Understanding, Nurturing and Working Effectively with Vulnerable Children in Schools by Angela Green
Review by Helen Porter
As a tutor on our Area Meeting’s ‘Peaceful Schools’ project I found a lot of parallels with the work of Quaker Angela Greenwood. We Friends have been talking a lot about the need to really hear what others are saying, rather than just reacting to attitudes and behaviour we find difficult. And as the subtitle of this book (‘Why can’t you hear me?’) suggests, this is nowhere more important than in the case of ‘difficult’ children, who are often pushed to react by their own trauma triggers. Although our work in Peaceful Schools is group work, and Angela’s emphasis is on responding to the individual child, both depend upon creating and fostering a compassionate and peaceful culture within a school (as the final chapter in the book illustrates so vividly). Every child in a group benefits from support given to the most vulnerable among them, because it develops their empathy and capacity to work as a whole group.
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