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Promote resilience through the school ethos and culture

Measuring Impact and Success

You might consider:

  • baseline assessments of resilience among pupils and periodic assessments to show impact
  • monitoring activities (observing lessons and behaviour and culture during unstructured times)
  • headteacher’s report to governors
  • pupil portfolios showcasing involvement
  • repeat behaviour records reducing
  • welfare records showing improved mental outlook from targeted pupils
  • participation records, records of challenges undertaken and participation rates
  • pupil interviews/surveys to check your pupils’ understanding of resilience and its importance
  • staff interviews/surveys to check the policy understanding and consistent implementation and pupil observations
  • parent interviews/surveys to check the strategy understanding and anecdotal feedback
  • external reviews to check whole-school implementation of your school’s mission.

Remember in each case to describe the impact of your actions (that is, what difference they made) and not just what you did.

Overview

This benchmark is about making sure that the importance of developing resilience in pupils is well understood and clearly communicated throughout your entire school. In this way, all stakeholders, such as governors, staff, pupils and parents, will have a common understanding of what resilience means and what it should look like in your school.

You can promote this culture further through your pastoral programmes of study and policies around behaviour and attitudes. By keeping the notion of resilience fresh in everyone’s minds (through assemblies and displays) you can further promote the benefits of being resilient.

Parents are your best partners in engendering a resilient mindset, so engaging them in your school’s strategy can be very powerful. Beware: if you do not ensure that the concept of resilience permeates your school’s policies and practice, it might become a bolt-on policy that has little substance or impact. 

Intentions

Intentions are actions you intend to take in order to improve your provision in this benchmark. Choose three intentions to focus on.

A mission statement aims to ensure everyone in your school is working towards the same purpose. The statement does not need to be lengthy or complicated: it simply needs to set out the intention of your school in terms of the provision and plan for promoting resilience.

Involving pupils and staff in creating a whole-school mission statement brings a feeling of ownership and understanding for all. You can do this can in small groups, assemblies, discussions and creative sessions, in whichever way best suits your pupils. It can then be brought together and shared, ensuring that everyone understands why it is in place too. 

Top tips

  • Involve your whole school in the creation of the mission statement, whatever their age and ability. 
  • Be creative and consider using art and music as well as written words.
  • Display the mission statement in a prominent place in your school and add it to your school website. 
  • Refer to it regularly to keep it at the forefront of people’s minds. 

Your personal development programme is the ideal vehicle to promote resilience. This is because it is often the time to reflect on life skills and character development.

This intention asks you to examine your pastoral curriculum and see where there may be opportunities to promote resilience explicitly. Consider where in your programme of study you could explicitly teach about resilience in an age-appropriate way. For example, you could give pupils different scenarios where things do not go according to plan and get pupils to discuss a positive next step or solutions. The character development dimension of your PSHE curriculum could focus on the characteristics of successful people, the importance of not giving up and having a positive mindset.

Top tips

  • Consider getting pupils to undertake research on a range of successful people and present their findings to the class.
  • Develop your PSHE bibliography for pupils and suggest key reading to help pupils consider the character attributes of successful and optimistic people.
  • Interweave work skills for life into your careers programme to engender in pupils the characteristics needed to gain and sustain employment.

Further resources

To raise awareness among pupils, you can hold a series of assemblies to promote resilience as a key skill or characteristic to be successful in life. An assembly programme can focus on the merits of seeing failure as learning and how setbacks can make us stronger. You could also incorporate resilience quotes as a ‘thought for the week’.

Use well-known figures in sport or entertainment as roles models to show how their losses, setbacks or mistakes eventually led to better outcomes because of a resilient mindset. Classic examples might be Michael Jordan, Andy Murray or J.K Rowling, but you can choose your own. Use discussions afterwards to help pupils consider how the story might help them.

For younger children, resilience can be promoted through play or the use of toys and puppetry. See the following article on promoting resilience among young children.

By regularly reflecting on the skills required to be resilient, you are providing children and young people with the tools to overcome adversity. 

Top tip

  • Ensure that the figures chosen do not exclude or inadvertently stereotype groups.

Further resources

As you embark on becoming a resilient school, it is important to consider how you will convey notions of resilience across your school. By flooding your environment and communications with messages, quotes or reminders about resilience, you reinforce the benefits and mission of the school.

Displays can be useful to reinforce a resilient mindset with role models, famous figures, quotes and images that promote resilience. Place photos of famous people with quotes from them at strategic places around the school – canteen, library, toilets, entrance, assembly hall and in all classrooms.

Think carefully about how to organise your displays and the messages they convey. Ensure they are current and the figures convey the right moral example. For example, Ang San Suu Kyi of Myanmar may not hold the same reverence as she once did.

Consider using older pupils to help decide on contemporary images, quotes and figures that might be more relevant and impactful. Think about how these figures and quotes reflect the diversity of modern Britain.

Top tips

  • Consider including an inspirational quote reinforcing the importance of resilience in all your communications with parents. Change it up every month.
  • Inspire everyone to become more resilient, through quotes and images on your school website.

Further resources

Consider the texts pupils read in class that might help to foster the themes of resilience that could be discussed.

Through your reading for pleasure strategy, consider providing a list of recommended books or articles about people who have overcome adversity or who have shown good resilience. The school library could have a special section devoted to this too.

In secondary schools, ask subject departments to recommend reading about key individuals in their field who showed remarkable resilience in the face of adversity or rejection.

Some examples could be:

  • Science – Edward Jenner, who persevered to eventually find the cure for smallpox.
  • History –Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela.
  • Maths – Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly: the story of four black female mathematicians who helped the NASA space mission during segregation in the USA.
  • Literacy – in most novels, including Shakespearean plays read in schools, there are characters who have overcome adversity. Your English department could draw out these characteristics routinely while studying the text. Harry Potter, Of Mice and Men, Oliver Twist and The Tempest are also classic examples.

Top tips

  • Consider running a project with prizes for pupils to research and present their findings on famous people who represent the ideals of resilience.
  • Create a special section on resilience within your library.

Further resources

This intention can help you raise awareness among parents on the importance of resilience and how they can support their children to be resilient.

As part of your workshop/s, consider sharing some of the following strategies:

  • Focus on the positive. Recognise and praise efforts to foster self-esteem.
  • Discuss the day’s events with your child. Focus on the positive parts of the day and do not dwell on the negatives.
  • Help children develop problem-solving skills rather than step in with ready-made solutions.
  • Expect your child to carry out age-appropriate tasks that contribute to the whole family, for example, younger children putting their toys away at the end of the day, older children hoovering or washing up.
  • Offer encouragement to help your child to persist during times of difficulty. ‘Keep going… you’re nearly there…’
  • Involve children in family decision-making and rule-setting.
  • Challenge negative defeatist thinking with optimism.
  • Respect and encourage independence.

Top tip

  • As part of the workshop, try sharing anecdotes when children have experienced failure or setbacks and discuss how to overcome them. 

Further resources

Reflection

Think about ways you might include the following:

  • The research that might underpin your mission statement – how accessible will this be to all staff?
  • How will you gain perspectives from all stakeholders in formulating your mission statement?
  • How will you share the agreed approach with parents and visitors through the range of school’s communication methods?
  • How inclusive is the mission and approach, including for pupils with SEND?
  • Consider what misconceptions might exist around resilience (for example, ‘being cruel to be kind’, ‘manning up’). These are not the ideas that should underpin resilience in schools. Can these be pre-empted from the start?
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