The Academic Resilience approach is a strategic, evidence-based method designed to help schools support vulnerable or disadvantaged students in achieving high educational outcomes, despite facing significant adversity or life challenges. Instead of focusing solely on fixing individual student deficits, it emphasises creating a nurturing, whole-school culture that changes the environment to “beat the odds” for these pupils.
The HeadStart service is about a whole school strategy, not a standalone programme but a comprehensive and systemic shift to embed a culture where mental health is everyone’s business and incorporated into daily school life and practices. This involves every member of the school community, from cleaners to senior leaders, in supporting the most vulnerable.
The evidence base of the HeadStart service is resilience therapy and this contributes to creating key protective factors and encouraging schools to provide a trusted adult, safe spaces and help with necessities (like food and transport).
We wanted to highlight this article (link below) outlining the importance of student-teacher relationships which can support social, emotional and academic success. A sense of belonging is a fundamental human need for all of us and is a key foundation for supporting psychological resilience. That one trusted adult a pupil has in school acts as a protective factor – providing not only emotional security but also social support needed to manage stress and trauma. A pupil who feels seen, heard and listened to and fully accepted for who they are will be able to build a deep internal trust that allows them to bounce back from adversity.
Pupils spend 1000s of hours in school, so it would be great if they all felt that they belonged there. For those that don’t, schools can do a great deal to help improve pupils’ sense of belonging and help them to identify a safe place or group where they can go when they are feeling vulnerable. Encourage them to have the right people in place to support them so that they feel protected.
It is important to help pupils increase the number of good influences in their lives so they outweigh the bad ones. Encourage pupils to identify what makes a good relationship and whether they could develop those qualities themselves so that they could then have better healthy relationships.
The article ‘How to Stop Bias from Getting Between You and Your Students’ from the Greater Good Science Center invites us to consider our own implicit bias in relationships and how this might present in education: How to Stop Bias from Getting Between You and Your…
Grab a cuppa and have a read 😊
Published: May 17