Service Children – A Guide for Education and Welfare Professionals by Joy O’Neill published by Bright Pen ISBN 978-0-7552-1350-4

  

The children of military personnel can have very different lives from those in civilian life.

They face moving home and school more often, sometime having been brought up in foreign countries and cultures, and then returning to the UK or coming here for the first time.

They can face long periods where one or even both parents are away on active duty – living with a single parent, a grandparent or carer.

They live with the daily media coverage of death and injury to serving military personnel and have to face the possibility that their parent may be one of the ones hurt or killed.

This can have a huge impact on them and how they interact at school, with teaching staff and other children. Being a service child can have a major impact on a child’s development both emotionally and academically and very often the professionals who are working with them are unaware of the full range of issues they face.

In this book the founder of the Service Children Support Network provides an invaluable guide for teachers and teaching assistants, school management teams, school governors and other welfare professionals on the unique and often hidden issues the children of serving service personnel face.

The book goes into detail about deployment, bereavement, military culture and even touches on issues like children of foreign service personnel being redeployed to the UK, and the issue of losing a brother or sister rather than a parent, as many of the soldiers who have died in recent conflicts have had school age siblings at home.

One of the fundamental elements of this book is a list of prescriptive and consistent recommendations for working with service children.

The author Joy O’Neill is a service mother and wife and also a school governor and founder of the Service Children Support Network who is keen to help education and other welfare professionals understand the issues service children face.

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