Best Practice Standards in AAI in Schools and Elsewhere: The LEAD Tool

By Prof Kerstin Meints, University of Lincoln, UK

Animal-assisted interventions (AAI) in schools can enhance learning, reduce stress in school children and improve behaviour. While research is still investigating the effectiveness of AAI in schools and other settings, practice has overtaken the science, and in many countries, animals are already introduced to schools and other settings.

A range of guidelines on safe practice for Animal Assisted Interventions (AAI) exists, but guidelines vary with providers and settings. In order to carry out a research project on AAI in schools safely and with the welfare of all involved in mind, we attempted to unify these guidelines and created the comprehensive, but easy-to-use Lincoln Education with Dogs (LEAD) Risk Assessment tool for AAI providers and users.

This talk will present the LEAD tool and highlight best practice with respect to safe and welfare-oriented AAI in schools and other settings. Risk assessment of settings, staff, AAI participants, handlers and dogs, safety training, animal welfare, minimising injury and zoonoses risk; staff training and dog bite prevention training will be discussed. Examples from practice working in mainstream schools and in schools for children with special educational needs will be provided.

About Prof. Kerstin Meints

PhD, MA, CPsychol, AFBPsS

Senior Fellow HEA

Suffrage Women in Science Award holder 2017-2019

Kerstin Meints is Professor in Developmental Psychology at the University of Lincoln since 2013. She completed her PhD at Hamburg University in 1997, then worked in Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford before moving to the University of Lincoln in 2000. She is chartered Member and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Prof. Meints is the Director of the Lincoln Infant and Child Development Lab and member of the Autism Research and Innovation Centre and heads the Lincoln Education Assistance with Dogs (LEAD) research grouping.

Her research spans cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on children’s development of language, categorisation and trust as well as comparative and applied research in human-animal interaction, especially dog bite prevention and animal-assisted interventions with children with and without special educational needs.

With about 30 years of experience, her interdisciplinary work has seen the creation of assessment and educational tools (e.g., UK-CDI – early word learning norms and questionnaires), dog bite prevention tools (e.g. Blue Dog programme), safety and welfare tools for animal-assisted interventions (e.g., LEAD Risk Assessment tool). She is part of the international dog bite prevention project The Blue Dog and recently founded the Lincoln Education Assistance with Dogs (LEAD@Lincoln) group investigating how dogs can help children learn and develop in the classroom environment.

She has been awarded a range of externally funded research grants from ESRC, NIH/NICHD, MARS-WALTHAM, Waltham Foundation and others and is an active reviewer and mentor.

In 2017, she has been awarded the prestigious Suffrage Women in Science Award by the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences. In 2018, she and her team received the Vice Chancellor’s award for Public Engagement with Research.