Today LifeSIGNS are proud to launch guidelines for schools on writing a policy to deal with self-injury – essentially these are aimed towards schools with pupils in the 11-18 age group.

So, where did this idea come from I hear you say?!
1. In my day job I work with school governors (for the Council), and as a team we get frequent requests for model policies on a variety of issues.
2. I read Barent Walsh’s excellent book “Treating self-injury” in which he gives guidelines for a policy for schools in the USA, and says that every school should have a written protocol for dealing with self-injury.
3. I was writing the new chapter for the SIA booklet which is aimed at schools and needed some useful and innovative information to include.

As a result I started thinking, and searching for available information about self-injury/self-harm school policies in the UK. The search didn’t lead me to a great deal. I did liaise with Wiltshire County Council and the author of their self-harm booklet for schools. This is a nice little publication and does include a bit about policy writing, and I’m sure it has been useful for many schools. However, I felt it was lacking in specific information about writing a policy. Therefore I could see that there was a significant gap in information that is freely available to schools – and one for LifeSIGNS to fill!

Schools often want model policies, and for certain issues this is possible (at least within local areas). Many county councils provide model policies for their areas, for instance HR policies dealing with staff discipline and grievance. Schools can often choose whether to adopt these policies or use their own.

There are certain policies which are statutory – Special Educational Needs, Sex and Relationships Education, Performance Management, Lettings, Child Protection, Pupil Discipline and Nutritional Standards to name just a few.
Then there are additional policies – for instance, Drugs, Homework and Recruitment and Retention.

According to the book “Policies: a guide for school governors and headteachers” by Michelle Robbins & Martin Baxter (Adamson Publishing, 2004 edition), policies need to be based upon the following:
Why the school exists (its mission)
What it believes in (its values)
What it is trying to achieve (its vision)
What it is going to do to make all of this a reality (its aims)
The underpinning rules that will guide action (principles)
The practicalities of implementation (policies and procedures)
(Robbins & Baxter; 2004 p.7)

Of course every school is different, and policies have to be written accordingly. However, with the book mentioned above (which happens to live on my desk at work as it is a very useful resource) as a general guide to policy writing, I have created the LifeSIGNS guidelines for writing a self-injury policy.

Whether or not schools choose to refer to these guidelines is of course up to them. It might be that schools do not wish to have yet another policy, but that they want to add specific self-injury information to an existing policy. The main aim of this exercise is not to tell schools that they need a self-injury policy, rather it is to achieve the following:
Alert schools to the fact that self-injury is a problem, and that it can NOT be ignored.
To let schools know about LifeSIGNS and that we are here to support schools and teachers.

In a discussion at the AGM, Kay pointed out that there is no point in a policy if it is not followed through – this is absolutely right! It is all very nice writing a policy, signing it, and letting it gather dust in a cupboard for 3 years until its review. However, this will not serve any useful purpose, except perhaps for schools ‘to be seen to be doing something’ about the issue.

Self-injury is an issue which needs to be taken seriously, however schools choose to approach it. At LifeSIGNS we have heard some dreadful stories about pupils being excluded permanently due to their self-injury. This just can’t be allowed to happen anymore. Whatever schools decide, they do need to know how to deal with self-injury, so LifeSIGNS hopes that these guidelines will be useful at least as a starting point.

The other month I heard of a governor saying that bullying didn’t happen in their school. It’s time for people to wake up and see that no matter how ‘good’ a school is, their pupils will face the same problems as pupils in any other school – this includes bullying and self-injury. It is how a school deals with the problems that really determines how ‘good’ a school is.