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Background and research behind ENABLE

Behaviours that interrupt learning can be linked to a child's early emotional and social development. Some children are not given enough guidance to help them manage life and school successfully. By using ENABLE you can help to rectify this: the program will bring you profound insights into of young people’s needs, and identify how relationships and learning environments can be improved.

What is the classroom challenge?

  • To respond positively to the needs of children who behave in ways that interrupt their own or others' learning
  • To ensure access to the curriculum for all young people, including those with emotional and behavioural difficulties
  • To contribute towards the inclusion of more children in mainstream classrooms and schools
  • To find ways to encourage troubled children, rather than merely to control them
  • To maintain a professional, informed, evidence-based approach to teaching and teacher morale

Beliefs and Approaches

We at ENABLE recognize the challenges faced today by teachers and others who have to cope with children with emotional and behavioural difficulties.

Our program is based on first-hand experience of supporting the emotional and social development of young people, using a therapeutic model to identify their underlying developmental needs. We at ENABLE firmly believe that:

  • Short-term remedies for behavioural problems do not solve difficulties permanently, either for the child, the school or the community
  • Teachers and others who deal with troubled children must be offered positive strategies to correct behavioural problems and to help young people to learn
  • The teacher/learner relationship and the curriculum can and should be used to prevent and respond to disruptive behaviour
  • Effecting positive change is both practical and possible in ordinary classrooms in mainstream schools

We at ENABLE are able to demonstrate clearly the links between interruptions to healthy development and the behaviours that interrupt learning. Above all, we are able to offer practical strategies for use in all educational settings. ENABLE thus makes it possible s for all young people to achieve a higher educational standard.

Emotional Development

It is vital that we understand how best to support children as they grow up by helping them in the early years of their education and encouraging them to achieve higher long-term educational goals. It is essential too that we pay attention to the role of emotions in learning, and to realise how emotions are linked to behaviours that in turn can either promote or inhibit learning.

When children’s thought processes develop normally, they learn to recognise and regulate the emotion that lies behind action (affect), and will be more able to control their actions or behaviours.

English's work in Transactional Analysis provides useful evidence of how children’s ability to differentiate between inner awareness, the expression of feelings, and actions develops as they grow up. Children need to be supported as they experience and demonstrate emotional states; they need to be taught to recognize and name emotions, to extend their emotional vocabulary, to learn to think about emotions, and to think while experiencing emotions. If young people are to change their behaviour in lasting ways, they need to be taught imposing how to do so. ENABLE can help encourage their insights and understanding – imposing simple discipline is not enough.

The development of this cognitive function happens when children recognise and share their emotional states (affect attunement). This is of particular interest when considering:

  • Access to Learning for All
  • The identification of learning needs, especially for children who are vulnerable, underachieving, or at risk
  • Strategies for working with young people whose behaviour interrupts their own learning, or that of others

The relationship between teacher and child is an under-recognised and under-used resource – but by using ENABLE, this relationship is enhanced and will bear fruit.

Read more about the developmental model >