ELSA

Meet The ELSA Team.

What is ELSA?

Emotional

Literacy

Support

Assistant

The ELSA programme recognises that children are happier, and are more able to learn when their emotional needs are addressed.

ELSA is an initiative, which was designed to enable school staff to support the emotional needs of their pupils. Teaching Assistants (TA’s) are trained to understand the psychological underpinnings of key areas of intervention, for example:

• social skills

• emotions

• bereavement

• social stories and therapeutic stories

• anger management

• self-esteem

• counselling skills such as solution focus

• friendship

TA’s are then able to develop individual support programmes to meet the needs of pupils they work with.

The ELSA initiative was developed and supported by educational psychologists, who apply their professional knowledge of children’s social and emotional development to areas of need experienced by pupils. They provide on-going professional supervision to help maintain high quality in the work undertaken by ELSAs.

How does it work?

When an ELSA referral is made, the child will be paired with one ELSA who they will visit weekly for 1-1 sessions. The ELSA will be able to consider the areas of need for that specific child and develop a programme of support based on this. ELSAs use SMART targets to measure progress over the sessions which run for 6-8 weeks, before these targets are reviewed.

In a typical session, ELSAs give students an opportunity to check-in and talk about their week, they then explore the child’s difficulties and help them to problem solve or teach strategies that the child can use to support their emotional wellbeing.

ELSAs use activities to address that child’s area of need, for example: ELSAs might use social stories and strategies to support emotional understanding when working with a child who is dealing with a bereavement.

After the 6-8 week period when targets are reviewed, if the targets are met, a handover meeting between the ELSA and the child’s classroom staff will take place to ensure the child is supported in maintaining their progress and putting their learnt strategies into practise in the classroom environment. Alternatively, sessions will continue beyond this period, whereby their SMART targets will be reevaluated.

ELSA Toolkit

At Pinkwell, we are also implementing an ‘ELSA Toolkit’ to give all staff an understanding of how they can support the emotional well-being of all students during the school day.

The toolkit includes practical strategies and resources that will enable classroom teachers and TA’s to understand and support the emotional well-being of their students.

Each year group has an assigned ELSA who are a point of contact to support staff in using these strategies and tools.

Coronavirus and ELSA

The pandemic and the subsequent closing of schools has had a dramatic impact on the emotional well-being of children across the country.

Many ELSAs have been unable to continue 1-1 sessions, however ELSAs at Pinkwell have been able to continue sharing resources and well-being supports that students can use at home to support their well-being.

ELSA Resources

Find attached some examples of ELSA resources which you might find useful to use with your child at home.