The research that is presented arises within the later action enquiry phase of a trans-European school-based project funded through an ERASMUS + Strategic Partnerships for School Education Project: Learning in a New Key: LINK - Agreement no 2015-1-UK01-KA201-013752.   The partner organisations (from Poland, UK, Italy and Portugal)  comprise 2 mainstream schools, 2 special schools,  3 HEIs and 2 centres providing music / arts based therapeutic services.  This research/ development endeavour addresses an inclusion issue that has resonance in the wider European region.  Groups of vulnerable young people continue to risk exclusion from educational and social milieux because of their challenging emotional and mental states that result from their trauma histories. These are various and include such circumstances as abuse and neglect within the family, abandonment due to parents' economic migrations, experience of warfare and experience of human trafficking.  While this applies in extremes for a relatively small percentage, there is evidence in each of the countries represented in the LINK project that high levels of psychological distress  exist within school populations.  For example in the UK it was evidenced that 15% of the  school aged population is  affected in this way  (Oral Evidence presented to the Health Committee, 1129, 1/4/2014).  The UK Health Committee Third Report October 2014 Researching Children's and Adolescents' Mental Health and CAMHS corroborates this finding. 

This challenge is understood to be one that faces teachers in schools and the resolution of the challenge one that can be best addressed by  multi-professional teams. (Final Report on the Thematic Working Group on Early School Leaving).   The learning pathway adopted in the LINK project has been to develop innovative training programmes for practising teachers through the agency of practising music and arts-based therapists.  The development process has been participatory and inductive with the effect that a multi-disciplinary competency framework has emerged from close observation of /reflection on the emerging classroom practices in the four schools represented.  The classroom-based practices that have been routinised as everyday experiences and entitlements include  listening to music and collaborative music making.  These experiences have provided opportunities for both young people and teachers for sustained relaxation and also for non verbal communicative music-making  within classrooms where social and emotional stress have previously impeded the learning of some groups.   

The LINK project training process has brought teachers into close and sustained proximity with music / arts based therapists.  Although the approaches and aims of these diverse professional  groups have been found to be different, nonetheless a symbiosis between their professional works and lives has emerged and strengthened as the project has continued.  Interchanges between them have uncovered the complexities involved in providing professional support for this at risk client group  and have stimulated a profound review of school-based educational priorities.  In particular theoretical insights from the fields of trauma informed and attachment focussed practice (as well as those from music and arts based therapy interventions)  have extended the teachers’ learning about the children and young people that they are supporting as learners in classrooms.  

The outcomes from the project are various, but the point of focus for this paper is the development of and responses to a competency framework for  ‘therapeutic teaching practice’.  This competency framework is an innovative construct within the project.  The question which has shaped the research phase in the LINK project that is reported in this paper is this:  what  new practices and professional competences have been recognised by the teachers as relevant to inclusive practice  with young people who have had adverse childhood experiences and suffered developmental trauma? 

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