Practical Solutions from the UK: Overcoming Invisible Struggles in Education with Liessa Callahan

How do we create schools where neurodivergent students and their teachers can thrive?

In this episode, psychodynamic counsellor Liessa Callahan (United Kingdom) draws on three decades as a teacher and special educational needs coordinator to reveal the invisible struggles in today’s classrooms. From sensory overwhelm to unsustainable curriculum demands, she explains how outdated systems harm both learners and educators—and why small, practical shifts can transform outcomes.

Her insight is clear: What works for neurodiverse children works for everyone.

You can find Liessa at www.perspectivescounsellingservice.co.uk

Chapters

• 0:05 Introduction to TAUGHT Podcast
• 0:58 Meet Liessa Callahan: From SENCO to Counselor
• 3:22 System Limitations and Mental Health Impact
• 7:53 Neurodivergence and Classroom Challenges
• 11:56 Teacher Burnout and Systemic Pressures
• 16:06 Practical Solutions for Schools
• 22:54 Supporting Mental Health and Self-Worth
• 30:54 Closing and Resources

Transcript

Amy Schamberg: 0:05

Hi everybody. This is Amy Schamberg and you're listening to TAUGHT, the podcast for education changemakers who want simple, effective and actionable strategies to make schools healthier, safer and more sustainable places to work. By now you've probably heard it loud and clear Educator burnout is a compounding global crisis. Teachers are leaving in droves and students are paying the price, but despite the scale of the problem, most teacher wellness efforts still focus only on the individual, the least effective level of intervention. It's time for a new approach, one that looks upstream, moves beyond surface-level fixes and focuses on real organizational solutions, because, let's be honest, you can't self-care your way out of systemic dysfunction. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. Hi everybody, and welcome back to this very special episode of TAUGHT.

Amy Schamberg: 1:09

Today's guest, Lisa Callahan, is joining us from the UK. She is a psychodynamic counselor who works with both young people and adults in private practice, and before training as a therapist, She spent years in education as a teacher and special needs coordinator, supporting children and families and school staff. She has deep experience in neurodiversity, including working with folks with ADHD and autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia. She brings insight into these differences and how they impact emotional well-being, daily life and learning. I am so excited for this conversation. Welcome, lisa. Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here Today. We're going to be talking about the invisible struggles that are often overlooked when it comes to neurodivergent students and educators and what that intersection looks like. But I'd always like to start by just getting a little bit of background on your professional journey and your career and talk about your shift from teacher and SENCO to psychodynamic counsellor and what inspired that transition.

Liessa Callahan: 2:13

Sure, I started off as a class teacher a long time ago now, back in 1995, when I was very young, and from that job I became interested in working with children with special educational needs. So I became special educational needs coordinator and I did that job in three schools for over 20 years and I really loved it, particularly in the beginning where I was very hands on with the children and there was a lot of work around maths and literacy skills. So I guess what I've noticed in that 20 years was a real change in how, in the number of children with special educational needs, the type of special educational needs that were really becoming a focus and the role of the SENCO, my role and how it changed over those years. So, as I said, when I first started working it was a lot of small group work, maths and literacy skills, but then over the years it became so much more focused on children with very complex needs coming into mainstream schools and the schools trying to find the right resources for these children and support them to learn about how to work with children with neurodiversity. Really. And I guess over the years, as my role was changing, I moved from being hands-on and working with the groups to learning and training myself in all these different skills, about how do you manage someone with dyslexia, how do you help them learn to read and write. Or if someone's got autism and is non-verbal and they're in a mainstream school, what do you do? What do you put in place? And it was really interesting work. And there was a lot of work with families as well, because families need support in order to do the best for their children, and schools have always been the first port of call. So I gained that expertise and I gained expertise which I could then pass on to class teachers and the teaching assistants.

Liessa Callahan: 4:22

But I guess the years that job became a bit intense because I was always working part-time and it was really a full-time job. But school funding, you know, there's always limitations, and one of the things that I really started to notice was the levels of anxiety in families and for the children themselves and mental health issues that were coming out of the limitations of the system. And I understand there's always going to be limitations, but when children's needs really aren't being met and their mental health deteriorates, it feels really difficult for them to be able to learn. So I think I got a bit burnt out over the years and in, I think, about 2018 or 2019. I was really tired and I just had to look online as you know what kind of things can a teacher do, moving on, because I was just exhausted at that point and I found a course that was just an introduction into counselling and I went on and it was just a 10-week course and I absolutely loved it.

Liessa Callahan: 5:24

So it just gave me a new kind of interest and I could really make the links between mental health in schools and what we need to do to support people with developing good mental health and how important it is. So for me, that is more fundamental than the curriculum really Mental health aspect. If you've got someone who's positive and able to learn, even if they're learning differently, then they've still got capacity. If you've got someone who's feeling anxious and their fight or flight responses are activated in school, it doesn't matter what you do to try and teach them. You're up against their nervous system and their stress levels are too high. So that's what I was coming for and that's how it all developed for me.

Amy Schamberg: 6:11

Thank you so much for sharing your journey, and it sounds like it was a natural pivot into mental health after almost three decades in the schools and then noticing this trend where there was an increase of mental health issues with the students that you were working with. I want to go back to something you said a moment ago. You talked about mental health issues being related to the limitations of the system, and I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit.

Liessa Callahan: 6:38

I think over the years, the school curriculum has changed, funding formulas have changed and the needs of the children have changed and they don't always marry up. So it works at all levels, from education policy downwards. So part of it is what do we want our children to learn Over? In the UK since about 2014,. It became very fact-based and I feel like for some people trying to hold all that information, if you've got neurodiversity and you're struggling to process information, if you're having to process a high level of information every day and then write it down, you're already overloaded. So that's not necessarily the best approach. But in terms of other skills the creativity, the imagination if you've got more of an emphasis on that, it feels like you can engage children where they're at, rather than, oh, you need to learn this arbitrary stuff out here. That's what makes you successful. Because if you can't, if you can't hold on to all that, then there's issues with your self-esteem. You feel like you're a failure, the system's not working for you.

Amy Schamberg: 7:49

I completely agree with what you're describing. I think that it's similar in the United States. There has been, you know, over the years, so many shifts and focus on academic standards and mandated curriculum and test scores. I was just reading something online recently about a school system in Philadelphia where parents are petitioning to bring recess back because they just completely removed recess and many of our schools recess is already very, very like a small period of time, maybe 20 or 30 minutes out of an entire day, and many schools across our country are suffering from funding cuts as well, and so oftentimes the first things to go are art classes or music classes or classes that inspire creativity, like you were talking about, which is just so unfortunate.

Amy Schamberg: 8:44

And then there's the whole other social, emotional, well-being side of things. I mean, I'm sure it's the same in the UK. Different places are doing better than others and some aren't. I am lucky in that the town in which I live, the school system, is very much focused on mental health and social emotional well-being for students. That's not the case in many, many places, and you're absolutely right, because if a student is struggling with anxiety or depression, it doesn't matter how smart they are, how capable they are intellectually, they are not going to be able to access their learning, and it's so important to prioritize the whole child. So I completely agree with everything you just shared, and I find it it's interesting to know that we're on opposite sides of the world and we're seeing the same things happening right.

Liessa Callahan: 9:37

Really interesting. Yes, and what I find so frustrating, I guess, is that, in terms of research, we know all the things that really help children, but we just don't seem to be able to translate it into the school system. We know that children, they need social and emotional support. We know that, we know that they learn best if they're working creatively there's been so much research on that but then there's something in the system that narrows it down when you're actually in the school system and what we know doesn't get translated into classroom, as you say, with consistency. That's right.

Amy Schamberg: 10:17

And I think about how that impacts our educators, our teachers in the classrooms, our special education providers. I mean, I know for myself it's been very frustrating in different roles that I've been in. I'm curious to hear what have you seen when it comes to the limitations of the system and how that impacts educators.

Liessa Callahan: 10:41

In all the schools that I've worked in in, the teachers have been really keen to. They want to know. They want to know how to help all their students to achieve. They are also very busy. There's an awful lot of admin that they've got to achieve they've got.

Liessa Callahan: 10:56

The curriculum is so full there's no time to go back over things if children don't understand it. It's kind of like this is what we're doing for these few weeks, then we're done, or days even. They do want to learn the skills of how to include as many people in the classroom as possible all the children and to use different techniques, but there's just not always the time or the resource to do that. So, for example, some children need very highly differentiated learning and I did notice when I was in classrooms that teachers would give all the children the same worksheet and then maybe have an adult sitting with one group of children. If there was an adult available even so, they'd be trying to get them to do a worksheet which the children didn't really understand.

Liessa Callahan: 11:44

And it wasn't that they didn't want the children to understand, they did. It's just time pressures make it so hard to then differentiate and think, oh, how can I do this differently? Can I get this role playing somewhere else? Is there a room for them to even go and do that? There's such constraints and for some children just doing it verbally would have been enough and help them understand and or even physically, but they can't do that, obviously, in the classroom. It's too disruptive. So they're doing the best they can for a very wide range of skills in the class or ability levels.

Amy Schamberg: 12:20

I guess yeah, I see that all the time here as well Differentiation meaning differentiate the instruction so that you're reaching each student at their particular level. But when you have a classroom of 20, 25, 30 students and they're all at various levels across the spectrum, very, very challenging to differentiate for each of those students. And it's not for a lack of trying, it's just at some point you're just stretched so thin. Let's switch gears a little bit and go back to neurodiversity and I'd like to talk about what you've seen and experienced around how neurodivergence impacts emotional well-being and learning in both students and adults, because I know when you're working counselling now, you're working with adults as well. So how are you seeing neurodivergence impact mental health?

Liessa Callahan: 13:11

What I've seen is so. I was working with children from a nursery up to age 11. And what I could see was that school can feel very challenging because you're coming into this really busy environment with lots of instructions and constraints and lots of demands. Your sensory overload can become quite intense. Your actual understanding of what's going on in the classroom, what the demands are, the social demands, there's an impact.

Liessa Callahan: 13:40

If you're not able to access the social cues, then the classroom can be a bit of a mystery for you. And if you're not able to express that yourself through your expressive language or your receptive languages still developing, then what do you do? All you can do is have a meltdown, which then feel you're overwhelmed as a child. And then the class is overwhelmed and the class teachers, because the resources are being focused on you. So I guess I saw that an awful lot anxiety as well. As children got older. They they wanted to learn, but they weren't always clear about what they were expected to learn. Or they might feel isolated because there's not a program for them to learn how to socialize with other children. So they may be watching but they can't quite engage.

Amy Schamberg: 14:33

Yeah, it can be quite a barrier when they don't have the language to describe their internal experience. That often shows up as a tantrum or a meltdown, and that kind of behavior doesn't often allow them to get what they actually need.

Liessa Callahan: 14:48

And I also think classrooms can be too busy in terms of it's lovely to have lots of lovely posters on the walls and have things hanging down, but you know, if you're sensitive in a sensory kind of way, that can be so distracting. If you're sensitive in a sensory kind of way, that can be so distracting that you're so overwhelmed with information that how on earth can you concentrate on the learning goal?

Amy Schamberg: 15:08

It's so true, I've walked into plenty of classrooms that are just like, wow, where do you even look? Because every square inch of the wall is covered in charts and pictures and I think it's all useful information, but it can be really overwhelming, even as an adult.

Liessa Callahan: 15:24

Yeah, and then we're kind of telling children oh, you've got to focus on me. But it's just like there's so much going on around them that you're swamping them with information overload and then wondering why they can't quite gauge.

Amy Schamberg: 15:39

Yes, the environment is so important. I worked with a really great occupational therapist for a while and she was always talking about the design of the classroom and how we just needed to be so mindful about keeping it simple and calm. And in the few classrooms that she had the opportunity to go in and kind of restyle, I guess felt you could just kind of feel your nervous system regulating when you walk into those rooms. Because it was very simplistic. There would be some plants, you know, not too many toys out or things like that. It was just a preschool classroom. But yeah, it makes all the difference in just regulating their system.

Liessa Callahan: 16:17

Yeah, and I think what works for neurodiverse children also works for everyone else. As you say, when we walk into classrooms as adults, we're just full of oh look, what's going on over here. It's hard to concentrate. We're putting a lot of expectation on children who haven't even got that adult to try and regulate their own nervous system. They're relying on us to do it for them. We're overloading them.

Amy Schamberg: 16:41

That's right, that's one piece of the puzzle contributing to students who are neurodiverse having struggles. I could see how that then is absorbed by the teachers that are tasked with being with them day in and day out. What are some other larger systemic contributors causing difficulty? Being able to not just regulate students but regulate yourself as an educator?

Liessa Callahan: 17:06

As we're overloading students, we're overloading adults as well with the demands of the job. There's such a massive high turnover of teachers that this has got to be a signal that something is not right in the education system. Because people are moving on because of the demands. It's very high pressured, isn't it? For adults. You've got to get it right and of course we want to do that, but you have a hundred tasks a day to complete as a teacher. You don't stop.

Liessa Callahan: 17:35

So I think there's something around the expectations of how much we pack into the curriculum, maybe trying to simplify it a little bit so that what we are teaching is really relevant. Maybe we can find I don't know, this is so it's a big question, I know. You know teachers are just very overwhelmed. They're trying to deal with a wide range of children with different needs and all the demands of paperwork and, and you know, meeting targets, all that kind of things as well. It's almost like there's two full-time jobs on the go. So there's understanding your students, but there's also kind of a massive amount of paperwork and planning marking to do so. Teachers stress levels are quite high going into the classroom and then you're also dealing with children and trying to keep them regulated learning.

Amy Schamberg: 18:27

It is a really, really tough job. I think that sometimes you feel just that you're set up to fail because the workload is so high and the needs are so, so enormous. And people who go into education do it because they care deeply about students, and so you have this sense of responsibility and that plays into a lot of overworking and bringing the work home because it doesn't end. You care about your students and you want to help them progress. And even as a mental health provider, I mean, I was working very, very long hours because I often thought, well, if I don't do this, who will? Right, it's like me or no one.

Amy Schamberg: 19:12

And when we talk about emotional labor, right, that's a very heavy burden to kind of carry. Burden to kind of carry. So I wonder, what are some solutions that you have seen in your career that are effective for either you, individual teachers, or have you seen school leaders that have implemented certain small changes that make a bit of a difference? I often talk about lessening the pressure by 2%. Right, like what could we do to just lessen the pressure by 2% so we can breathe a little bit?

Liessa Callahan: 19:46

Individual teachers are very willing to learn and when they get to know their class and their children they become really adept at adapting things and providing materials that their children can work with. So they do get to know what works with individual children and how to motivate them. I think alongside having some expertise in you know, how do you manage dyslexia? How do you manage somebody who has sensory overload or inattention? I think that can be really effective.

Amy Schamberg: 20:18

We were talking about the behaviors and you are from a special education background and counseling. I as a school psychologist. This is kind of our world, but a lot of teacher programs are not providing instruction on how to work with neurodiverse students, how to work with students with disabilities, how to manage behavior in a way that is proactive and all of the things that you know are kind of inherent to what you and I do, and so that can be so frustrating and challenging to be in a classroom with many students with diverse needs that you don't even have the training on how to manage that.

Liessa Callahan: 20:56

Yeah, and what worked really well when I was a synco is that we used to have speech therapists or occupational therapists coming in and the educational psychologist and we had autism support services as well and getting them to come in and do training, you could almost teach us making the links of oh, that's why we need to do that, that's going to help that child, and training up your teaching assistants to do some additional work following programs provided by speech therapists the occupational therapist because it's going to help the child in the classroom. You take them out of short periods of time to develop skills that they're struggling with and then they can go back in the classroom and have a bit more confidence because they're learning the skills that they need, but in a slightly different way.

Amy Schamberg: 21:45

That's absolutely right. I love what you just said about utilizing the resources that already exist in your building. So, if you have an occupational therapist and educational psychologist and a speech language pathologist, they have expertise. And it's like what you were saying before, that the design of a classroom can support not just the needs of a neurodiverse learner but all learners. And I think it's the same thing with the expertise that those special service providers. Yes, they typically work with highest need students, but their strategies are applicable to all students and if we could tap into that knowledge that they have, that's a beautiful solution.

Liessa Callahan: 22:25

Yeah, yeah. So if you have one person that's delivering training and everyone can then come together as a school and work out how we can use that training in the classroom, it makes such in its ethos, isn't it having having an ethos that is open and inclusive, to trying to get everyone into a place where they can learn yeah, that's absolutely right.

Amy Schamberg: 22:48

Every person in a school building brings a level of expertise. They have an area of interest or knowledge on a certain subject or a way of working with students. If we could just tap into the knowledge that already exists Because, like you said before, educators want to learn. They want to know how to do the right thing, tapping into the expertise that already exists perhaps the biggest struggle would be finding the time to make that happen, because you know time is always limited. That's a great solution. Thank you for sharing that.

Liessa Callahan: 23:22

And it's stuff that can be developed over time as well. There's so many different topics you can cover, but you can do a bit at a time, a bit of training, bite-sized training, and then, once it's embedded in the school, then you're ready to get something else in.

Amy Schamberg: 23:38

Yeah, that's a really good point too. Sitting through a 30-minute training, how much are we actually going to remember? And especially when we're thinking about I've got to create this lesson plan or I've got to write this report. Your mind is in many different places, but if it's just a bite size five minutes you know three actionable strategies that you can try this week. That sounds very doable. Have you seen that happen in any of the schools in which you've worked?

Liessa Callahan: 24:04

We used to have a speech therapist that would come in and train the TAs the teaching assistants who worked with the children with speech language needs and that worked really well because there's a shortage of speech therapists. So they would come in and have an overview. Then they would speak to the teaching assistants, give them programs of work to do. So the teaching assistant was confident in what they needed to do and then they would come back and review. So over time the teaching assistant gained expertise. They were working under someone who was fully trained and who could then give them guidance as needed.

Amy Schamberg: 24:41

Beautiful. I love that. What are some other approaches, or even just mindset shifts that you have seen helpful in schools or in your counselling practice to support the well-being of educators?

Liessa Callahan: 24:56

What I was thinking of is including parents as well. Parents often come into school and they're really anxious about children's progress, as are the class teachers. So part of the role I had as SENCO is don't worry about your child's progress against everyone else. It's as long as your child is making progress against their own targets, then they are developing just at a different rate. And I was always trying to reassure class teachers as well, because some of the targets are set for the year group seem impossible. So it's about trying to take off that pressure. If you're observing progress, that's fine. That child, that person you're investing in, you are making a difference and you are helping them to achieve their potential.

Liessa Callahan: 25:45

One of my concerns was that for class teachers, parent and the child, the feeling that you have to be at a certain level at a certain point in the year or at the end of a particular year could be very disheartening and lead to really low self-esteem. And then parents would panic and they'd be getting in tutors. So the child is being bombarded with teaching and information that they need to learn and I think again, step back. There has to be some joy in life and there's there's a time to do learning. There's a time to step back and just be as a person. So they children will develop if they're supported and you've got the right materials for them and the right strategies.

Amy Schamberg: 26:32

Yeah, I really appreciate that you share that and I agree wholeheartedly. Before we wrap up, what other insights would you like to share that perhaps we haven't touched on yet?

Liessa Callahan: 26:45

For me, the most important thing is keeping good mental health and good emotional well-being for children and adults.

Liessa Callahan: 26:55

You may have neurodiversity, you may have anxieties, but you are part of society and you do have skills. It just feels that because of some rigid approaches we have, it can be really easy to lose your confidence and the limits of the system can be internalized within the individual and they feel it's their fault because they can't remember things. It's not about that. It's about you as a person and the skills you've got and the qualities you've got and embracing that. And if we as adults can instill that when children are young, they won't be coming through to me as young adults or older adults into my private practice feeling that they're failures, which I think is awful. It's such a shame because, no, you're not a failure, you just your expectations have been kind of created by the system, I suppose probably not intentionally, but you've just picked something up that makes you feel that you're not good enough and then that feeling of shame not being able to do things at the same time as everyone else becomes internalised and you believe that that you've done something wrong.

Amy Schamberg: 28:06

Yeah, Isn't that interesting that you've seen it come full circle from when you were working in schools with the students and seeing the pressure placed upon them by educational system, perhaps by parents who just want the best for their kids, but they're comparing their progress to others. Then that is internalized by students as there's something wrong with me. And then they grow up and as an adult they're still. I often see a lot of perfectionism, people pleasing that sort of thing, yeah, and now they come to you as an adult for help in unwinding all of that, which is really tricky. Yeah yes.

Liessa Callahan: 28:44

So let's try and stop that, so that I've come a bit more redundant at the other end, exactly be more proactive on the front end, absolutely.

Amy Schamberg: 28:52

I really am excited for people to hear this episode. This was such a rich conversation and I really appreciate the wisdom that you bring to this. Having been in the school system for three decades which, by the way, that's uncommon, that's amazing. That is something to celebrate. But I think we touched on a lot of important points. There are certainly a lot of needs and challenges, but there are solutions. There are strategies that can be implemented without a huge overhaul. Like you said, if we just work with what we have in each building, there can be some really impactful positive changes that take place.

Liessa Callahan: 29:36

And the point that I would really like to have as a takeaway is let's do things in bite-sized chunks rather than trying to overwhelm ourselves with changing everything at once. Little bite sizes, implementing those and embedding them, and then you can move on to the next thing without being so under pressure that you've got to make a huge change all at once, and then everything will be perfect. It's, step by step, more sustainable. That's right. It's very interesting that we're across well across the ocean from each other, but you know, we're seeing similar issues and we think in the same kind of way. Similar issues and we think in the same kind of way.

Amy Schamberg: 30:13

I know it's actually quite inspiring. I have to say it's validating and inspiring, right, Lisa? I've learned so much from you today and I really appreciate your time and your insight, so thank you so much for being here with us.

Liessa Callahan: 30:29

Thank you very much, amy, it's been a pleasure.

Amy Schamberg: 30:54

Thanks for listening to TAUT, If you found this episode helpful. Thank you very much, Amy. It's been a pleasure. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to keep the conversation going. Finally, remember to check the show notes for links to today's guest and additional resources. See you next time.