The Anxious Classroom
On sale
21st September 2026
Price: £15.99
Anxiety is one of the biggest challenges facing children in education today, cited as one of the main reasons children do not attend school. While many books help teachers understand mental health, few focus on anxiety – which school staff feel they know the least about.
Emma Connor offers a compassionate, practical toolkit for supporting anxious children in school. Drawing on over 20 years of experience, she combines attachment theory, neuroscience, and effective strategies that fit naturally into everyday teaching.
Warm, grounded, and deeply respectful of educators, this book empowers every member of the school community to build emotional safety, strengthen relationships, and create classrooms where children can truly thrive.
Emma Connor offers a compassionate, practical toolkit for supporting anxious children in school. Drawing on over 20 years of experience, she combines attachment theory, neuroscience, and effective strategies that fit naturally into everyday teaching.
Warm, grounded, and deeply respectful of educators, this book empowers every member of the school community to build emotional safety, strengthen relationships, and create classrooms where children can truly thrive.
Reviews
The Anxious Classroom is a book that is deeply grounded in compassion, neuroscience and attachment. Full of practical wisdom, it reframes anxiety not as behaviour to be managed, but as communication to be understood. This is a book that will change the way schools see children - and the way children experience school.
Emma Connor writes with clarity and compassion, offering insights that are both deeply thoughtful and refreshingly practical. With warmth and wisdom, she turns complex ideas into simple suggestions that work.
Grounded in relevant, accessible psychotherapeutic theory, this book is full of invaluable information. It will empower teachers and other school staff to better understand the ways in which a child's experiences and emotions can become an obstacle to their learning in school. Emma offers a multitude of practical ideas for supporting children when feelings of anxiety become overwhelming. Significant issues, including Separation Anxiety, The Power of Empathy, Neurodivergence and Exam-related Anxiety, are addressed chapter by chapter. Each chapter includes a number of clearly explained, achievable and creative activities to support the anxious child and help ease classroom stress. Every teacher should invest in this book!
The Anxious Classroom combines deep insight into childhood anxiety-now at epidemic levels in schools-with practical, classroom-ready tools, offering clear strategies teachers can use right away/practical takeaways teachers can use right away.