When Phoebe Gilbert was 9 years old, her mother died suddenly.

At 10, she was made to sit through a Mother’s Day assembly, followed by a Mother’s Day card-making session.

“I remember going home to my dad and just curling up,” Gilbert, now 20, says. “That was one of the loneliest times.”

The Childhood Bereavement Network has estimated that approximately 41,000 children born in the UK have lost a parent by the time they are 18. By the end of secondary school, an average of one child in every class will have experienced a significant bereavement.

Few teachers have received training in the impact of grief and bereavement on pupils. In a report published recently, the childhood bereavement charity Winston’s Wish found that many bereaved pupils spoke of a lack of support at school.

The report, entitled Voices of Adults Bereaved as Children, states: “There is evidence that schools want to support at times of bereavement, but are challenged, and the climate is highly pressured.”

Many headteachers and senior leaders find themselves confronted with death - of a pupil, a colleague or a pupil’s parent - with no framework or guidelines dictating how they should respond.

“There was nobody to prepare you for that situation,” says Julie Rees, headteacher of Ledbury Primary in Herefordshire, of the moment when she learned that her deputy head had been killed in a car accident.

“It was absolutely horrendous. To be in school with her on the Friday … She was bringing messages into my office. We were supposed to be going on a course together on Monday. It was the last thing in the world I expected to hear.”

She received the phone call on Sunday morning, while she was on a train. Her first thought was that she needed to communicate what had happened to the school community.

“The friend in me was so racked with grief, but the headteacher in me knew that I had to contact the local authority, the chair of governors, my senior team, the parents, and deliver that news.”

This, according to Sacha Richardson, director of family services at Winston’s Wish, is one of the first rules of school bereavement, whether of a staff member, a pupil, or a pupil’s parent.

“Schools need to think about how to acknowledge the loss,” he says. “Communicate about it. Make it talkable about.”

This was particularly important for Gilbert. She changed schools the year after her mother died; the school she attended when it happened responded thoughtfully and supportively.

“They were amazing,” she says. “They got every student in my class to make cards and send them. The teacher sent flowers - it really brightened up the house, at an awful, awful time.

“You can’t get something wrong, because we were already going through the worst time. You can’t make it worse, so you may as well try something.”

Rees, meanwhile, decided that the best way for her pupils to learn about the death of the deputy head was from their own parents. So, sitting on that Sunday morning train, she drafted a letter on the back of two Starbucks serviettes.

That afternoon, she met her senior leadership team in school. Then she emailed the letter out to parents. She followed it up with a text message: “Please open your email, because there’s an important letter there.” Then she waited about an hour, and communicated the news over social media.

“Social media is not a good thing for schools in so many ways,” Rees says. “But on this occasion it really helped. The outpouring of grief, the collective mourning. Obviously everybody was in shock, as I was. We all felt connected on that Sunday, even though we weren’t physically in the same room.”

‘I just fell apart’

Rees acknowledges that she was lucky to have had the breathing space of the weekend. Crista Hazell did not have that luxury. Hazell was working as a class teacher in a secondary in the South West of England when she received the news that one of the pupils in her tutor group had died.

It was around 7.15am, and the school was almost empty. Hazell was in the habit of arriving early, and having breakfast and a cup of tea in her classroom. Before making the tea, however, she would always check her emails. That morning, there was one from a parent: “Hi Crista. Just to let you know that” - here she named one of the pupils in Hazell’s tutor group - “has died.”

“I felt like I’d been hit by a bus,” Hazell says. “It just took my breath away. I tried to read the email again, and I thought: ‘No, no. This isn’t a joke’.”

She knew that the deputy head was also in school, though his office was a distance away. “For some reason, I decided not to walk up there, but just shouted, ‘Help!’” Hazell recalls. “And, bless him, he came running.”

The worst part, she says, was when her tutor group began arriving in the room. “They were 12 years old,” she says. “They were wearing white knee socks and talking about Christmas trees. They may not have gone through anything like this in their lives. And I’m the one who has to tell them this terrible news.

“I just fell apart. I talked about the student. We said her name, to show it was OK to say her name - it’s not a taboo thing.”

Alison Thomas, of the charity Cruse Bereavement Care, believes that acknowledging a death within the school community is important: it should be something spoken about and, where it affects the whole community, commemorated.

For example, she says, one group of pupils built a raft, which they filled with candles and sailed out into a lake, to commemorate a classmate who had drowned.

“It helps to help them process it,” she says. “All the ideas came from them - they owned it.”

Eventually, Rees planned a memorial service for her deputy. However, she held off holding an all-school assembly until the Tuesday following the death.

“One of my top pieces of advice is not to do an assembly on the first day,” she says. “I was incredibly emotional. On the first day, I went to visit every class and I hugged every member of staff.

“I didn’t feel it was appropriate to have all that grief in the assembly hall. Five hundred children and a lot of staff, all together - it would have been too much grief in one place. It would have been absolutely horrendous - it would have been hysterical, I think.”

By Tuesday, however, Rees was much more controlled. “I called it a Hug for Mrs Evans assembly,” she says. “We sang a song she loved. I told funny stories about her. It was emotional, but in control. We started going through the process of accepting that she wasn’t coming back.”

After the initial shock, the school community will eventually settle back into its usual pattern. But, when the bereavement has affected one pupil in particular, it can be easy for everyday routine to mask ongoing grief.

“Because of the natural busyness of school, and the demand teachers are under, they can give the message - either explicitly or implicitly - that the pupil should be over it quite soon,” says Richardson, of Winston’s Wish. “Often, things that happen at school can be difficult for a bereaved person.”

He gives the example of a letter home to parents. A bereaved child might find that wording - “a letter home to parents” - difficult to hear. This, however, can be easily managed, as long as there is an open conversation around it: the teacher could, for example, give pupils “a letter for the people who care for you”.

The new normal

Similarly, Mother’s and Father’s Days need not be ignored. But bereaved pupils could be taken aside and asked what they would like to do while other pupils make cards. Would they like to make a card for their surviving parent? Or would they prefer to make a card to leave on the grave of their dead parent? Or, indeed, not to make a card at all?

The problems start when, as in Gilbert’s case on Mother’s Day, teachers simply ignore the wishes of the bereaved child.

“When you lose a parent, or anyone in fact, you lose the life you had before,” Gilbert says. “People forget to realise that it’s not just coming back to school after you’ve lost your mum - it’s trying to find my way around life with this completely new layout. There was so much more than the loss of one person.”

And, she says, there is a widespread assumption that time heals grief. She argues that it changes grief, but that change is not the same as healing.

“I was in Year 12, and I remember hearing that two close friends had said that I should be over the death,” she says. “And I was thinking: how? How will I ever be over the loss of my mum? How do you expect anyone to ever be over it?

“Where had they got that idea from? Is that what they’d learned from adults: that with time you get over death?”

Though Gilbert was in primary school when her mother died, she found that her grief was sharpest in Year 10. “I think that the grief and the loss - it grows with you,” she says. “I’m not who I was at age 9, so there’s no way your loss is going to be the same, either.

“But I was in a different school. No one had familiarised themselves with my grief, what I was going through.”

This, according to Thomas, of Cruse Bereavement Care, is not uncommon. “Say a bereavement happens in primary school,” she says. “At the time, all school staff were notified, everybody knew about it. But when the child goes on to secondary school, is that information passed on? Most often not - it’s lost in the ether.”

But, Richardson says, it really takes very little for a bereaved child to feel supported at school. “This is something that will keep impacting them,” he says. “It’s important to gently offer pupils the chance to talk, even if they don’t take it up.”

For example, he says, one classroom teacher remembered the anniversary of a pupil’s parent’s death every single year. Every year, the boy chose not to talk about it, but every year the teacher continued to mark the date. Shortly before the boy left the school, he knocked on the staffroom door and presented the teacher with a bunch of flowers. “Thank you for remembering,” he said.

“You don’t have to sit the pupil down and enforce it: let’s talk about your mum or dad,” Richardson says. “That wouldn’t be helpful, either.

“But it’s about giving them time and space. Above all, it’s in the teacher’s manner: I’m approachable. It’s about knowing that’s there.”

Adi Bloom is comment editor at Tes. She tweets @adibloom_tes

This article originally appeared in the 12 July 2019 issue under the headline “Sudden death”