Young people whose behaviour does not conform to our expectations of how pupils should behave within an educational context have had a variety of labels attached to them including: Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (SEBD), and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The employment of such labels will shape how the young…

The impact on full-time carers of children with intellectual disabilities who exhibit challenging behaviour has been well researched (e.g., Lach et al., 2009; Shah et al., 2010; Wodehouse and McGill, 2009), however, there is to date no published research into the impact of behaviour that challenges on seasonal carers. Five participants who had…

This article describes how applied behaviour analysis can be implemented effectively and affordably in a maintained special needs school in the UK. Behaviour analysts collaborate with classroom teachers to provide early intensive behaviour education for young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and function based behavioural…

This small-scale pilot research project investigates the prevalence of Speech Language and Communication Difficulties in a sample of children attending a Youth Offending Service in the UK. Using the CELF-4, approximately 90% of the sample displayed some form of language difficulty and, overall, this population displayed mild to moderate…

This study investigates the use made of humour by teachers during classroom interventions with adolescent students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). Literature mentions the use of humour as a key tool in successful classroom interventions with students with SEBD and yet there is little quantified research on this topic.…

The Youth Psychopathy traits Inventory (YPI) is a newly developed self-report measure of psychopathy. There are no studies looking at the validity of this measure in UK samples. We assessed 115 male adolescents (mean age 16.22 years) with DSM-IV conduct disorder on a range of measures including the YPI, Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL) and the…

This study seeks to develop a reliable self-report instrument to assess obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in young people. The children's Obsessional Compulsive Inventory had good internal consistency, criterion validity and was significantly correlated with the Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale. This preliminary new measure could…

The psychosocial effects of national lottery and scratchcard gambling among adolescents in the U.K. (N=1195) are examined; reinforcement factors are discussed. Time and money spent playing, links with parental gambling, attitudes of students toward the games, perceptions of winning, and data on problem gambling are reported and discussed.…

Pakistani and Caucasian mothers were both highly accurate in the identification of child and adolescent mental health problems. In a community-based vignettes study, Caucasian mothers were more likely to identify all behaviours as problematic. However, Pakistani mothers who did identify behaviours as problematic then rated them as being as (or…

This article argues that non-directive play therapy offers an approach that is well suited to addressing adolescent concerns. The argument is illustrated by two accounts of therapy that show how a more traditional non-directive counseling approach was combined with play therapy by the adolescents themselves, allowing exploration of emotional…

We combined data from the Office for Standards in Education with those from a large national survey of child and adolescent mental health and developed a simple score that schools or LEAs could use to predict the level of emotional and behavioural difficulties that they are likely to encounter. The final Ford score is based on the rates of free…

Objective: To compare prevalence of serious emotional and behavioral problems and mental health contacts for these problems among American and British children and adolescents. Method: Data on children and adolescents ages 5 to 16 years were drawn from the 2004 U.S. National Health Interview Survey (response rate = 79.4%) and the 2004 survey of…

A previous project by the Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities analysed data that had been collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 1999 in their survey of the mental health of children and adolescents in Great Britain. The Foundation found that in this nationally representative sample of just over 10,000 children, 39%…

Fifty-six secondary school students with and without social emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBDs) completed self-report measures of their strengths and difficulties, self-concept and social identity, cognitive attributional style and participated in computer-based tests of risk-taking and impulsivity. Contrary to common understanding, the…