DESIGNATED TEACHER
LEADERSHIP QUALIFICATION

Introduction

The Inclusion Expert Designated Teacher Leadership Qualification aims to build the skills around, and capture the impact of, three of the most important parts of the Designated Teacher role:

• Leadership: Progressive pedagogy and advocacy for CLA/LAC students, managing multiple stakeholders, corporate parenting and supporting the training of staff in SEMH and wellbeing.
• Inclusion: Facilitating staff to learn and share knowledge and skills in how to best include vulnerable, challenging and CLA/LAC students in the classroom.
• Well-being: Supporting students and staff to manage their wellbeing when confronted with the often emotionally and psychologically painful circumstances experienced by many vulnerable, challenging and CLA/LAC children.

For the first time and with leading psychological support, we are shifting from one DT per setting assuming sole and often painful responsibility for CLA/LAC and making this a whole school approach.

Whole School Approach

The unique strength of this course is underpinned by learning how to provide comprehensive peer support. This enables the whole school to benefit from increased resilience – not only the most vulnerable pupils but also SLT, DTs and other staff too.

Peer support is not a new phenomenon but it is underutilised in the teaching profession. This element delivers four significant benefits to the whole school:

• Improve interpersonal competence and empathy;
• Develop a sense of equality in giving and taking between self and others;
• Gain self-awareness while helping; and
• Build a profile for self and school, from the person they help, and others.

When working with CLA/LAC and vulnerable, challenging pupils, staff are often exposed to high levels of strain and emotional toxicity, and may unknowingly collude to enhance damaging behaviours with students. However, schools cannot implement effective peer support if it needs a qualified psychologist to run each group, which is why we have embedded a peer support learning component to enhance knowledge and skills.

This DT Leadership qualification delivers:

• • How to prevent the group from being hijacked by one person
  • Learning how to process increased openness and vulnerability
  • Arc of integration: How to shift participants’ attitudes to the group so that they feel an increased sense of equality, thus allowing the mood in the group to evolve from skepticism, to understanding to appreciation to enthusiasm
  • The foundations of wellbeing and the role peer-support groups can play in cultivating wellbeing
  • Facilitating language and actions