Fostering academic resilience:

A short introduction to pros and cons of specific

approaches for schools - Feb 2014

Professor Angie Hart and Stephanie Coombe

Centre for Health Research, University of Brighton

and boingboing social enterprise, Brighton

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Note to readers:

There are a baffling number of approaches to fostering resilience in schools. Some are in direct competition with each other and cover similar ground. This guide unashamedly makes it clear what we think about particular approaches so you can see exactly where we are coming from and make up your own mind. Between us we have decades of experience of doing academic research in this area, developing resilience-based approaches ourselves, parenting children with complex needs as well as working in schools and child and adolescent mental health services If you think we’ve got something wrong, and can prove it, please don’t shout at us. Rather, email info@boing.boing.org.uk and we will update the document with your new information and make it clear that you have put us right.

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Fostering academic resilience

Resilience has become associated with schools-based approaches that support pupils, including improving the mental health of, and academic outcomes for, the most disadvantaged pupils. But what exactly does the term ‘resilience’ mean and why should schools bother with it? This short guide gives you the definitions of resilience which might be particularly useful for school contexts. It provides you with pros and cons of programmes and other approaches that have been used to develop pupils’ resilience.

Contents

Summary of main points………………………………………...

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Definitions of resilience useful for schools………………….

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Programmes & approaches to develop pupils’ resilience...

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Academic Resilience Approach…………………………………...

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Achievement for All…………………………………………………

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Barnardo’s Arch Project……………………………………………

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Bounce Back………………………………………………………...

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Circles of Resilience Approach……………………………………

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FRIENDS Programme……………………………………………...

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Health Promoting Schools…………………………………………

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Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies……………………….

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Rochester Resilience Program……………………………………

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United Kingdom Resilience Programme…………………………

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Summary of resilience programme research………………..

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References…………………………………………………………

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Summary of the main points in this short introduction

There are many definitions of resilience. Applying definitions that focus on pupils’ internal capacities means you might miss out on making lasting changes to the whole school community. The definition we use for schools is:

Academic resilience means pupils achieving good educational outcomes despite adversity. For schools, promoting it involves strategic planning and detailed practice involving the whole school community to help vulnerable children and young people do better than their circumstances might have predicted. This approach should help individual pupils beat the odds in the here and now. However, in the future, it should actually improve the odds for all vulnerable pupils. This is because local, national and international school community systems will have resilience promotion embedded in them.

Nobody in the world has yet set up an experiment to compare all the different resilience-based schools programmes or approaches and find out which one is best

Most resilience programmes are ‘bolt on’ to classes

Many resilience programmes must be purchased, and some are expensive

Some resilience programmes must be followed exactly as the researchers designed them or else they don’t work properly

Only a very few resilience programmes or approaches work across the whole school community so lasting change can be tricky to achieve

Some resilience approaches claim to be resilience-based, but they are not really about resilience, but about well-being more generally. Even those that are resilience-based, generally only tackle a few aspects of pupils’ resilience

Schools are already doing some very important things that could be reframed as resilience-based, but if you use what you are doing already, be clear exactly how it relates to resilience (see our ten point list below)

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Sometimes particularly disadvantaged children and young people have been left out of schools-based resilience programmes which have been well-researched. This is because researchers often find it too hard to involve children who are not in school, or pupils who have learning difficulties

‘Evidenced based’ is a term that gets used quite loosely. So be sure to look more in more detail about what is actually being claimed

Programmes rarely advertise explicitly how much they cost so you may have to do quite a bit of work yourself comparing prices

A lot of the programmes have been developed overseas and so you may not get the back up you need if you go for one of those. If you do go for one of these, consider choosing an approach that is used in the UK too

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Definitions of resilience useful for schools

Resilience is a word that is growing ever more popular and is being used by lay people, professionals and researchers alike across the broad spectrum of human behaviour. We know very well that there are problems with outcomes for children in the UK. For example, The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF, 2007) report on child well-being in rich countries, ranked children’s well-being in the UK the worst of all 21 developed nations surveyed (see http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/rc7 _eng.pdf). Also, in the UK we have not managed to close the gap between pupils who do well at school and those who do not. Partly in response to these kinds of statistics, successive UK governments have drawn heavily on the concept of resilience to find ways to improve outcomes for children and young people who are having a tough time. Also the national mental health strategy emphasises the financial cost of poor mental health to the country and the need for earlier intervention in childhood (https://www.gov.uk/government/pu blications/national-framework-to-improve-mental-health-and-wellbeing). Alongside this, guidance provided by NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) on emotional and mental health for schools highlight the relevance of a resilient approach (http://www.nice.org.uk/Search.do?x=0 &y=0&searchText=schools+resilience&newsearch=true). So the importance of schools in developing resilience cannot be overstated – Masten, Herbers, Cutuli and Lafavor (2008 p5) write “Effective schools and teachers provide children on a daily basis with mastery experiences, opportunities to experience success and enjoy achievement that also serve to foster intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and persistence in the face of failure”. Due to the changing nature of how resilience is viewed by researchers, the definition of the construct itself has necessarily shifted with new knowledge and understanding. There are many versions of what resilience is. The following page gives some examples:

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Definitions of resilience

Luthar, Cicchetti and Becker (2000, p543) Resilience is “…a dynamic

process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity”.

Masten (2001, p234) “Resilience appears to be a common phenomenon

arising from ordinary human adaptation processes”.

McGrath and Noble (2010) Resilience is “…the capacity of a person to address challenges and cope with times of adversity and hardship, and then return to a state of wellbeing..”.

Ungar (2010, p425) “In the context of exposure to significant adversity, resilience is both the capacity of individuals to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural and physical resources that sustain their well-being, and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided and experienced in culturally meaningful ways”.

Rutter (1999, p135) “Resilience does not constitute an individual trait or characteristic...Resilience involves a range of processes that bring together quite diverse mechanisms....”

Hart, Blincow and Thomas (2007, p10) “…resilience is evident where people with persistently few assets and resources, and major vulnerabilities…have better outcomes than we might expect given their circumstances, and in comparison to what we know happens with other children in their contexts”.

Hart and Gagnon (2014) “Beating the odds whilst also changing the odds”.

Aumann and Hart (2009, p11) “The kinds of things we need to make happen (e.g. events, parenting strategies, relationships, resources) to help children manage life when it’s tough. Plus ways of thinking and acting that we need ourselves if we want to make things better for children”.

Hart and Gagnon (2014) “Resilience is overcoming adversity, whilst also

potentially tinkering with, or even dramatically transforming, (aspects of) that adversity”.

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Which definitions are most useful for schools? Definitions most useful for schools are ones that are not just about what children can do for themselves, but also take into account the impact of their environments on them. They take into account processes that are internal and external to people. These definitions are most helpful for schools because they emphasise what other people can do, not just pupils themselves. So they encourage school staff, parents and young people to make what we call ‘resilient moves’ in pupils’ lives. Governance and monitoring systems in schools can be geared to support this approach. The emphasis on strategic planning and detailed practice underlines the systemic approach that needs to be taken by schools to most effectively foster academic resilience. This involves:

Strategy and leadership (governance, policy, senior leadership)

Systems and structure (information management, behaviour systems, procurement etc.)

Pupils and staff (skills, training, roles and responsibilities)

Parents and community (carers, services, local authority etc.)

School culture (ethos and attitude) Of course, Academic resilience is not just about supporting vulnerable pupils who come from backgrounds of disadvantage. As the above definitions illustrate, anyone may be exposed to adversity at any point in their lives and may not cope with it successfully. Pupils who achieve highly academically may start to fall behind because of additional pressures or risks they are faced with at different points in their school lives. Academic resilience considers how to support ALL pupils in a school, giving them skills and strategies to cope with these adversities, if and when they are exposed to them. However, there are some pupils who will clearly need more support because they are more profoundly, and more systematically disadvantaged than others. Also, if you work with a definition of resilience that takes into account pupils’ own internal resources, and external ones (what we call an ecological definition), ultimately you should be making your school a fairer place. So that’s the definitional issues cracked. Easy! Now let’s think about what sort of things schools can actually do to foster resilience, both ‘inside’ the pupil so to speak, and drawing on everything else available ‘externally’ to help those individuals. For a comprehensive A4 one page overview of most of the ways in which pupils’ resilience can be fostered, download the table from here: http://www.boingboing.org .uk/images/stories/RT_Framework_children_young_people.png Boiled down further, there are certain issues that keep cropping up in the research findings about what can work in building resilience in vulnerable children and young people – they include all the things on the following ten point list:

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Ten things resilience approaches should try to put in place:

1. At least one trusted adult, with regular access over time, who lets the pupils

they ‘hold in mind’ know that they care

2. Preparedness and capacity to help with basics i.e. food, clothing, transport,

and even housing

3. Making sure vulnerable pupils actually access activities, hobbies and sports

4. Helping pupils to be better at problem-solving at every opportunity

5. Creating safe spaces

6. Helping to map out a sense of future (hope and aspirations) and developing

life skills

7. Helping pupils to cope – teaching self-soothing or management of feelings

8. Support to help others e.g. volunteering, peer mentoring

9. High intensity interventions based on individuals needs and with joined up

approach between home, school and other organisations for those that need it

10. Supporting children, young people, staff and parents to understand what

resilience is and how they might achieve it for individual students and the

whole school community

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Programmes & approaches to develop pupils’ resilience

All schools do a lot of things to support pupils’ resilience just by being schools, and by being there in children’s lives for so many hours, weeks, months and years. As explained above, these include everyday basics like providing children who may not eat properly at home a decent lunch, giving learning disabled children opportunities that help them learn to their fullest potential, and providing consistent, reliable adult attachment figures for children who may not have them at home. Over the years, there have been a number of very useful school programmes like SEAL, Spirituality for kids (http://www.spiritualityforkids.com/) Targeted Mental Health in Schools (TaMHS) that incorporate elements of a resilience-based approach, but which don’t actually frame their approach in that way. However, there are a number of ‘evidence-based’ school programmes that aim to foster resilience quite explicitly. They use the word ‘resilience’ in describing what their programme does, and they mostly have a specific definition of what they mean by resilience. ‘Evidence-based’ should mean that the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence is used in making decisions about what should go into the programme or approach. But in fact the term is used quite loosely, so we suggest you look a bit further at what people are saying when they claim that programmes or approaches are evidence based.

Pros and cons of programmes and other approaches that have

been used to develop pupils’ resilience Here are some of the main resilience-based approaches used in the UK and beyond:

Academic Resilience Approach

This approach works with what is known as an ‘ecological definition of resilience. This means ways to foster resilience are understood to be found both inside the person and around them. The approach provides support for both strategic planning and detailed practice in schools – using evidence based approaches and interventions. It includes of activities from whole school assessment; individual risk identification and planning tools; resources for use in class; links and information for every member of the school community, and guidance on commissioning of services. lt aims to support schools to encourage a culture across the whole school which promotes academic resilience at every opportunity. Developing the resilience of school staff is part of this.

The tools developed as part of this approach are linked to the research evidence base around academic attainment and resilience, and draw on good practice examples from schools to demonstrate how to put the principles of promoting academic resilience into practice. It is based on the resilience framework

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developed by Hart and collaborators (www.boingboing.org.uk). The academic resilience approach itself was produced by a partnership of mental health experts, academics and school communities.

Some things to consider when implementing the Academic Resilience Approach in your School:

The resources are all free and will soon be downloadable from the national charity Young Mind’s website.

It covers most aspects of pupils’ resilience (including basic material needs, and belonging), so it doesn’t just focus on coping and problem solving.

It isn’t a programme, but rather an approach, so you will need to choose exactly what you want to do yourself – this can mean a more bespoke approach.

It has been developed with schools, and tackles school culture and audit, as well as classroom based activities so it is aimed at the wider system.

If has not been systematically evaluated as a set of tools in practice, although the elements of it are all evidence-based.

It is still being produced, so some of the materials are a bit rough and ready.

It is produced by people actually living and working in the UK.

The people writing this short guide were involved in developing this particular approach, so they may be biased about what they say here (we’re not, honest, see how nice we are about other approaches below. The Academic Resilience Approach comes first in the list only because it’s alphabetical). If any of these work for your most disadvantaged pupils, consider us delighted!

Achievement for All

For schools, drawing attention to the value of high quality teaching and learning in relation to resilience promotion and what has come to be known as ‘closing the gap’ between poor academic achievers and those who do well, is clearly a variation on the teaching grandmothers to suck eggs theme. However, in many countries, including the UK it is clear that programmes that put extra emphasis on closing the gap, if well-resourced, have produced impressive results in this regard. As mentioned above, the UK programme Achievement for All (www.afa3as.org.uk) includes a fundamental focus on high quality teaching and learning with proven improvements in the academic achievements of those 20% of children who leave school with the poorest GCSCE results (Blandford and Knowles 2013 Achievement for All: Raising Aspirations, Access and Achievement). Clearly with these outcomes,

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if schools are ready to get involved in a formal programme, they should seriously consider joining in with Achievement for All. Achievement for All is a systemic initiative already in place. It has done a great deal of valuable work in this regard. It is run by the charity Achievement for All. They have worked in partnership with government and others for many years to transform the lives of vulnerable and disadvantaged children, young people and their families by raising educational aspirations, access and achievement. Their programme has been delivered in over 400 schools across the UK and it has four elements. These are: Element 1: Leadership of Achievement for All - to ensure schools maintain a focus on the aspirations, access and achievement of vulnerable and disadvantaged pupils Element 2: Teaching & Learning - leading to improved progress for all pupils Element 3: Parental Engagement - to improve parents' and carers' engagement with school and their child's learning Element 4: Wider Outcomes - to support participation, enjoyment and achievement of children in all elements of school life

Some things to consider if implementing Achievement for All in your school:

You would need to join Achievement for All and pay a small membership fee.

The programme has been proven to produce excellent results in closing the gap between children who do well academically and those who do not.

This programme has lots of schools in England signed up to it.

It would be important to clarify how Achievement for All works with pupils who are not in school.

Unlike many other resilience-based programmes, this one doesn’t seem to have a particularly major focus on emotional resilience, so you may want to consider how this is best fostered.

It is well-funded by the Department of Education at the moment and it would be important to clarify what would happen to the programme if funding ceased

Achievement for All does a lot of work with parents. Angie has heard that people who use their approach find it very useful.

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Barnardo’s Arch Project

(Achieving Resilience, Change, Hope)

This is not strictly a schools-based programme, but one of its key foci is education. It applies the six domains of resilience identified by Daniel and Wassell to build resilience in children and young people. Based in central Birmingham, the project works with children aged between 5 and 14 who have emerging emotional and behavioural difficulties and with their parents and carers.

Some things to consider when implementing the Barnado’s Arch Project in your School:

It wasn’t developed specifically for schools so may need some adjusting.

It includes parents and carers which is not always the case with resilience programmes.

The six domains of resilience approach exclude some important elements of resilience that might be important for schools (e.g. pupils’ access to material resources).

Daniel and Wassel’s approach is very user-friendly.

It doesn’t provide a whole schools approach.

It’s only being used in one place at the moment.

We’ve only put it on this list because we know some people are considering using it in schools. Nothing against the programme, but there are others that are far more focused on schools and have trialled in many schools.

Brigid Daniel and Sally Wassel are both Angie’s friends, and she loves what they do. Their risk and resilience matrix is very useful indeed (see risk and resilience matrix presentation slide 13).

Bounce Back (BB)

Helen McGrath and Toni Noble (2011) designed the Bounce Back (http://www.centreforconfidence.co.uk/projects.php?p=cGlkPTU3JmlkPTM2OA==) programme for developing wellbeing and resilience in children in Australia. The key aims of BB are to create positive, pro-social and resilient classrooms and schools, and to provide resources to enable staff to help their pupils develop resilient attitudes and behaviour (McGrath and Noble, 2011). BB materials were formatted to suit a UK population, and were introduced to 16 primary schools in Scotland in 2008. Mixed results were found across the schools, with 30% of classes showing a decrease in overall resilience scores. Reasons for this decrease are not accounted for by the authors. However, an overall increase of 2.25% in feelings of connectedness was reported by pupils, along with a 12.06% increase in pupils reporting more kindness

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to each other (Axford, Blythe and Schepens, 2010).

Some things to consider when implementing the BB programme in your School:

The materials produced to accompany the programme are very user-friendly and easy to get hold of. You can buy the materials and just use them if you want without having to stick rigidly to a programme.

The area where BB was introduced in the UK (Perth and Kinross) varies from some other UK contexts – the small population is spread geographically and has remote rural towns as part of its make up. The contexts of a rural village with lower class sizes and familiarity with peers contrasts starkly to growing up in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual city where population transience is the norm.

How accessible is this programme to ALL pupils e.g. those living in disadvantage, coping with psychological and communication difficulties and having limited social support?

The schools in the evaluation study were self-selected, so as with the UKRP (United Kingdom Resilience Programme) sample, may not be representative of the wider UK.

One of the methods used in this evaluation was self-reporting on questionnaires – a method that many pupils may find difficult to access.

BB is based on a particular definition of resilience. It deals with ‘every day set backs’, for example, feeling disappointed. This contrasts with some of the other definitions of resilience introduced above – coping with significant adversity, as opposed to daily set backs. The BB definition of resilience is “…the capacity of a person to address challenges and cope with times of adversity and hardship, and then return to a state of wellbeing” (McGrath and Noble, 2010 in Axford et al, 2010 p5). This assumes that one was in a state of wellbeing to begin with.

Circles of Resilience Approach

Circles of Resilience (CoR) is a web-based programme which helps children and young people make changes. It was developed by Lothian Council and is based on the resilience matrix developed by Daniel and Wassel which is used across Scotland. The online version can be found at http://www.westlothian.gov.uk/media/downloaddoc/1799471/2378129/Circles_of_Resilience_Handb1.pdf.

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Some things to consider when implementing the CoR Approach in your School:

You would have to ask Lothian Council. At the moment they say you can only access it if you have a Lothian Council email address.

It could be a very useful supplementary tool for a whole school approach to resilience building.

The framework on which it is based is very user-friendly, and has useful supplementary materials. However, it is selective in what it focuses on with regards to building resilience, and excludes some important dimensions, for example, acknowledging the support pupils and their families might need with material basics.

FRIENDS Programme

The FRIENDS programme (http://www.pathwaystoresilience.org/the-friends-programs/) was developed in Australia by Barrett and colleagues. A charity supports its implementation. It is promoted as a whole school cognitive-behavioural intervention that promotes emotional resilience in school children aged 10-16. The programme involves 10 structured sessions plus two booster sessions, and is based on a psychological approach called Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). The programme promotes self-esteem, problem-solving, psychological resilience, self-expression, and building positive relationships with peers and adults. The approach has had a lot of research done on it. For example, an evaluation of it was completed by Stallard, Simpson, Anderson, Carter, Osborn and Bush in 2005. This evaluation concluded that levels of anxiety reduced in pupils and self-esteem increased, it also had an impact on 60% of the pupils deemed to be in the “high risk” category.

Some things to consider when implementing the FRIENDS Programme in your School:

Staff who deliver the programme need to be trained in cognitive behaviour therapy – something that school staff aren’t necessarily familiar with.

Although this programme had positive effects on reducing anxiety and raising the self-esteem of 60% of “high risk” pupils, what about the other 40% that did not achieve these results? How would a school then provide for their needs?

It was unclear from the evaluation whether the effects were sustained over time.

While research has demonstrated that children aged 7 and over are able to access the concepts of CBT, it also has to be delivered at a developmentally appropriate level – this may mean that some pupils are not able to access the programme successfully. A pilot project undertaken in

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collaboration with the BOND consortium in the UK has experimented with an adapted FRIENDS programme for pupils with learning difficulties.

How might FRIENDS work with pupils who aren’t attending school?

The materials were produced in Australia and so they aren’t always suitable for pupils in the UK.

If you only implement FRIENDS, how will you change wider school systems and culture?

FRIENDS deals with emotional resilience, rather than broader resilience processes. In this regard some of the points made about the Bounce Back programme can be equally applied.

It is developed and promoted through a charity which seems to still be very active so you might get some useful, and not too expensive, support in implementing it.

You may need a trip to Australia to get your head around it, and find out more about Bounce Back as well whilst you are there.

Health Promoting Schools

This isn’t billed as a resilience programme, but it is such an important worldwide initiative that we felt we should mention it. It’s the only programme we do give a proper slot to here that isn’t billed as a resilience approach. And information about it is free to download (http://www.who.int/school_youth_health/gshi/hps/en/index.html). The World Health Organisation (WHO), provides a framework for schools to assist them to develop policies that enhance overall health in pupils. According to the above WHO web site, a health promoting school:

Fosters health and learning with all the measures at its disposal.

Engages health and education officials, teachers, teachers' unions, students, parents, health providers and community leaders in efforts to make the school a healthy place.

Strives to provide a healthy environment, school health education, and school health services along with school/community projects and outreach, health promotion programmes for staff, nutrition and food safety programmes, opportunities for physical education and recreation, and programmes for counselling, social support and mental health promotion.

Implements policies and practices that respect an individual's well being and dignity, provide multiple opportunities for success, and acknowledge good efforts and intentions as well as personal achievements.

Strives to improve the health of school personnel, families and community members as well as pupils; and works with community leaders to help them understand how the community contributes to, or undermines, health and education.

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Things to consider about this framework:

The health promoting schools model does not provide a framework, based on resilience research, that guides schools on strategies that may work for individual pupils and their families. Its view is a broad one of school ethos and policies, leaving schools to determine practical, day to day strategies that may work for their pupils.

It could be useful to take a look at for its evaluation approaches and systems focus.

PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies)

Developed in the US by academics and now operating as a charity, this approach is designed to be used in the primary classroom, but it is mostly provided through ‘bolt on’ lessons and in some cases by support workers and lunch time supervisors. It tackles elements of resilience-building, in particular those that deal with pupils’ problem solving skills, self-regulation and ability to understand and appreciate the perspectives of others. The intervention is delivered 3 times per week for a period of 20–30 minutes over three terms, using didactic instruction, role-play, class discussion, modelling by teachers and peers, social and self-reinforcement, worksheets and generalisation techniques. Teachers receive a three-day training workshop in conjunction with weekly consultation and observation from project staff. Parents are also informed about the approach and some activities are provided for them. PATHS (http://www.pathseducation.com/) has been tested in many different contexts and the developers say that it can be used with children with complex needs. After one year, positive changes for children included: number of positive and negative ‘feelings-words’ used, ability to identify three emotional states in others, better level of reasoning as regards general questions about feelings, and a significantly improved ability to provide appropriate personal examples of their own emotional experiences. Schools in Scotland have used it quite significantly in areas of high socioeconomic deprivation with Lothian having produced a write up of it on the web. Hampshire schools have also trialled it with modest results. A few teachers have told one of the authors of this introductory guide, Angie Hart that they wouldn’t be without their PATHS handbook, but that is merely anecdotal evidence.

Some things to consider when implementing the PATHS Approach in your School:

PATHS is for use in primary schools mostly.

You will need to pay for it, but the approach was developed by a not-for-

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profit organisation.

It has been used with children with complex needs as well as with mainstream children.

It doesn’t offer a whole schools approach although in some areas other staff, not just teachers have used it.

It had excellent results in both the US and Scotland, but in Hampshire the results were not as transformative as was hoped (but still good).

It has been used by a lot of schools in many different countries.

Nobody has told Angie Hart that they have chucked the manual in a cupboard and indeed, she remembers that at least 4 people told her they liked using it and carried on when the research was over.

Rochester Resilience Program

. This is a school-based emotion regulation skills training intervention developed in the US by Peter Wyman, a psychiatrist and colleague. It aims to strengthen self-regulation of emotions and prevent negative social-emotional outcomes in high risk primary school children. Children are assigned a mentor to work with them on an individual basis. An experimental evaluation found that this program had significant impacts four months after baseline on: behaviour control, task compliance, peer social skills, assertiveness/withdrawal, and frequency of disciplinary incidents at school when compared with a waitlist control condition.

Some things to consider when implementing the Rochester Resilience Program in your School:

It might be hard to find help to implement it, and the latest published details on it are years back.

It was developed by a psychiatrist so it certainly addresses mental health issues.

It only focuses on work with individual pupils, so doesn’t offer a whole schools approach.

Angie can’t find anywhere it has been used in the UK, but let her know if you used it.

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United Kingdom Resilience Programme

(based on the Penn resiliency programme in the US)

The UKRP was introduced into nine secondary schools (along with Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) and special schools), by three local authorities in Scotland in 2007 and a number of English authorities introduced it too, in a collaboration with the Young Foundation. It was aimed at Year 7 pupils attending mainstream schools, with the goal of improving their emotional difficulties, rather than behavioural problems. It was designed to build resilience, promote adaptive coping skills, and teach effective problem-solving. A main focus of the programme is the promotion of optimistic thinking to help children and adolescents cope with the daily challenges and problems encountered during the school years. The skills taught in the program can be applied to many contexts of life, including relationships with peers and family members as well as achievement in academics or other activities. It is a manual-based intervention comprising twelve 90-minute group sessions. The curriculum teaches cognitive behavioural and social problem-solving skills. Participants are encouraged to identify and challenge negative beliefs, use evidence to make more accurate appraisals of situations and events, and to use effective coping mechanisms when faced with adversity. Additionally, students learn techniques for assertiveness, negotiation, decision-making, and relaxation. In their evaluation of UKRP in 2010, Challen, Noden, West and Machin found that, the programme had positive short term improvements for pupils who were entitled to free school meals (FSM), had not attained the national targets in English or Maths at the end of Key Stage 2, or who had symptoms of anxiety or depression, experienced a larger measured impact of UKRP on their depression and anxiety scores. However, the overall impact of the UKRP was limited and not sustained over time. The evaluators write “There was no measured impact of workshops on behaviour scores or life satisfaction scores” (Challen et al, 2010 p4). The impact of the UKRP lasted for one year, with no observed impact two years on. This raises the issues of programmes that may be seen as “add ons” to a school’s provision, and also of sustainability of effect – not only is this an ethical issue whereby children need to be supported continually until skills are embedded (Lee, 1993), but also an economic one, where programmes need to be cost effective. Overall, in a meta analysis of the Penn Resilience Programme, (Brunwasser, Gillham and Kim, 2009, in Challen et al, 2010 p9) found “…very mixed results across studies”. It had little impact on pupil’s absence rates.

Some things to consider when implementing the UKRP in your School:

A limitation of the UKRP is its applicability to children with complex needs (those who may need such support the most) because it relies on them

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attending school.

Extensive staff training is required which will certainly embed resilience approaches if successful but schools may not be able to accommodate easily.

It may be seen to create “experts” in the field, which may mean other people in the school community won’t bother doing anything.

It hasn’t been written to take account of the range of complex needs and disadvantage that many pupils in the UK face and therefore needs adapting.

It requires 18 discrete sessions of teaching. This could be very beneficial, particularly if emphasis is simultaneously put on creating an “ethos” of developing resilience throughout both the school and wider community.

The authorities involved in the evaluations so far were self-selected and subsequently, results may have been gained that do not reflect a fair representation of UK school pupils.

How well would the programme transfer to pupils in highly diverse UK Boroughs, especially in contexts of deprivation?

What role did parental involvement and support play in achieving better results for some children?

You would need to pay for the programme, and it is not cheap.

Quite a few places in the UK tried this programme out. Where are they now?

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Summary of resilience programme research

The existing programmes that aim explicitly to develop resilience in children and young people do not always adequately address their differing contexts or their levels of experienced difficulties. Most of the programmes focus on the individual child and what they can do to help themselves, without considering the wider social, community and political forces upon them that they may be powerless to have any impact on. They do not always regard resilience ecologically. A seven year old child is unable to access financial resources so that her mother can buy more nutritious food; a ten year old boy cannot tell a school inspector that while he may be ‘failing’ according to their remit academically, he feels happier and better about himself than he did six months ago. However, used wisely they can offer impetus to schools and create a set of practices around which other resilience-enhancing approaches can be developed. The biggest threat to their implementation and sustainability is that many of them are costly and require schools to follow a specific programme rigidly in order to get the best results. Also, many of them were developed with substantial financial resources and provided training and support that may simply be unsustainable in the long term. This may be why one of the authors of this paper was told by a lead educational psychologist in Scotland who has already trialled many resilience programmes, that large numbers of manuals sit in Scottish School cupboards. If any of the bespoke classroom programmes are implemented, look beyond the marketing material to consider how you will sustain these in your school if the funding ceases. Also, remember most of these don’t really help you embed some important elements of resilience. If you judge resilience approaches you are thinking of implementing by seeing how many areas it covers on our ten point list above, that would be a good start. You can then think about what else you need to implement to make sure you have everything covered. For access to free, down-to-earth materials that support your school to develop its own approach to academic resilience promotion, keep an eye out for the web resources we are designing with Young Minds. As an alternative, if a comprehensive ready-made approach is wanted, schools might consider implementing Achievement for All, rather than any of the other explicit resilience building programmes, possibly with some emotional resilience work more explicitly factored in. Achievement for All is not a costly programme, and it is a charity rather than a private business motivated by profit. (Just as an aside, we should point out that neither of us have ever met the people involved in developing Achievement for All, we are going by what we have read and heard about it). In many cases it would be cheaper than any other option and it addresses many of the fundaments of resilience building. Further exploration of that programme is beyond the scope of this short paper. However, the reference list provides further details, and the activities and approaches suggested on this website complement that programme, as well as many of the others.

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So to sum up, think carefully about what definition of resilience you are using. Avoid just putting in place a bolt on programme that fails to recognise the context of diversity and challenge living in disadvantage may have on children and young people in the UK. Be careful about implementing programmes or approaches that are mainly focused on the individual child, as opposed to also considering the possible impact the macro systems they live within may have upon them. These contexts have a huge impact on schools, their resources and their publicly measured results and must be acknowledged. An ecological model recognises these forces and the potential impact they can have on pupils in schools. Go for one of those, and you should manage to sustain it and not have piles of manuals gathering dust in the cupboard. Also, you should stand an even better chance of improving outcomes for the most disadvantaged children and young people.

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For Further information about our work visit the boingboing website:

www.boingboing.org.uk

Or email info@boingboing.org.uk

Twitter: @bb_resilience

References

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