Problem People. Bullying. Equal Opportunities. Grief, Bereavement and Change. Safety on Educational Visits. Truancy. Working with Parents.

Daniels Pounds 8 each

Alan Beattie reviews booklets which, he says, rapidly get to the key issues.

This series of quick guides should be ex- tremely helpful not only to teachers but to many others with a stake in personal, social and health education - educational guidance staff, parents and carers, nurses and doctors involved in child health, health promotion specialists and so on.

The books come in a more-or-less standard form - A5 size, laid out as a sequence of individual (photocopiable) pages or double-page spreads - designed, according to the series’ foreword, to present key information “in a format which facilitates rapid reference and provides valuable action checklists”. By and large they succeed in doing this clearly and concisely (in “note-form”) across a range of timely topics.

The individual books are all written by practitioners who are experienced and knowledgeable in the fields covered. Each book gets rapidly to the key issues that need to be addressed in working situations, each cites relevant and up-to-date policy sources (government and other), and they all make a brisk attempt to spell out the standards and procedures that can contribute to “good practice” on the topics raised.

Each includes a list of useful addresses and books and other resources; although, needless to say, in the brief compass of these publications detailed citation of research evidence is not attempted, nor is there room to open up the wider professional and academic debates that rage around most of these topics.

While the format is not one that calls for active or interactive learning as such, and the reader is not directly invited to embed the matters covered in her or his own job, the books provide the resources for a systematic and purposeful approach to each topic, taking the reader step-wise through examples of relevant tasks and actions.

The whole set of books together offers a wealth of useful ideas: digests of key facts (medical, social, legal, etc); glossaries of key terms; incident report sheets; time planners; skills inventories, action flow charts; needs assessment checklists; survey and audit forms; specimen letters; questionnaires and quizzes; examples of policy statements; excerpts from whole school development plans; agendas for meetings and workshops.

But there isn’t complete consistency, and some of the books are a little stronger on facts than on actionable guidelines; perhaps a slightly stronger overall editorial hand could have helped to keep the action orientation more firmly in focus.

A related point about the series as a whole is that cross-referencing between different booklets would have been useful - for instance, between bullying and truancy and problem behaviour; and between almost all of them and Working with Parents.

In fact, the books come in three distinct colour-coded sub-sets, labelled “health education” (including the guides on alcohol, drug education and sex education), “career enhancement” (a somewhat awkward and mysterious phrase, hence including counselling and problem people), and “class and school management” (which includes all the rest) - which seems a bit divisive and arbitrary.

The best possible use of these booklets might be as a basis for training sessions for school staff - and for local interagency alliances - and it could be especially helpful to work through several of the Quick Guides over a short period of time. As well as being valuable aides-memoires, they should prompt lively discussion and help to make a reality of “schools as health promoting environments”.

Alan Beattie is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Health Research, Lancaster University