Dealing with crisis: An interpretation of scale in the health work of schools

Working from a growing database, the broad canvas of health work undertaken at schools is becoming clearer. A trend that seems to be emerging suggests that the type of work construed as ‘health work’ and indeed the actual work that gets done in its name seems to align with the socioeconomic status of the school and the social and geographical community of which is is a part.  Among the consequences of this is how the term ‘crisis’ is constituted when related to health work across different schools, different sectors and different locations.  This in turns drives the nature of the problem solving approaches that need to be recruited to deal with crises. This paper is a discussion of the scale of crisis across schools of different types and in different locations and how the approaches to crisis management might be considered as health work of varying intensities for which, as we suggest teachers, have had little or no professional development or previous training. Such a discussion requires some attention to more formal definitions and descriptions of crisis. For example in a wide range of literature associated with caring and support services, a crisis is generally perceived as a disruption to normal function, a state of disequilibrium, and a breakdown in normal functioning. It is widely agreed that a crisis is invariably acute and involves a heightened sense of vulnerability. Moreover the same body of literature tends to claim that a crisis is something that cannot be resolved with ‘customary problem solving devices’.  It is our contention, that crises are construed differently by different schools, and by different school sectors. What might be a crisis in one barely registers in another – scholars and clinicians from social work and psychiatry have long argued this point and in this sense crises in health work in schools might mirror similar categorizations that can be found in social work and psychiatry. To this end it is helpful to distinguish between a health work ‘problem’, a health work ‘emergency’ and a health work ‘crisis’ and how these are managed by teachers and schools. At the same time it is important to consider if, within the context of health work duties, teachers themselves experience states of disequilibrium that might also be construed as a crisis.