What is an ELSA?

The skills that ELSA’s bring are to support children and young people with overcoming life’s challenges, to support their wellbeing, to provide relational care and to help children and young people to develop the skills they need to develop emotional literacy and to promote and support emotional, social and psychological growth and resilience.

Why is Emotional Literacy important?

Emotional Literacy is made up of:

The ability to understand your emotions, the ability to listen to others and empathise with their emotions and the ability to express emotions productively.

To be emotionally literate is to be able to manage emotion in a way that improves your personal power and improves the quality of life around you.

Emotional literacy improves relationships, creates loving possibilities between people, makes co-operative working and learning possible and facilitates the feeling of community.

(Claude Steiner)

What does Emotional Literacy consist of:

Emotional Literacy consist of:

• Knowing your feelings.
• Having a sense of empathy.
• Learning to manage our emotions.
• Repairing emotional wounds.
• Putting it all together: emotional interactivity.

Having its roots in counselling, it is a social definition that has interactions between people at its heart.

Emotional Literacy is not fixed and can be developed and nurtured.

Our ELSA is able to:

• connect with and build rapport with challenging and vulnerable youngsters.
• think beyond the presentation of behaviours.
• think about what is needed, not what ‘is wrong’.
• be a reflective practitioner.
• be a resilient practitioner.
• work independently and creatively
• apply in practice what is learned.

They also have:

• willingness and ability to plan, write and evaluate programmes of support.
• a desire to learn and a desire to share learning.