This book explores the impact of trauma in educational contexts, drawing on lived, learned and professional experience to rethink how we can design and deliver our services for the better.

The book takes readers on a journey to understand trauma, its prevalence and the impact it has on children and young people, on teachers and on the education system as a whole. Chapters examine what trauma-informed practice really means and consider how trauma-informed thinking can be embedded into educational policies. With lived experience at its heart, it explores the power of relationships, as well as the difference educators can make by implementing small changes and gaining a holistic picture of each learner. The book advocates for a change in our thinking, emphasising the crucial role schools can play in creating an education system that truly understands the impact of trauma on educational and societal outcomes.

With examples from practice and reflection opportunities throughout, this book is valuable reading for senior leadership teams and all educators wanting to further understand journeys through trauma and to make meaningful changes to their practices and settings.

Shumela Ahmed-Poole is the co-founder and managing director of Resilience Learning Partnership (RLP), a lived experience led organisation. As an adult returner to education, she pursued a career in community education and cofounded RLP in 2018. Shumela understands the role trauma-informed practice has for those who have experienced complex trauma in overcoming many of the barriers that exist in finding meaningful ways to learn and experience education.

Resilience Learning Partnership is a training and education provider with a dual purpose, and they work across the health, social care, education, housing and criminal justice sectors. They specialise in trauma-informed practice and lived experience and inform policy and strategy through their work, ensuring that lived experience is at the heart and start of all public policy-making decision areas.

RLP’s activities focus on ensuring the voice of lived experience is authentically and meaningfully embedded in service and organisational policy and practice design and is valued as much as any other evidence-based framework or approach.