The conquering anxiety guide

Practitioners need to:

• Decide whether to deliver FRIENDS to a whole class or a targeted group.
• Meet parents in advance, if possible.
• Establish a good knowledge of the children and young people’s communication levels and strategies, and of how the school supports this.
• Create a staff team to support their work.
• Get a good feel for individual pupils’ knowledge of emotions, the degree to which they recognise them and how they express them.
• Decide at what level they are going to target their work but also tailor support to individual children.
• Use concrete, visual props.
• Make use of Makaton and other communication supports.
• Maximise the usefulness of role-play to bring complex concepts across.
• Plan, but do not plan too rigidly: it is very important to retain some flexibility and adapt the programme if this is necessary.
• Repeat activities.
• Make sure that activities that are done at home are as simple as possible.

Expert comment

Ro Rossiter is a clinical psychologist and researcher who has been working with FPLD on the FRIENDS programme. 

‘It’s widely acknowledged – and most professionals working in the field certainly know this – that children and young people with learning disabilities have higher rates of anxiety and other emotional and behavioural disorders than their peers in the mainstream.

'At the same time, they have less access to interventions to tackle this. That in itself isn’t surprising; it’s part of the whole range of health and social inequalities they experience.

‘The UK has been leading the world in trialling and evaluating the use of FRIENDS with children and young people with learning disabilities and neurodevelopmental conditions. It’s still early days, but we are seeing some concrete benefits already.

'Teachers report that children’s behaviour has changed at home and at school; they have new coping skills, they are showing less challenging behaviour, they’re walking out of lessons less, and they are using the methods they’ve practised for dealing with anxiety.

'And the children and young people tell us that they have learned new strategies and they are doing things differently: using breathing exercises in stressful situations (one young person, for instance, used them in order to be a ring-bearer in their sister’s wedding) or to help them in interviews – and using the FRIENDS skills to help them calm down at home, rather than getting to fights with siblings.’