Resources: Review - How to move on from a school crisis

But Rosemary Thompson wants schools to face up to and prepare for challenges.

Her book takes readers through everyday situations, showing how to cope with a student suicide or a natural disaster. The key message is that post-traumatic stress can be alleviated and the school community reinforced by shared experience, which deserves the same management that's applied to the business of learning.

Thompson argues for acknowledgement of any major, traumatic experience and for the deployment of structures that allow young people to move away from being powerless victims to survivors who've acknowledged their pain and found a way to move on.

It's a practical book from an author who has a background in professional counselling. Most interesting is when she contrasts the relatively directive approach needed for post-crisis counselling with the more Rogerian one, where the emphasis is on enabling clients to find their own solutions.