The Academic Resilience Approach provides free, practical resources to help everyone in the school community step up and support pupils’ academic resilience.
Our resources:
• Help any school establish systems to build ‘resilience approaches’ that support disadvantaged pupils over time through a whole school approach
• Will benefit all pupils from a school-wide approach to increasing academic resilience
• Raise achievement
• Offer ‘quick wins’ that can be implemented immediately
• Help identify pupils who are at risk of not fulfilling their academic potential
• Provide practical approaches to help pupils do better than might be expected
• Offer ideas to help everyone in the school community play a part.
All our resources are based on research evidence and practice. One Head teacher involved in developing Academic Resilience uses a famous quote from NASA to illustrate the idea of a whole school approach:
“The folk tale goes like this, one day a visitor came to the space station and asked a cleaner who was sweeping up what job they did there. The cleaner replied ‘I help put men on the moon’.”
Imagine what it would be like in your school if every adult in the school community’s answer to a visitor asking what they do was ‘I help our most vulnerable pupils achieve better than any of us could ever have imagined they would’.
Would you like answers to these questions?
• How do I improve results through an Academic Resilience Approach?
• What is the Academic Resilience Approach?
• What is Academic Resilience?
• Which pupils are we talking about?
• What can schools do?
• How can services support me?
• What about parents?
Find out more about us and the resources
Academic Resilience – beating the odds for better results, is an approach for schools devised by Lisa Williams and Professor Angie Hart and adopted by YoungMinds. Based on Professor Hart’s collaborative resilience work at the University of Brighton and Boingboing.
Are you using the Academic Resilience Approach in your school?
Have you been using the Academic Resilience Approach in school, or even just some of the ideas and tools? We would like to know about it.
The Boingboing Resilience Framework
The Resilience Framework is a handy table that summarises ‘what works’ when supporting children and young people’s resilience according to the Resilience Research base. The Resilience Framework forms a cornerstone of our research and practice. On this page we have pulled together lots of useful links so you can find out all about the Resilience Framework.
Ready, Set, Resilience
Ready, Set, Resilience is a workbook and supporting guidance created to support young people’s resilience aimed at year 9 students. It uses mixture of activities which support individual resilience (beating the odds) and activities to support changing the odds like activism.
Academic Resilience Approach evaluation
This evaluation project explores ways to build the capacity of school staff and the commitment of school leaders and other key stakeholders to help them identify and implement specific resilience-based actions using the Academic Resilience Approach.
Academic Resilience resources directory
Here you can download the Academic Resilience Approach resources to help any school establish systems to build ‘resilience approaches’ that support disadvantaged pupils over time through a whole school approach. All the Academic Resilience Approach resources are free to download.
Interactive Resilience Framework
The Interactive Resilience Framework was developed especially for schools with children and young people in mind and has more detail about each idea, including relevant research evidence, suggestions of what to do, and what you people themselves think.
Building child and family resilience – Boingboing’s resilience approach in action
This briefing seeks to build practice approaches to building resilience in the context of the social deprivation that is the experience of many of the most disadvantaged families.
Academic Resilience Approach Training workshops
This CPD accredited Academic Resilience Approach workshop is for anyone keen to understand how to build resilience in school communities. For example headteachers, governors, SENCOs, teachers, school counsellors, educational psychologists and support staff.
Fostering academic resilience a brief review of the evidence base
It is very clear that poor school outcomes can have catastrophic long-term consequences, and there is growing recognition that schools should address ALL pupils’ needs. This brief review of the evidence explores what is meant by the term resilience and gives an overview of what schools can do to foster it in their pupils.
Evaluating resilience-based programs for schools using a systematic consultative review
The aim of this paper is to explain how and why school-based resilience approaches for young people aged 12-18 do (or do not) work in particular contexts, holding in mind the parents and practitioners who engage with young people on a daily basis, and whom we consulted in the empirical element of our work, as our audience.
Schools mental health guide
Supporting children and young people in their mental health: A guide for East Sussex schools. A resilience-based, whole school approach to promoting positive mental health and addressing individual needs.
Supporting mental health and emotional wellbeing at school
A short guide to how you can best support mental health and emotional wellbeing at school – Tips for teachers and staff in schools as recommended by young people.
About the Academic Resilience Approach
There are many school resilience programmes which aim to narrow the gap between pupils who do well academically and those who don’t. A lot of them are very useful, so why have we put this information together? Resilience programmes can be expensive – we wanted to offer something everyone could access for free.
