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Nowadays primary and secondary school teachers search for increasing amounts of educational support when it comes to educating pupils with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). The social and emotional aspects of learning (SEAL) framework that was recently launched within the English educational setting provides a wide variety of guidelines and advice on how to promote and enhance the needs of pupils, including those with SEBD. These needs can be met by enhancing pupils’ self-awareness, managing their skills, enhancing their motivation and enabling them to become more empathetic as well as developing their social skills. These five components, according to many authors, are considered to come under the umbrella of social, emotional and behavioural skills (SEBS).

In the literature, there is evidence to support the view that primary and secondary school teachers are not psychologically prepared to adequately support pupils with SEBD within the classroom setting. The research I have undertaken has enabled me to come to the conclusion that, before entering the classroom, teachers first need to develop their own SEBS before attempting to enhance those of SEBD pupils. This goal can be achieved by enabling teachers to become more emotionally literate. Through the development of emotional literacy, teachers will gain the ability to understand their own emotions, listen to others and learn to empathise with them, as well as to express their emotions productively (Barrow, Bradshaw, & Newton, 2001). Once this goal has been achieved, teachers will be in a better position to support pupils with SEBD within their classrooms. Therefore, this chapter aims to explore the elements that emotional literacy has to offer primary and secondary school teachers, and how these elements enable them to enhance their personal skills when it comes to supporting pupils with SEBD.

Some researchers argue that teachers of children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) have one of the most stressful occupations in the modern world. As pointed out by this research, high-stress jobs can lead to the phenomenon of ‘burnout’. When teachers suffer from burnout, it affects not only them, it also brings about negative consequences to the organisations that they are members of and more significantly, the students that they teach. Nonetheless, no teacher can be said to experience the same level of burnout. Some, in fact, are able to avoid feelings of burnout altogether. Researchers suggest that an investigation of teachers' perceptions of their jobs should be carried out before formulating initiatives aimed at preventing teacher burnout. The main aim of this chapter is to explore similar perceptions of Thai teachers of children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). Educators, who present low levels of burnout based on the Job Burnout Inventory, were interviewed in order to explore their perceptions. The chapter discusses their responses with regards to their professional work, particularly areas relating to what they see as the positive aspects of teaching children with SEBD as well as the coping strategies that they applied to manage stressful situations.

This chapter explores issues around children's voice, physical education and social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) in England. Research has previously highlighted the physical, social, effective and cognitive benefits of participation in physical education (PE) (Bailey, 2006). Furthermore, practical, physical and expressive creative experiences in education have been cited as being an important constituent when educating children with SEBD (Cole & Visser, 1998). However, research has yet to address the experiences of the child with SEBD alongside the ideological benefits of their participation in PE. After a period of sensitisation to the field, in a number of pilot schools, a total of 24 weeks were spent immersed in the cultures of two mainstream schools in the West of England. After six weeks of local familiarisation, during which field notes and research diaries were kept, weekly interviews with each of six case study participants commenced. This process resulted in an intensely interactive and personal process of engagement (Sparkes, 1994) which was at times magnified when working in a PE environment. In this research, a PE environment afforded opportunities to spend time and build trust through co-participation in the negotiation of socially constructed roles in the subject. The six case study participants whose experiences have been studied make reference to, amongst others, their affinity towards the physical nature of PE, the perception of it being a subject allowing for freedoms not found elsewhere in the curriculum and one which cemented both the positive and negative social systems in relation to their relationships with peers. Inductive processes of analysis utilising constant comparison methods between data sources have generated data which shows signs of both the idiosyncratic nature of multiple truths and some common ground in their experiences.

This chapter explores the simultaneous effects of the independent variables of social cognition (social information processing) and of self-esteem/global self-worth on clinically and research-derived measures of problem behaviour in children aged 8–12 (dependent variables). The specific aims are to develop and test a school-based standardised model for better screening of SEBDs in Greece in children 8–12 years old and analyse in-depth the inferred patterns of mental processing of SEBD-screened children from the data collected in one-on-one interviews. The hypothesis is that groups of particular children will emerge that share similar characteristics in their social information processing styles and their proposed reactions to challenging social interactions. Evidently, these findings could lead to a suggestive discussion of school-based approaches to interventions.

The study presents evidence for this hypothesis, suggesting the existence of three separate groups in the sample. The sample included 240 children assigned in two groups, the experimental and the control, each containing 120 closely matched cases. The exploratory analysis of the outcomes reveals an identified mental processing bias in attributing causality and in behaviour response selection that is consistent enough to suggest the bias may be as organised in the brain as a ‘hard-wired’ function.

Little has been published in relation to girls and SEBD. This chapter examines outcomes from a project between university academic staff and a specialist provision for girls excluded because of behaviour difficulties. Particular focus is upon the development of identity via engagement with creative projects involving prose, poetry and the visual arts. The chapter provides vivid illustrations of the potential of girls labelled with SEBD to be so much more than that. Furthermore, it illustrates how schools can creatively form themselves to be a good fit for their students. As adults working with young people, it is as well to remember that we need to create opportunities within learning communities to review identities in transition and to capture the dynamic sense of self. The authors concur with Carrington (2007) that developing the opportunities and skills ‘with which to participate and transform one's life path’ is central to social inclusion. This applies to all young people particularly those caught up in specialist BESD/SEBD provision.

Drastic reductions in financial and personal support for public education over the last years in Germany seem to open gateways to ‘new’ acceptance of punishment in the realm of pedagogy. This ‘discourse’ is clandestine in theory, hidden from the public but real in institutions of the child and young people welfare system. They intensify the penalisation of their ‘drop-out’ clientele. The special schools for pupils with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) tend to act in that way, too. Particularly children and young people living in poverty are on the agenda of this new trend to penalise ‘deviant’ behaviour.

Programmes, trainings and drills are available. They are meant to help social workers and teacher in their position with new aims and functions. In their daily routine, most of them are overburdened and overloaded, because classes are overfilled and the number of families in the communal welfare system is growing rapidly, due to the so-called ‘Hartz IV’ legislative for unemployed families. This new trend is also a market place for the media; they launched an emergency call on education.

Some punitive praxis is contradictory to the human rights and the children rights, so that all professors for SEBD in Germany published a public declaration against the breaking up of the agreement of an education without violence. There is no empirical evidence for any positive outcome of such ‘pedagogy’. Despite all ‘modern’ promises, working with fear, anxiety, shame and punishment doesn't pay in the long run.

This chapter clarifies the relationship between socio-economic development and this ‘law and order’ pedagogy, the loss of professional standards and the psychodynamic consequences for pupils labelled as ‘deviant’.

Secondary schools in increasing numbers have been exploring nurture group intervention as a means of reducing exclusion, promoting educational engagement and transforming troubled lives. Here David Colley, co-author of the Boxall Profile for Young People (2010), offers guidance to school staff on the key steps to setting up a successful nurture group in the secondary school.

This chapter argues that, if pupils experiencing SEBD are to be able regulate their behaviour, it is essential for them to be perceived as being able to exercise agency, no matter how their difficulties are conceptualised. It also makes the case that, if we are to effect lasting change, it is necessary to impact at the level of values and beliefs, helping young people to come to an understanding of themselves and their relationships with others. The focus of the chapter is a case study evaluating a group work approach (Support groups), designed and implemented by the author, to support such pupils within a Scottish secondary school, situated in an area of multiple deprivation. The chapter examines the extent to which pupils participating within the intervention developed the capacity to regulate their behaviour with good judgement in a range of contexts, identifying variables which fostered or impeded progress. The study is principally qualitative but draws also from quantitative data. It focuses upon four cohorts of Support group pupils (N=69), inclusive of six case studies. The findings indicate that the intervention had impacted positively upon the capacity of the young people to self-regulate their behaviour, if to varying extents, and that pupil outcomes were highly context related. A range of factors came into play in effecting improvements in self-regulation in young people, such as the capacity of the Support group Leader to ‘see the good’ in the young person and hold onto them through difficult times. The quality of relationships between pupils and their Support group Leaders emerged as key as did the ethos of the group, providing an emotionally safe environment in which pupils could communicate without fear of reprisals.

Late in 2010 the Social Emotional and Behavioural Association (SEBDA), based in the United Kingdom, held an international conference at Keble College, Oxford. The theme was ‘Transforming Troubled Lives’ and 160 delegates arrived from countries around the globe. Around 50 per cent of those attending presented papers. Some of the presentations were short, others longer, some very practically based and others more theoretically focused. A range of papers has already been published in SEBDA's international journal Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (volume 16, issue 3). The chapters in this volume draw upon other presentations given at the conference, which we, as editors, felt were representative of the good practice, provision and policy to be found amongst professionals working both to transform the sometimes troubled lives of children and young people and to ensure that these students are included in educational settings.

This chapter discusses the issue of those young people who upon leaving compulsory education at age 16 in England do not progress into further education, training or employment and are known as NEETs. It elucidates possible causes of NEETs and the characteristics of those classed as NEET. A particular intervention programme, Learning Independence for Future Transition (LIFT), is described as developed and implemented in a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) and some evaluative comments offered.