"School nurses at first schools"

After a very promising start, my son started to struggle with going into school after the autumn half term in his reception year. Both me and his teacher used several methods to get him into the classroom ok but there was always lots of tears and resistance in a morning. Within 10-15 mins he was fine and enjoying school. This continued with varying degrees of stress throughout the year and by the middle of the summer term his teacher and myself decided he and we needed extra professional help. His anxiety was escalating and impacting on school during the day and family life. His sleep was disturbed and he was overly fearful of new and uncertain situations.

So I called the school nurses.

I was put in touch with our school nurse, Lisa Storey, and she talked to me about the situation and arranged with school to visit my son at school and talk to him and his teacher individually. After watching him in class, he spoke with her about school and home and although he was on denial about his problems, she allowed him to talk around idea of fears and anxiety. She introduced the reward chart system of getting stickers to encourage him to go into school without tears and eventually without my support in the class room. She involved the teacher and class room assistant to use distraction techniques with my son so he forgot his initial worries.

We were given several visits at school and many support phone call for me to discuss improvements in behaviour and any new issues that had arisen. We worked through many coping and confidence growing techniques and reward methods. As his confidence grew on school mornings, his general happiness improved and he could put his new skills into practice in other "fearful" situations. After 6months of support for my son individually and to us as a family, Lisa and I decided to stop the school visits and phone support calls to allow son to continue to use his new skills and develop his confidence with the proviso that she was always available on the phone if more support was needed in the future.

We still have periods of stress at school which impact mornings and home life but we use the techniques shown us by the nurse and we can usually guide him through to allow him to over come his fears.

Thank you school nurses