I feel like I have been living a 'double life' for a long time and the two halves met today.
For about 10 years as well as running the assembly website, I have been working with bereaved children. In 2010 I started volunteering with the Hampshire child bereavement charity Simon Says, as a helper initially, before going on to run one of their youth support groups for teenagers. I also worked for them as a schools advisor. During this time someone put my name forward to work as a trainer for the national charity Child Bereavement UK when I was running these training days that I realised that the attendees, really wanted to go away with as many ideas as possible to use back at school or wherever they worked. When I told them about some of the activities I’d come across or thought up at Simon Says they would be frantically trying to write them all down and I thought to myself ‘there has got to be a way of making this easier’. I began to think of putting the ideas together in a book and went to the people at Child Bereavement UK in the spring of 2017 with this idea. They agreed and I started to put things together. I also mentoned that we were moving to London later in the year.
On July 17 the Grenfell Tower Fire caused the death of 72 people and changed the local community in West London forever. Child Bereavement UK set up a project in response and I received a call asking if I would like to work on this and by August I was working as Bereavement Support Practitioner in West London. This took over life for the next 3 years and the book took a lot longer than I had planned for.
In this time in working with Child Bereavement UK on the book we decided that the activities had to be had to be grounded in theory as with all their work and that the focus should be, ‘developing resilience and coping skils’. There are a surprising amount of beareaved children in our schools, but because the topic is quite taboo and by it’s nature intensely personal, they often remain hidden.
1 in 29 5-16 year olds has been bereaved of a parent or sibling - that's roughly a child in every class
The topic of bereavement can be hard for staff to tackle and the activity book is written with that in mind. It helps anyone working with individuals or small groups of bereaved children by giving them activities and guidance based on theory that gets children talking. It has 20 session plans with a range of activities that mean leaders can focus on listening to the young people that they are working with. It’s split into sections that focus on different areas that leaders might want to tackle. It comes with photocopiable resources and is suitable for 8-18 year olds. It's available on the Child Bereavement UK website.
I need to say a BIG thank you to everyone that has helped make this happen in some way -
Victoria Hussey and the staff, volunteers and children and young people at Simon Says - they set me off learning about this and it was a great place to start.
Ann Chalmers and Ann Rowland as well as the staff from Child Bereavement UK that have worked on this.
The ‘smashing’ Child Bereavement UK West London team at Queens Park and all the young people that they support.
