'A Bit Less Alien" - The Ask Me: Education Manifesto

I was invited to the launch of a brand-new campaign launched by youth ambassadors from the bereavement charity Winston’s Wish.

Called Ask Me: Education, the campaign has been created as a way to ensure all schools offer bereaved children and young people the help they want and need.

And that starts with asking the child themselves.

Diminished, Trivialised or Shut Down

All the young people who spoke at the launch held in Central London, near the Houses of Parliament, had all lost a close family member – notably a parent – while they were in education.

While they shared a few instances of caring and compassionate teachers offering them the support they needed, there were too many examples of their grief being diminished, trivialised or shut down completely.

‘You'll be over it in ten years,’ is not really what a headteacher should be saying to a child who has just lost their father.

‘Getting on with your work will help you forget it,’ is not really how it works when a child has just lost their little brother.

Spending an English lesson on a poem about a failed Kamikaze pilot is not really what a young person should have to sit through when they have just lost their father to suicide.

At a time when everything has changed and everything is different, what they wanted was for schools to work with them to help them feel, in the words of one young person, 'a bit less alien'.

Asking Schools for Six Commitments 

At the heart of the campaign is the Ask Me Manifesto.

This is the opportunity for educational professionals to commit to putting the grieving child or young person at the heart of the decision-making process when it comes to supporting them in their grief at school.

It’s a commitment to:

• Giving bereaved students choice
• Leading with empathy
• Communicating
• Understanding grief
• Being flexible
• Making support visible and available.

I know from my own experiences with my three children following the death of their mother[1] how schools can make things that little bit better or a whole lot worse, based on quite simple decisions.

(Perhaps designing a Mother’s Day card less than a year after losing her mother is not what a ten-year-old should have to go through.)

One in 29 Children Will Be Bereaved

To hear from these young ambassadors that things were not much better nearly two decades later was hard to listen to.

But it makes their campaign, their manifesto and the materials, training and support associated with it, all that more important.

Please have a read, sign it, commit to it and when the inevitable happens – statistics indicate that one if every 29 or so children are bereaved each year – you will at least know where to start in your support for that child.

It starts with asking them what they need.

And if they don’t know, it’s about then working with them to find out. [ITL]