EduCare launches online Bereavement and Loss training course in partnership with Winston’s Wish

Safeguarding and duty-of-care training specialists, EduCare, has launched its Dealing with Bereavement and Loss course.

Produced in partnership with Winston’s Wish, the UK’s first childhood bereavement charity, the course will help users to understand what needs to be in place to support everyone involved with bereavement in school or college.

Dawn Jotham, EduCare’s Pastoral Care Specialist, explained why she was keen to work with Winston’s Wish on this project: “Safeguarding children and young people from harm means taking a contextual approach and looking at all factors in their lives, whether they take place in the school grounds or not. Childhood bereavement can have far reaching consequences, for example, the occurrence of suffering bereavement in childhood are shown to have a higher risk of anxiety and depression that can last into adulthood.

“Winston’s Wish is the UK’s first childhood bereavement charity, and subsequently, their insight and knowledge of the subject is vast. Given the extremely sensitive nature of bereavement, it was important that we partner with experts to ensure that the content of the training course was thorough yet delivered in as delicate a way as possible; Winston’s Wish was the perfect choice.”

Emma Radley, Director of Fundraising and Communications at Winston’s Wish, commented: “Working with EduCare to prepare this online training course that supports our work is a new opportunity for our charity.

“Winston’s Wish provides a range of resources to support schools and also offer in-depth 3-day training sessions that combine bereavement and loss awareness with sessions on resilience. Working with EduCare means there is now an initial online option available for people who may need it; this is an important step in reaching out to the 41,000 children who are bereaved of a parent every single year in the UK.”

The new course will cover various aspects including the effects of grief on a child or young person; how a death may impact school life, and how information about the death should be shared with pupils and staff; how to manage potentially difficult topics and avoid unnecessarily painful comments when communicating with a bereaved pupil or student; and how to communicate with children and young people about tragic events in the media, to list but a few.

To find out more please visit www.educare.co.uk/bereavement or https://www.winstonswish.org