 Hello everybody, it's Ross here at Teacher Talker. I hope you're well. You're in for a treat this afternoon if you're joining us live, if not watching this recorded. I've got a special webinar for you today with the International Rescue Committee bringing together UK classroom teachers. So I've got two special guests for me who are going to share their wisdom and precious time to discuss their experiences supporting refugee and asylum seeking students over the past year in their schools. So this is a good opportunity to learn some top tips and practical advice about supporting students in your school. So I'm going to bring them in and introduce everybody that's in the virtual room. But before I do, so let me just do a little bit of admin for you. So we're live streaming this to a few platforms. So if you're logged in, you can leave a comment and then what I will do. I'll just show you a quick little demo. I'll leave an example question like this and we'll respond to you as a wedding and we'll share lots of resources, emails and links like that as we go through. So without further ado, I am going to bring in Jade, Josh and Emma. I'm going to just hide these slides for a moment so you can see us all up clearly. So Josh, can I start with you from the IRC? Could you just introduce yourself to everybody and tell us what you do? Sure. Good evening, everyone. My name is Josh Corlett and I'm the education coordinator for the International Rescue Committee here in the UK. So I run all of our education programs that we're currently running in the UK. Fantastic. Thank you, Josh. Over to Emma. We'll do this alphabetical order. So Emma, you're a primary school teacher in Essex. Tell us a little bit more. Yeah. We are quite a small primary school. We've got 115 children on the roll at the moment. A year ago that was 103 and I've got a mixed year group of year 3s and year 4s currently. Okay. Thank you. And over to Jade. So I'm going to pick your brains a little bit more, Emma. Jade, your secondary teacher in Burnley. So tell us a little bit more about yourself and your school. Yeah. I'm a secondary school teacher. I also teach PSHE but I did also do nine years in primary school as well and then moved over to secondary. So we've got about 1200 pupils on roll, massive diverse range of ethnicities and languages and different children from all over the world go to our school. Great. So thank you both for your precious time. You know, on the front line of teaching we know is not an easy challenge and, you know, in current circumstances we are all facing difficult period of time. And I guess this is where the brilliant work of IRC can help us, Josh. Josh, can I put you in the corner and give us a 30-second lift pitch? Let's start with the Healing Classrooms Programme first of all. Absolutely. So the IRC's Healing Classrooms Programme is actually a programme that has been run for about 30 years now all around the world. More recently we have taken it and adapted it to fit the UK context and it's essentially a teacher training tool that we use. It's trauma-informed and it helps teachers and schools to provide the best support for refugee and asylum-seeking students in order to provide those safe spaces to allow them to thrive and reach their potential. Now that was perfectly summed up in a nice 30-second response. In terms of the programme itself, so I've been working with you for quite some time. I know there's lots of resources and programmes, but how can teachers get involved? I mean, I'll go through some links with people later, but what would you say people that are new to IRC, how would they get involved? So if you go on our website you can book onto one of our training sessions. So we have the Healing Classrooms Approach which is our sort of core offer. We then also have a more detailed trauma-informed care session. That's two hour-long sessions all online. And we also do an EAL webinar once a month. All of these come with resources. You get sent a handbook in the post and there's plenty of resources on our website. What we also offer and we love to do this and we think this is the most effective approach is if you want to reach out to us via email, again we'll share the email. We can come into your school and do bespoke sessions that really meet the specific needs of your school and we can tailor that to whether it's primary or secondary and depending on the students that you have. And I should say as well everything that we offer is free of charge. Fantastic, free. That's music to every teacher in schools here. So Emma can I come to you first of all, so can I ask maybe to begin with, kind of going off script, how did you come across IRC, how did you get involved to begin with? So I was really lucky that I saw a post from an email I think that mentioned that through the teaching program that I was on, that there was this offer of the free course if you wanted to be supported, learn more about how to help refugees. Our school was at that time in a situation where when I started at the school, we were quite white British, we didn't have children who were refugees or asylum seekers. And in the blink of an eye we changed dramatically. So a hotel locally was then taken as a place for refugee and asylum seekers and therefore we were asked to take some of the children. Now the children had already been there for quite some months, some of them even a year, but it changed the sort of overnight, OK, we have these children and we don't know much about them. We don't know their background and there was suddenly the fear of how do we deal with this? How do we support them? What do we do and panic? And hopefully during this session we can help some of your viewers who may be thinking the same thing. Great. So just in terms of timeframe Emma, are we going back a good couple of years before the kind of demographics or even further back? This only changed in the last, so last, so September school year, so 18 months ago. Right, OK. No refugees. And then in the last 12 months, I think we've just had the 12 month anniversary of when we had the phone call in the school to say, this is a situation and you're going to get these new pupils. And suddenly our school went from sort of 103 pupils to 115, 117. OK, so thank you for that. I'll come back to you in terms of how IRC has helped with resources and things like that. Jane, how about you? Give us a little kind of little historical synopsis of how things have changed for you. So it's similar. So I've just completed an MPQ for improving culture and behaviour in schools and Teach First sent me the email for the course. So like I was saying before, I've come from primary school, predominantly white British and no experience with refugee children, no experience with EAL children. So I moved into a school with a massive diverse community and it was a bit of a culture shock. So I moved during COVID three years ago and I was based in Year 7. So within the Year 7 cohort, we were all throughout the year just getting children from different places in the world, really. And really my main focus, because I didn't have that experience, was language. Whereas I don't want to talk too much about how the course has helped, but it really changed shifting my perspective from more, I have to focus on the language immersion to a trauma-enforced response. And it was really just, I wanted to go on it because the range of behavioural issues can be from no engagement to quite serious disruptive behaviours. And it was how to deal with them and offer equity to all the peoples. It's very fascinating, you know, the dynamics of the world, I suppose, and how we have to respond. Josh, can I just ask from your perspective, you know, the macro overview, we've heard from Jade and Emma in terms of how they're responding on the ground. What patterns have you seen over the last 18 months in terms of numbers, schools, you know, kind of count from young people, et cetera. Can you give us some statistics? Yeah, absolutely. So as an organisation, we have been delivering this training in the UK for a year. It's actually a year this week since we launched our very first programme. And we actually designed it and launched it in response to the crisis in Afghanistan, which led to an increase in refugees coming over. Obviously, we didn't know at the time that there would be then a second crisis with the Ukraine crisis soon afterwards. And in that time of the year, we've worked with around 1000 teachers so far in around 500 different schools across the UK. And we've really seen, I think as a result of the Afghan and Ukraine crisis, this is a situation that we've not experienced in UK schools. I was a teacher myself before I took this role. And for generations now, perhaps in living memory, we've not had a situation where schools are having to support so many refugees and asylum-seeking students. And I think from our point of view at the IRC, it's been incredible to see how schools, as they always do, just adapt and provide the best possible support and care for these students as they do all students. And really, we're here just to offer that little bit of extra support and to help them continue doing what they're doing and also just to sort of provide that reassurance. I think what we get from a lot of teachers is they're doing brilliant work, but they just kind of want to check in because it's a relatively new environment for them. It's a relatively new situation, as Emma was saying, and we're just there to sort of provide that advice and that support. Great. Jade, can I come back to you? So we'll come back to some tips and resources, but can I just maybe pick your brains in terms of lessons learned over the last year in particular? And before you answer that question to everybody watching, don't forget, pose a question in the whatever platform you're watching, and then I can display your questions on the screen. So we've got a big comment here from Nina. It's very big of this one. So I'll hide this one for now. I'll process it and I'll pose the question on your behalf shortly. So Jade, back to you. Lessons learned over the last year. From the IRC course, or just in general? Generally with seeing an influx of refugees and asylum seekers and then maybe early days getting access to the resources from IRC and navigating what's going to be of most benefit and value to you for your time and also for your students? Yeah, I think it was initially when I first went there, was that idea where when you're doing your training or whatever, you're always told to have really high expectations for behaviour and things like that. So a lot of the behaviour was I was seeing because I wasn't aware of the impacts of toxic stress and those different types of things. Maybe I wasn't approaching those behaviours like I said before and offering pupils equity by offering them different strategies or maybe me responding in a different way to them that I would do maybe a pupil that hasn't been through those types of experiences. Also because it was during COVID we didn't really have access to other departments so we didn't have access to. I couldn't just go down the corridor and speak to somebody in our student support or in like the alternate provision. So I was relying on delayed responses through emails and things so really the course has really allowed me to take ownership over how I respond to it and being able to understand the responses that I'm seeing and why children are behaving in the way that they are. One of the big things I got off the course was the use of language. Like we might for example just use the word detention as in like just normal everyday language that we would use in a secondary school but for a young child coming from like a refugee or something, detention centre might mean a very sensitive thing to them. So it really made me mindful about the language I was using, how I was the behaviour management technique so I was using just different things like that and really having that trauma informed. Sounds like it's sharpening your perspective a little bit in terms of their world I suppose. Thank you Jade. Emma can I have the same question to you. Any key moments and lessons learned over the last year, not tips or resources just yet, we'll come to that in a moment but key things that stand out that if you were offering any advice to people who are just starting out what would you recommend? I think that there are two things that sort of stand out so far. Number one is through the help of Freda at the Healing Classrooms course she was able to give me an insight from her firsthand experiences in other countries in refugee camps as to what traumas children might have been through and also what customs that you may not think about and I wasn't knowledgeable about the fact that in Ukraine children sitting on the carpet it's a you've done something wrong if you've done a misdemeanor you're on the carpet and we have time where during assembly everyone sits on the floor and now we can understand that actually that must be so alien and in a room where people are speaking a different language and you can't understand that moment maybe the behavior that is seen is because well why what have we all done wrong why are we in this room together and appreciating those what we take as just normal can have a huge impact because it's not the culture not the experience of children in our care and then the other sorry go on Ross. No are you cut you are rather here from you so tell me what you were going to say. The other thing that I was going to say was the approach isn't just for the children who are refugees and asylum seekers a lot of what I've learned through the Healing Classroom course is embedded in our school as a whole because the approach works for all the children and it isn't just isolating refugees it's good practice for everyone and it means that they are able to get through other traumas that they have encountered or have yet to encounter and that you're giving children the skills to be able to deal with one another and their futures. So really fascinating comments from you both you know I've written some notes here you know about the you know the customs of different people from different cultures the choice of language we know in the classroom is really really important and before I come back to you both on resources and tips Josh if I put these slides up on the screen so some of the resources that you're giving people that sign up the you know the webinar experiences the resources. What have we got on this slide in particular that can help people that are going through these experiences in our schools. So on the left here we have country specific teacher briefings and you can see everybody's holding them out. So with the country specific teacher briefings we're very fortunate the IRC that we have a presence around 40 countries around the world and we use our colleagues or utilize I should say our colleagues in those countries to help inform all of our programs here in the UK. And so we're just giving two examples of two of our briefings there for Ukrainian students and Afghan students and these provide cultural background but also education backgrounds and for children from those countries. So what type of education are they likely to have had, which is something that we found teachers have found really really helpful that the cultural background but also understanding how they've been taught previously. In the middle there with the Healing Classrooms handbook which Emma was was holding up. It's a it's a reasonably large booklet that we send out in the post to all participants and the idea is participants can use this as they're going through the online course to take notes and also provides loads more detail and background because we understand that at the end of a long day. You're signing up for a webinar it's an hour and a half you know not everything might go in and so it's designed to be there to be flipped through. Now I've got one on the back of my table here and it is a fantastic resource I have to really stress that so if you've not got got your hands on a copy and you're watching this make sure you get in touch so I'll share the contact details. Shortly it is a brilliant resource and what about the ones on the right Josh. Yes and then these two are available online and it's just a social emotional learning games banks and loads of different games mainly in the primary school perhaps year seven and eight and then a lesson plan bank for a whole years worth of social emotional learning intervention and social emotional learning cement that we embed for all of our courses and we think it's a really really useful tool to help any student to deal with their emotions and to sort of grow and learn effectively. Okay great so we've got about seven or eight minutes left for people watching this and so send your comments through I'll put one or two questions I've got quite a few on the screen that I'll pose right at the end we'll share some links. Jade and I'm going to ask you the kind of tips and resources I want you to come up with two or three top tips for people if you can so I'll put you on the spot before I do Josh can I just ask you. Is it are you seeing an influx from Sudan given the latest crisis was it too early to say. It's far too early to say from our point of view and I would imagine that we would. But at the moment we haven't seen anything in schools. Okay. And you mentioned you're in is it 40 countries or more. As an organization the Instance and Rescue Committee is in about 40 countries we tend to go and all we work in places that are affected by conflicts and disaster. Okay so thank you Josh and let's start with Emma Emma. Two or three top tips so whether I'm a school leader, a teacher, maybe a parent. Any possible suggestions. Yes so I think my number one tip would be don't panic if you're new to the situation as a school leader or a teacher with it happening in your school or your moving school. Whether your parent with other children coming to the school or whether you're a parent who is a refugee or asylum seeker I think don't panic. There are people out there to help you. It took us a little while to as a school to find the healing classrooms approach but in fairness I think we sort of found our way a little bit and then healing classrooms has been the thing that sort of given us extra help. And the other thing would be our head was instrumental in forging relationships particularly with the hotel where our refugee and asylum seekers in school mostly come from. And often finds that through doing that and through she regularly every once a week she will go to the hotel she will talk to the staff there she will talk to the families and the children she shares the newsletters out because they love seeing the pictures and seeing that what their children have been up to. And she also finds that we get information about changes in numbers who's leaving who who are new arrivals before we get them through the official channels. Through the local education authority so that I think build relationships as soon as you can. And that includes building relationships with the families that you will soon find out what level of English they've got and there will be often people who can as a community one person or a few people will be able to give more information to sort of pass to the school from other families and schools are pretty good at you know inclusivity you know assemblies translated materials and things but we've seen a big shift in how you might deliver certain things in school. Yes, a lot more sort of sharing of things in not necessarily different languages we we have a real variety of languages we have a real variety of ages abilities and some of our children have come through multiple countries to get to us so for instance producing stuff in some of the home languages in a written format is of no use for our children some of our children because they can't actually read their original language. So again it's all every child is an individual so it really depends on the resources for that child, saying that we have one online system which all of our children have used at some point and use regularly and enjoy the feedback is very good and they enjoy using it which helps Now I'm going to have to go back to you because I can't remember you've All right I'll come back to you and see if you can think of that. Let me pop over to Jade give me two or three tips Jade how things change what's working really well for you. So it's changing that perspective from and like I said I went in we're teaching one perspective about the language acquisition. Initially we're now a look at it from more about creating a safe and predictable environment for the new refugee children. So that's enabling conditions for good behavior so it can foster success. And that is through that SEMH learning and it's really important it works well with my job because I'm a PSHE teacher too so I put that into the curriculum. Again it's just about it's about making them feel safe first where following on from Emma I was doing things in water different languages and they were saying I can't speak that language in their own way like And it was just hours and hours of doing things like that and little tips like I got this off the course saying you can make notes in your own language and you're like can I But for the course I was like it really because I thought you have to make them use English but on the course it was like well you can't just take a weather identity because they're in a different country and it was like of course So it's about making them feel welcome and another tip is that offering that equity understanding the impact of toxic stress and building those really strong relationships again so they feel safe so they can be successful And I would say really welcoming in the community. Particularly for parents that you might have done so parents evenings you know community events that type of stuff. Yeah so it could even be offering free English lessons once a week or having diversity weeks where people contributed something to bestow that's from their original country to like share different cultures and things and Like I've spoken to it with a few children in my school and they're so excited the idea of being able to show who they really are and bring their identity into the school because after all we are a community and they are part of that community So it's really important that they have that identity to feel safe it's predictable then you can start building on that and develop that language acquisition and all those other things And would you both say I hope this is not a leading question but would you both say your asylum seeker refugee confidence is more heightened and stronger as a result of using the IRC? Definitely. Yeah it's focused the perspective on how in what order to do it first of all create that safe space make them feel welcome and then you can start to foster success Josh any final pearls of wisdom before I kind of look at some of our comments and then signpost some contact details for people to watch? Yeah I think Jade and Emma summed it up really really well and I would just reiterate both of their points in terms of creating that community for learning and allowing new students to feel that sense of belonging in their school and ultimately fostering that success And I think ultimately we say at the IRC that it's a few things first of all just patience and secondly having whole school systems to support all students rather than taking an individual approach And thirdly it's the way you view all new students really but especially new students perhaps from different countries is viewing as an asset to the school community rather than a problem or something you need to solve But think about what can they bring to your school community and we often find once you start viewing things from that perspective then suddenly things become a little bit easier and a little bit nicer So someone's got a lot of emails firing off there so we're going to wrap things up and let people get back to their day job but can I just say people watching this live on whatever channel and people watching this recorded There's the contact details on the screen so you've got an email address here and a QR code to zap and get those resources I've got a couple of comments I'm not sure if they're entirely relevant but let me just maybe summarize them and just see if I can get one or two pearls of wisdom from any of you So I've got a comment here from a teacher in Greece I can't verify the accuracy I suppose but in essence the comments suggesting that refugee children are being taken away from families Is that something that you see from your side Josh in terms of how communities can find help if children are perhaps being taken away? I can't comment on the situation in Greece but what I will say is we have a large IRC presence in Greece doing some really wonderful work And feel free to reach out to the email there and we can put you in touch with someone from the IRC Greece that can help Okay so to the person that left that comment I won't put it on the screen but there's that email address if you need a bit of help I've got another comment from someone watching from India and they're a biology teacher and they want to know how they can help refugee children in their context Any pearls of wisdom there Josh? I guess your resources are free so that anyone can download them anywhere can't they? Yeah absolutely I mean there's no difference really anywhere in the world it's all about creating these safe and secure environments predictable environments where anyone can reach their potential Just have a look on our website there's lots of resources available and please again feel free to drop us an email and we can see what else we've got likewise we've got IRC colleagues in that part of the world as well Okay so there's Josh's comment there so thank you and hope that can help and we've got a lovely thank you from Mohammed who is watching Mohammed let us know where you're watching from but he says thank you for all the efforts he's doing I'm just going to reiterate that because we know our teachers are on the front line and life is busy but our schools are a mirror of society and in rhythm with the dynamics of the world and what we've heard from Jade and Emma here is very much happening in lots of schools that I visit on my travels so thank you to you both for your precious precious time I know how important that is to you but also for the lessons learned and your tips and resources that you shared with us in this short time I really appreciate it I'm sure people watch and do you too and to Josh for all the brilliant resources that you share to help everyone work a little bit more effectively so without further do unless there's any other comments sorry I was going to say in response to the biology one or any lesson rather than translating worksheets or anything you could pre-prepare a glossary of keywords right there's a lot of universal diagrams and things in sightings but a glossary of keywords translated I think would be really helpful Emma I can see that you've left me a comment here Flash Academy tell us quickly yeah so Flash Academy is the platform that we're using that children are loving and it's got around something like over 48 different languages so the children can see things in their language the language of their choosing and otherwise they can have support with it in English they can choose lessons the school can set certain lessons so if you on that note of what Jade just said if there's certain vocabulary you can set that as a task for them to do or you know depending on where they're at you can either let them choose or you can sort of set certain vocabulary and words phrases great and is there a web address that people can go to for that one I think it is as simple as flashacademy.com there we go right so we'll have a look at that and so Jade Emma thank you so much as ever for all your wisdom and advice keep up the good work and hopefully I'll speak to you very very soon and Josh thank you also for your resources and support and wisdom let me just put this back up on the screen and so we've got the healing classroom program we can find all the resources online there are the programs free in the REE in case you misheard me they're free to attend lots and lots of resources and courses Josh when is the next kind of sign up because I know that some are happening in May aren't they but is there another site available yeah there's some starting next week in May and there's still a couple of places left a couple of places left you get signed up everyone and there's there's all the resources freely available to download and there again once again for the final time is your contact the QR code and resources so I'm going to say goodbye to I guess thank you very much everybody I'm going to stick you behind the scenes otherwise to everyone watching my name is Ross McGill teacher talk it thank you for your time and attention and I hope these resources ever make a difference to the world on which you work and so hope that we can support many of our people in our society and thanks for watching and I'll see you again in the future bye for now