Peer Support and Emotional Literacy - Cumbria, March 2002

Antidote organised a conference in the Lake District in March for the Peer Support Forum.

Young people are curious about each other, and need diverse opportunities to understand what happens in their relationships. Peer support schemes are one way of addressing this. A key issue explored at the conference was how such schemes can effectively address all young people's emotional, social and intellectual development.

Addressing needs
Participants were interested in how peer support can address the emotional needs of those who do not have specific issues to talk about - a general feeling of distress, perhaps, rather than an incident of bullying to report - and also those who cannot articulate verbally what is making them feel bad.

This led them to reflect on the need for peer support programmes to be embedded in an overall strategy for encouraging students to practise listening and speaking to each other. No scheme can have a significant impact in isolation from other school-based activities that address peer relationships. And an effective scheme will catalyse other initiatives, as teachers become more attuned to the emotional and social needs of young people.

Also discussed was how peer support processes, which are often used to tackle bullying, can provide young people with opportunities to deal with their feelings on a range of other issues.

Schools, it was felt, needed to continuously explore with young people their concerns and preoccupations, and to help peer supporters address them. This should be part of a regular process of reviewing the purpose of any scheme. Often the most effective schemes are those where the pressure to set them up emerged internally, from young people recognising a need and thinking about how that need could be most effectively addressed.

With imagination, people argued, one can set up schemes that enable students to support each other through distressing emotional experiences they are unable to speak about - either because they lack verbal skills, or because the experiences are too raw. Living on farms that had lost livestock during the foot and mouth crisis was the example most often mentioned. People spoke of young people engaging in reflective activities - such as hair braiding - that allow for the development of emotional connection. Peer support, they concluded, need not be just for kids with 'problems', nor just for those needing an opportunity to 'talk'.


Conference reports