Managing bereavement in schools and colleges
Schools and colleges are an important part of students’ lives. They act like a
second family providing security and routine when everything else changes. As
such, they are faced with managing a range of sensitive issues, requiring
differing levels of response.
Schools need to be pro-active in their planning for managing these sensitive
issues, including bereavement and mourning. Counselling and emotional
supporting are learning processes for all who take part. Positive relationships in
school create a warm and trusting environment and ethos that allows support
and counselling to be sought and given effectively.
All adults in schools and colleges are potentially able to support needy students.
However, the level and degree to which this occurs must be discussed by staff.
Counselling carries with it a great responsibility on the part of the professional.
The counsellor, as well as the supported, will need protection. The best
protection for all is a carefully planned framework within which to work, involving
the whole school/college.
A framework for your establishment
• Support and counselling is a part of the pastoral care a school offers to its
students.
• It belongs on a continuum of provision from low level affirmation to interagency
intervention.
• It needs to have a policy that defines its purpose, its key workers and their
roles.
• There should be consultations with students, staff, governors and parents to
establish an acceptable framework.
• All members of the school community should be aware of the services
available for access or referral.
• The links between PSHCE, mentoring systems etc. need to be made.
• The roles and responsibilities of other agencies should be acknowledged.
• It needs to be part of a departmental plan in terms of budgeting, staff training
etc.
• It needs a cycle of implementation, monitoring and review.
• Models of good practice should be established.
• It needs a modus operandi.
‘Counselling involves a deliberately undertaken contract with clearly agreed
boundaries and commitment to privacy and confidentiality. It requires explicit
and informed consent.’
(BACP Code of Ethics and Practice)
Grief and bereavement – complicated grief
In complicated grief, it is as if an unexpressed or unresolved important life issue
– a frozen block of time – has created a wall of ice between the person and the
grief. Frozen blocks of time stop normal mourning or grieving. Situations that
can lead to complicated grief are:
• suicide
• murder
• abuse
• violence
• terminal illness
It can feel as if life stops and time stands still.
There can be no movement forward until the issues are resolved and the
feelings released.
Activities that can help with complicated grief:
• Story-writing:
° This can allow projection of feelings onto a character. It allows nonthreatening
dialogues to take place.
• Visualisation:
° Students can visualise their feelings of hurt, pain, anger or fear and
interpret them in 2-D or 3-D abstraction or give them voice through
characterisation.
° Loss timeline:
° Students can fill a time-lie with people and dates or events and dates in
chronological order. This becomes a concrete representation of loss.
• A family tree:
° A geneogram can be created using circles for people still living and
squares for those who have died. This gives an over-view and depicts
the possible support system still existing.
Students do not need protecting from their feelings but support them with
them. They need the following:
• acknowledgement of their pain and suffering
• time to talk to an active listener
• to know that you understand their feelings and can help articulate them
• to know there are no ‘right’ feelings but there are common feelings
• to know common feelings range through sadness, depression, anger, panic,
despair, guilt, shame, betrayal
• to know other feelings include loneliness, embarrassment, boredom,
imbalance, craziness, etc

 

Appendix 3: Mourning and burial customs

 

Every culture develops a philosophy which attempts to make sense of the

nature of life and death. However simple the organisation or economy of a

group of people, they will develop concepts about death which can be

communicated from one generation to another. This belief system or religion,

produces cultural practices or ritual to regulate behaviour at times of marriage,

birth and death.

Part of the function of religion is to explore the nature of man and to find

answers to questions about mortality and immortality. Long before there were

written records there is evidence that people believed there was a life after

death. The discovery of old burial grounds in which food, tools and

manifestations of wealth were placed beside the dead, indicate something of

the beliefs which people had about life beyond death. All the major religions

have a belief system and a consequent ritual which integrates faith and action

at the time of death.

 

Christianity

 

A number of variations in Christian ritual exist as a reflection of differing

emphases of belief and doctrinal focus amongst the various denominations.

Some aspects of the Christian perspective have become part of the wider

cultural ritual associated with death even though participants may not give

active assent to all the beliefs. Recently however, there has risen a move to

create a ritual suitable for those of no belief or of humanist aspiration. This

avoids borrowing from a religious tradition which inappropriately reflects the

beliefs of the deceased, but which allows the event of death to be marked with a

social act consistent with the emotional need to say ‘goodbye’.

Christian emphasis has changed over the centuries as there have been

theological moves between focus on the centrality of the hope of resurrection

and the grief-laden ritual borne of an uncertainty about mankind's acceptance

by God. More recently Christian ritual has combined these aspects – looking at

the hope which a belief in a life after death brings, while acknowledging the grief

of the mourner separated from someone of importance in their lives.

The funeral will usually take place within a church or chapel and be followed by

a short service at the crematorium or act of committal at the graveside. The

nature of the funeral service will reflect the style of worship within each

denominational tradition, e.g. Roman Catholic will have a requiem mass while

Quakers will have a service with no formal ceremony.

Preference about mourning clothes, flowers and wreaths have become a matter

of family choice, although increasingly there is a move away from formal

mourning and the purchase of flowers. It is more usual for people to be invited

to make a donation to charity as an alternative gesture of sympathy, and

messages of condolence are usually expressed by the sending of commercially

designed cards.