More than 200 young survivors of the Manchester Arena bombing have shared what helped them recover, in work now being used to support teachers helping pupils after the Southport knife attacks. The Bee the Difference research, set up after the 22 May 2017 arena blast, brought those survivors into the conversation with teachers who were facing their own aftermath after three girls were killed on 29 July 2024.
Dr Cath Hill, who led the project with Lancaster University and the National Emergencies Trust charity, said the young people gave teachers on the frontline of dealing with traumatised children practical examples of what worked after the Manchester attack and what did not. Hill said the survivors offered "hope and practical ways teachers could support those children in Southport," and added that sharing their stories helped teachers know what to expect while also giving "sharing some hope."
The Manchester Arena attack killed 22 people and injured more than 1,000 more when a bomb exploded at the end of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. Bee the Difference was created after that attack to help future survivors of similar violence, and Hill, who also founded the Manchester Survivors Choir, said the project was built around listening to young people who had lived through it.
What the Southport teachers needed was not only advice, but each other. Hill said that although Southport was a much smaller geographical area than Manchester, teachers were not supporting one another as much as might have been expected, and that bringing them together for peer support was helpful in itself. She said the survivors' accounts were useful because they did not just describe what went well; they also pointed to things that felt retraumatising or that they wished someone had handled better next time.
The exchange turned personal experience into something more immediate for teachers working with children in dreadful situations. The surviving young people were not offering theory. They were describing what it felt like to be on the receiving end of support after a mass-casualty attack, and that made a difference. The unanswered question now is whether schools, with help from those lessons, can give traumatised children steadier support than the Manchester survivors themselves had when disaster first hit.
