School support for bereaved pupils
We provide support for school professionals who are supporting a bereaved pupil.
Helping education professionals support grieving pupils
On average, 1 in every 29 children will be bereaved of a parent. That’s one in every class. Yet many teachers receive no bereavement training and are unsure how to support grieving children and young people in their class. It’s vital that schools have a bereavement policy and teachers and staff understand how to support the grieving children and young people in their school. Our team at Winston’s Wish can help you and your school create a bereavement policy, provide training and advise teaching professionals on how to support a child dealing with loss and grief.
Support a bereaved child in school during the coronavirus pandemic
During the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, when children and young people are cut off from their usual support networks, support from teachers and schools is even more important. This is a time of great uncertainty and potential anxiety for all of us, and for teachers and pupils the huge change in circumstances and the loss of daily contact can be very hard to manage. We explore how you can help your pupils when the schools are closed and continue to offer support from afar.
From keeping in touch and maintaining a routine, we discuss the importance of listening and reassuring during this time in our dedicated guide to supporting children during coronavirus.
Training for school professionals
Free online bereavement training
Two introductory courses to help teachers and school staff to understand how grief affects a child or young person and how you can help them cope with their grief. Aimed at both primary and secondary schools.
Childhood bereavement training video
Our 30-minute video provides an introduction to childhood bereavement, guidance on supporting children and young people before and after a death and how the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown can impact on grief.
In-depth training courses
Three-day bereavement training courses to teach professionals, including teachers, how to better support grieving children and young people. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, these courses are currently being run online via Zoom.
Useful information and resources for school professionals supporting bereaved children
Adapt and amend this template to create a bereavement policy for your school of college.
This guide will help you understand and adapt our example bereavement policy for your school or college.
This guide will help you understand how children experience grief and how to support them in school.
These guidelines will help you to develop a strategy to respond to a death in the school community.
This charter is based on our conversations with thousands of children and their families, who have told us what gave them hope after bereavement.
Thunks™ are ‘beguilingly simple-looking questions’ that make your brain go ouch. This particular set, a collaboration between Winston’s Wish and Independent Thinking, is specifically designed to open up thinking and discussion around the topics of death, grief and bereavement.
How schools can make a difference
If you work within a school community, it is inevitable that you will work with children affected by death in one way or another. They may have experienced a death the previous night or a few years ago, but in each situation you have a genuine chance to positively affect a young life. Often, our first thought is ‘help!’ and we don’t know what to say, fearing we will ‘make it worse’. The very worst thing that could ever happen in that child’s life has just happened – you can’t make it worse. The fact that a teacher cares enough to say ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mum dying, it made me sad’ or ‘how are you feeling today? I guess things are still hard’ will make the world of difference to a pupil.
See the quotes below from young people and teachers to see how your words and actions can have a lasting impact on bereaved children.
“My Mum died and my life changed forever. It was the biggest thing that ever happened to me. My teacher never mentioned it.”
“One of my most painful memories after I lost my mum was being made to sit in a Mother’s Day assembly when I was 10 years old, followed by making Mother’s Day cards.”
“We were doing a bike safety course and she suddenly burst out crying. I had no idea her sister died in a bike accident – I didn’t even know she had a sister who died.”
Where you can find help?
Our expert team can provide advice and guidance on supporting a bereaved pupil or responding to a death in your school community.
- Call: 08088 020 021
- Email: ask@winstonswish.org
- Use our online chat
Schools fundraising
If your school would like to fundraise for Winston’s Wish and help us ensure bereaved children at schools up and down the country get access to support when they need it, then please click on the link below.