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Abstract
This paper explores what the learning support assistant needs to help integrate children with educational or behavioural difficulties into mainstream education. Although focussed on one role, the paper is relevant to a wider context and draws upon the author's experience of infant observation in relation to the educational workplace.
The paper reflects upon the different roles that workers take up within institutions and how these can be seen to form part of a triad including the maternal, paternal and infant positions. The author suggests that the learning support assistant (and other comparable roles) takes on the maternal role. The paper reflects upon the supposition that mothers function at their best when their own anxieties and fears are contained by the paternal function. Similarly, assistants are only able to contain and support the child when they themselves feel sufficiently supported. The assistant gains from an awareness of paternal and maternal functioning and projective processes. When levels of support are sufficient, the assistant can engage in triadic thinking, hold the link between organisation, child, and individual worker, and function as a container.
Notes
1. I use pseudonyms for all individuals in this paper apart from myself.
2. I have also worked in a secondary school and argue that the ideas and experiences discussed here are equally applicable in that setting.
3. This paper uses the analogy of a traditional family, containing mother, father and child, to refer to the learning support assistant, school and child. However, I recognise that this is often not the reality of contemporary life in which many children spend much of their time in single-parent families, or not necessarily with both birth-parents. For this reason I must emphasise that when I refer to the role of father this is a metaphor; what I refer to here is a consistent, reliable presence that performs an internal function in the life of the mother/worker and child and who is able to contain the natural anxieties of the mother/worker. My reference to the maternal is also to be taken in the same way: I use this analogy to stand not only for what actual mothers provide but also for an ability in the worker to contain the child, to support their development and to engage them in moments of reverie. This is achieved by the assistant who has been able to internalise the emotional holding that s/he has received, enabling a capacity to think reflectively and bear in mind the triad—that is, the functions of the maternal, paternal and child, and the impact of the external world.
4. For the purpose of presenting my argument, I shall not always present case material in a chronological order.
5. OFSTED stands for ‘Office for Standards in Education’.
6. This idea is expanded by Greenhalgh (Citation1994) who proposes, ‘Whole-school agreement about roles, responsibilities and procedures may serve to provide a necessary chain of emotional holding for the staff, who are then enabled to provide such holding for the children’ (p. 269).
7. This sense of disintegration is illustrated by Orford (Citation1996) who proposes, ‘A school setting that does not provide a group of teachers able to pull together and to create a secure container, will, as the child's environment may have done hitherto, be open to splitting and acting out in relation to him. The system thus filled with a child's bad feelings will either be fought by him or he will run away from it’ (p. 120).
8. The infant exclaimed ‘gone!’ as it disappeared and ‘there!’ when it was once again visible, in an effort to gain mastery over his feelings about his mother's presence and absence.
9. The importance of the environment for children such as Robert, who may have formed a psychical second skin as a result of a lack of containment necessary for the first skin to form, is described by Bick (Citation1968), who suggests that ‘the containing aspect of the analytic situation resides especially in the setting and is therefore an area where firmness of technique is crucial’ (p. 486).
10. In calling Robert a ‘good boy’ I was working against an image he held of himself as a ‘bad boy’. When I spoke with other staff about his constant assertion that he was a bad boy they explained that a previous assistant had often called him a bad boy when she felt overburdened with the situation. I was conscious that children, particularly with autism, can become fixated on particular wording as if glued to a single word or sequence of words, and I became aware that if I did not act sensitively to alter this pattern Robert could become so adhered to the wording that it became part of his identity.
11. Because of the real responsibility that the learning support assistant is given, it is also important that management are aware of the precise skills necessary for the role when recruiting, because the employment of a non-suitable individual can be harmful.
12. This was clear when I returned to work after a two-week absence due to a chest infection. I made a cartoon for Robert explaining that I had been unwell but that I had been thinking about him and, finally, that I was ‘all better now’. For many days afterwards, Robert repeated my words, saying that I was ‘all better now’ and even made a piece of work about the event himself, writing, ‘My friend Jessica is ill but Robert is sad but she's all better and Robert is happy’.