From Attachment Awareness to Attachment Aware Schools

The application of attachment theory to schools in England—as opposed to health and social care—has been relatively recent. This chapter outlines the development of the concept of attachment awareness in schools and the impact of associated notions of children’s wellbeing, emotion coaching, neuroscience and learning, and children’s mental health. It considers the way in which thinking around specific policy areas such as the education of children in care, exclusions and alternative provision has impacted on teacher understanding, as well as research on teachers’ own attachment needs, and on the education of trainee and early career teachers. It also considers issues such as restorative practice, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and character education. It suggests that these latter developments need to be treated with caution, given their normative and neoliberal origins. ACEs, for example, are based on a medical model of individual pathology, while character education, derives from ‘entrepreneurial’ initiatives in the USA, was strongly linked with the Conservative narrative of ‘Broken Britain’ and was promoted by the DfE as the solution to the emergent mental health issues among young people. However, despite its origins in Youth Offender programmes, restorative practice can be transformational for both individuals and school communities, as demonstrated by the secondary school in this study.