Eight o’clock on a rainy, grey morning in the London borough of Brent. All is quiet at Preston Manor comprehensive school. None of its 1,350 pupils is to be seen, and few staff are around, except in one room, where eight adults sit round a table. Five are teachers, one a classroom assistant, another the school receptionist. The eighth is Emil Jackson, a child and adolescent psychotherapist from the Brent Centre for Young People (formerly known as the Brent Adolescent Centre).

They are discussing Lizelle Nash’s most difficult class, a Year 11 graphicacy group containing seven or eight difficult and disruptive boys. Although the conversation might seem familiar to anyone who has sat in a staffroom off-loading, it soon becomes clear that Mr Jackson is guiding the conversation much deeper.

This discussion group, run by the BCYP, is part of a revolutionary approach to difficult pupil behaviour. Staff come with an open-ended brief to discuss anything and everything about their professional experiences. In the almost three years that Brent’s Mental Health in Schools outreach project has been running at Preston Manor, more than 40 staff have met with Mr Jackson. The project is growing: this year, an extra meeting has been timetabled for heads of year, with two other secondary schools in the borough (Queens Park and Edgware) considering programmes of their own.

This morning, as people share their experiences of difficult classes, and these boys in particular, Ms Nash’s troubles are quickly connected to the boys’ educational history - family problems, exam failure, problems in making friends. These boys fear loss, points out Claire Haskett: “They don’t know how long you are going to be here and they test you. If you stay on after the holidays, you gain respect.”

Sue Lowidt, Preston Manor’s special needs co-ordinator, highlights their “painfully low self-esteem” - some see short-course graphicacy as a “dumb” GCSE option. Many of them struggle with their learning. And, says receptionist Brenda Kempton, they need to feel in control because their home lives may be out of control.

Mr Jackson suggests that, as everyone agrees these boys are not going the right way to academic success, perhaps their behaviour in class has other goals. How does Ms Nash feel at the end of a session with them? “I feel angry, hopeless, as if nothing I do goes right, humiliated,” she says with stark honesty.

“Perhaps we should think if that is how these boys feel, and why,” suggests Mr Jackson. A shock of recognition runs round the group.

Trained in child and adolescent psycho-therapy at the Tavistock Clinic, the London mental health centre, Mr Jackson applies its ideas to explain why miserable, disturbed people often seem to hand their problems on to others. “There is a link between the status of the subject area Lizelle teaches - let’s face it, you only do that short course in graphicacy because you can’t do a full GCSE - and how the class makes you feel.” The group agree.

Staff also identify the fear haunting Year 11 - of what will happen to them after GCSEs. Even though Preston Manor, under its dynamic head Andrea Berkeley, has raised its percentage of pupils gaining five A*-Cs from 43 per cent in 1997 to 68 per cent in 2001, these pupils do not, at the moment, perceive a brilliant future.

In 2000, the Financial Times named the school the 10th most improved in the country, but Mrs Berkeley is the first to admit the challenges facing a student body with lower than average SATs scores on entry, 82 per cent having English as an additional language, and 23 per cent on free school meals. High expectations drive up standards, but they can also leave casualties.

Beyond this, though, Mr Jackson (in line with the theories of Dr Moses Laufer, who founded the Brent centre more than 30 years ago) sees adolescence as a problematic time, opening up vulnerabilities. With this group of boys, Ms Nash’s bright good looks may be a painful reminder of their own inadequacies. “They feel better when you feel their humiliation,” as a group member puts it.

Sharing this, and other insights, is a tremendous relief for staff. Mr Jackson explains: “Teachers have little space within the school structure to talk about their concerns about pupils, and little time to reflect on what behaviour means.” It transforms the way in which teachers view their jobs.

In line with Preston Manor’s decision to avoid, except in extreme cases, permanent exclusion, and with the Government’s emphasis on social inclusion, the project is aimed at helping Preston Manor staff and pupils make education succeed. As Sue Lowidt says: “Because of the group, we are all increasingly aware of how young people’s emotional development can underpin - or undermine - their capacity to learn.”

Over the past three years, as well as the staff discussion groups, the school has set aside space and time to offer therapeutic help to individual pupils and staff. The pupils chosen were at risk of a total rift in their relationship with school because of challenging behaviour or suicidal thoughts, exam pressure or bullying. Preston Manor uses many tools to improve pupils’ school lives: the Excellence in Cities programme, mentoring, anger management, assertiveness training, rigorous revision of individual targets for pupils and staff, a pro-active seating policy in class, a system of rewards and trips, gifted and talented activities, a Children at Risk rolling review, and a staff-parent Raising Achievement for African-Caribbean Boys programme. With so much going on, says Mrs Berkeley, “we needed some work that focused on staff”.

She has no doubts of the project’s value. “The work has had a big impact on achievement as well as on staff morale,” she says. “It’s made people more tolerant, not of bad behaviour, but of the pupils themselves. More willing to think things through. And that rubs off on staff who work with teachers who’ve been in the groups. They see their approach, and that it works.”

Several pupils, says Mrs Berkeley, would probably have been lost to school were it not for the project’s work. Successes include one boy in public care with no exam success predicted who got six GCSEs and went on to further education.

From the psychotherapist’s point of view, the facts and figures are encouraging, but the underlying mental health implications are even more important. On the one hand, teachers feel a great relief, Emil Jackson says, once they realise that dealing with difficult pupils is not hopeless. On the other, work discussion groups help staff focus clearly on such pupils, “not just as people who make them feel terrible, but as people who might actually feel terrible inside themselves”.

Teachers don’t know how important they are. Lesley Sawyer, with 25 years’

experience, says: “Emil’s taught us what a big part we play in vulnerable kids’ lives. And it makes us feel good. Knowing a bit more about a group or a scenario empowers you, gives you confidence, which feeds back into the teaching.”

Mrs Sawyer, with a background in physical education and special needs teaching, sees psychotherapy as an intensely practical matter. Since joining the teachers’ discussion group, she has set up and run anger management courses where pupils come for an hour a week for several weeks and enact, through role-play and drama, situations they find difficult to manage. “We have to cut some kids a bit of slack. That’s not being soft, it’s taking time to empathise. And they respond. Kids who have finished the course keep asking if they can come back.”

Much of the difficult behaviour comes, says Claire Haskett, from troubled children who have reason not to trust adults. She says of one boy, a refugee: “He used to really wind me up. I used to say, ‘I won’t tolerate your rude behaviour, get out’. Then I thought about it, using the group, and I sat him down and said, ‘Let’s think why you are doing this and why I am losing my temper’. So we’ve set it up that when he feels upset he will say to the other teachers, ‘I need to see Miss Haskett’. And he’s still here, which I never would have thought. He’s not a perfect child, but he can contain his anxiety so he doesn’t explode in class, he knows to remove himself.”

Feelings, as Emil Jackson stresses, are not some kind of indigestion to get rid of, or an interference with education. Teachers use the new perspective to disentangle personalities from tense situations. He says: “First and foremost, we have to work out what feelings belong to us and be careful not to put those on to others. For example, a teacher found a particular child repellent. When she asked the class to write about how they saw themselves, the girl wrote that she was the ‘ugliest girl in school’ and ‘no one likes me’. Talking to the girl, the teacher found how needy and lonely she was, and how her misery made her repel help. Understanding this, the teacher’s own feelings of revulsion disappeared.”

Inner-city schools will never be places of perfect harmony. Children have problems, teachers become exhausted and stressed. There is no final answer to life’s difficulties. But after reflecting together in the group, says Mr Jackson, staff discover in themselves the resources to cope. “Behaviour can be communication. If we know that, we don’t become just a victim, but a receptive listener who can choose how to respond.”

Brent Centre for Young People has been specialising in the treatment of 14 to 21-year-olds for 34 years. Its walk-in service is particularly highly regarded. It has recently developed partnerships with key agencies to provide a drugs and alcohol service, a careers and education service, a housing advice service and the Mental Health in Schools outreach project. A sexual health service and Citizens’ Advice Bureau open shortly. Contact: 51 Winchester Avenue, London, NW6 7TT. Tel: 020 7328 0918 or 020 7328 4216. Email: ejackson@brent-centre.org