The Profound Impact of Grief – An Introduction to Grief and Children with PMLD

Children with profound and multiple learning disabilities grieve like anyone else, but they're the group most often left out of bereavement support. Their grief can show as a change in breathing, a lost skill or a behaviour put down to their disability. And it doesn't only follow a death: the passenger assistant who stops appearing one morning is a loss too.

You'll learn to read those signs, and to talk about death with real words ('dead', not 'passed away') backed up by photos, objects of reference and the child's own AAC. You'll build a toolkit of sensory activities, from memory boxes to friendship bracelets for everyone still in their life. And you'll find ways to teach the whole life cycle across the curriculum, so the lesson doesn't end with the butterfly.

It's taught by a former special school deputy head who is researching how non-verbal children express grief.