Joris Verlinden: “Thanks to Solentra, we are a safe school”

Joris Verlinden is the headmaster of the Stedelijke Lyceum Offerande, an Antwerp OKAN school offering education to 270 pupils. Many come from Somalia, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Syria, some are unaccompanied minors. The school has been working with Solentra for seven years.

Many students at our school are struggling with grief or loss. Moreover, a large group has a severe post-traumatic background or experiences intense stress. Every day, we notice how this not only hinders their learning, but also their functioning in the class group or in the school. Sometimes even to the extent that it can affect their safety or that of other pupils.

Thanks to Solentra, we have been able to apply a trauma-sensitive approach to our care policy in recent years. This has allowed us to make incredible strides in the care and guidance we provide to our students.

The professional support we get from Solentra includes regular trainings that introduce the entire school to the characteristics of trauma and teach us how to work with those in the classroom. We are also given tools to improve our trauma-sensitive care policy.

In addition, Solentra offers local intervisions, during which they consider individual approaches in complex pupil cases together with the care team and the teacher. In 2016, for example, a lot of young people from Syria and Iraq arrived at our school and we had to deal with a lot of fights and aggression. Thanks to a coaching intervision series from Solentra, we were then able to build a more structured and safer school environment with a lot of attention to trauma sensitivity.

Solentra’s guidance really did keep us afloat then and we are still reaping the benefits of it today. I can say that we have since become a stable and safe school. Despite the complex target group, the number of fights is now very limited in the school. We have an extensive care team that works very professionally, and we owe much of that to Solentra. Highly recommended to all OKAN schools.