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My name is Kierran Pearce and I lead the Multi-Schools Council. The Multi-Schools Council (MSC) is something I started back in 2012 while working as a sports-coordinator at an Essex special needs school. Entering this type of setting when I had just left school myself was a real challenge but something I fell in love with straight away. My own experience of education was mixed as I experienced several exclusions and struggled with my mental health.

Creating the MSC came from a conversation I had with a young girl who attend the special school and she said:

‘I think the support we get in schools like this is great but one day me and my friends have to leave, and other young people and other adults don’t understand our differences.’

We needed to do something about this because she was right.

The journey began with some local schools who all brought their own school council reps along to a meeting. The meeting was designed to give young people a voice and bring different groups of young people together which included mainstream primary and secondary schools and special schools. We were questioned at first, how can you bring such a mix of young people together? Time has shown that it works.

Slowly but surely more and more schools across our local authority became aware of what we do, and our meetings became projects. These projects than became initiatives that the local authority started to listen to and in 2018 they agreed to fund our council for 1-day a week. This allowed us to start delivering some of the initiatives our young people who attended the meetings wanted to see which included autism and ADHD awareness workshops for children and staff in schools.

As our work continued to grow, we had surrounding local authorities ask how they could be involved, and our work was then funded for 5-days a week (but still on a secondment basis). Just before this was agreed we did a mammoth walk across our county to every single special school within our local authority within a week. This was over a marathon a day and ensured that it put our special needs education system on the map.

The work has grown momentum since then and delivered several projects including a framework looking at how inclusive our schools are, visual impairment videos to build awareness and a music album to help challenge mental health perceptions (to name a few). The core of what we do is the fact all of this has been designed by young people. During he summer our local authority agreed to make the MSC a full-time role within our system and, with funding jointly provided from education and health, two full time youth workers to continue delivering our work.

A toolkit for teachers: Autism, ADHD and Mental Health is an example of what can happen when you listen to young people. The whole book is influenced by young people with autism, ADHD and those who have had challenges with their mental health. The book looks to build awareness, for example how young people with autism may look at the world through a different context and how they may process different bits of information. Our ADHD section looks at understanding ADHD as a diagnosis and not a behavioural difficulty and notes on how different parts of the brain perform. The mental health section talks about understanding individual needs and the steps needed to ensure young people can make progress in school.

While all the sections look at understanding, we know teachers and other professionals working in schools also wanted strategies. The strategies are designed to look at whole class and whole school approaches to ensure they are achievable and there is balance to understanding small adjustments for all make a big difference to an individual. We have also kept the book light, what professional within education has time to sit down and read a 500 – 800 page book? The book includes the real key messages our young people wanted to get across to you in just over 100 pages.

 We want this book to create understanding and support professionals working in schools. We know from speaking with many professionals over the years when developing the council there is not enough awareness among our workforce due to a lack of training and exposure to the areas we cover within this book. We also know from working with children that there is not enough awareness about our differences because quite simply many of us don’t know enough. This book helps with all of that and whether you are a trainee teacher and someone who has worked in education for years, on behalf of our young people, please purchase this book.