Transforming Traumatised Children within NSW Department of Education Schools: One School Counsellor's Model for Practise – REWIRE

Adequately supporting the needs of maltreated and traumatised children within New South Wales (NSW) public education system schools is often frustrated by poor perception of the impact of developmental trauma on children's school-based functioning and the need for additional, specialist support; the push for, and provision of, behaviour diagnoses for these children to fund basic assistance and supervision; competing demands on an overextended School Counselling resource impacting capacity for school-based trauma informed psychological services, and seemingly stretched capacity of government/non-government agencies to reliably provide effective support. This is accompanied by a lack of understanding of behavioural signals of distress children display and underreporting to agencies; persistent, simplistic behaviourist views of children's behaviours within schools and low-level collaboration between schools and external agencies. Facilitating a trauma sensitive environment within NSW schools can ameliorate these frustrations and attend to these inadequacies in a pragmatic, achievable way. This practice paper presents a School Counsellor-led model (REWIRE) for achieving this.