On this page you will find articles and links to a variety of free mental health and resilience building resources, written, co-produced and shared by the Boingboing, Resilience Revolution and CRSJ community. Our resources are aimed at young people, parents and carers, practitioners, school staff, academics and people with lived experience. Anyone can access these resources for free, but please clearly acknowledge Boingboing in anything that you draw on in your own work in line with the permissions granted by our Creative Commons Licence, and add links to our website so that users can access the detailed rationale and processes applied to using our tools.
Unless otherwise specified all our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This means you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made. If you do adapt or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Find out more..
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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.
How do I improve results through an Academic Resilience Approach?
A lot of schools struggle with how they can improve the results – or close the gap – for the more challenged, disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils in the school. This is much harder and requires much more attention to detail across the whole school.
Audit the whole school
A systematic approach to understanding your school and identifying where and what you might do to better promote resilience can help the whole school community to look through a ‘resilience lens’ in order to close the gap for disadvantaged pupils or those facing additional challenges.
Resilience Zap
Try a resilience zap if you want to get the following going across the school community: A basic level of understanding about building resilience and what it involves; Some shared language around disadvantaged pupils and support for them; Building of commitment to really go the extra mile with pupils who need it; Inspiring ideas based on evidence of what works.
What is Academic Resilience?
What is Academic Resilience key points: Good educational outcomes despite adversity; We can spot the impact of academic resilience through individuals doing better than we might have expected; Promoting academic resilience will lead to better behaviour and results for disadvantaged pupils.
How to use the Resilience Framework
The Resilience Framework summarises a set of ideas and practices that promote resilience. It is based on a body of research and practice development called Resilient Therapy developed by Angie Hart and Derek Blincow, with help from Helen Thomas and a group of parents and practitioners.
Which pupils are we talking about?
All pupils cope with some adversity, and pupils who experience multiple disadvantages face greater challenges in schools. But all pupils will benefit from an academic resilience approach. There are many disadvantages and stressors that can have a negative impact upon pupils; these are called risk factors.
What can schools do?
Focusing on just a few quick and easy activities can have an impact. A whole schools approach makes a bigger difference. Get a few things going, make sure you are doing them well and share them with the whole community. Evidence and practice based experience tells us there are a few key actions that you could take in school that would have impact.
How can services support me?
We understand the idea of commissioning or buying in help from external services can be daunting and know that there are differences between commissioning and procurement. You can use this page to think about why schools need to buy in services, and how to ensure services are good enough.
What about parents?
Every school knows that the more engaged a parent is in their child’s learning, the more learning is supported in the home. Some parents are dead easy to involve, eager to get your attention and are queuing up to talk to staff at every opportunity. But often the very families you would like to be involved more, can be the hardest to hook into school life.
Co-produced resilience tools
If you came to our Designing Resilience event in November 2015 you will remember the amazing range of resilience tools being developed by young people with complex needs together with local communities, digital artists and designers, academics, parents, practitioners and policy makers.
Co-production in promoting resilience – what does this mean for schools?
Co-production is a value-based approach that views people who use a service as assets with important knowledge and skills. It harnesses this experience, knowledge and skill to promote positive change, and design, produce and deliver better services.
Smart Moves Workbooks for schools
The Smart Moves Workbooks have been put together by Eikon Charity, adapted from or inspired by The Resilient Classroom Resource Pack written by Sam Taylor, Angie Hart and Hove Park School as part of the Academic Resilience Approach. Student and Teacher packs are available for Years 6 and 7.
Resilience Approaches Guide for schools and communities
We have written a user-friendly guide called Resilience Approaches to Supporting Young People’s Mental Health which covers various different schools-based and community-based resilience building programmes and approaches.
Helping Children with Complex Needs Bounce Back
Resilient Therapy is an innovative way of strengthening children with complex needs, that anyone can use. This tried-and-tested handbook is accessible and fun, includes exercises and worksheets, and breaks down research to apply to everyday situations.
One Step Forward – Young people in care
A visual guide to resilience written & illustrated by young people in foster care and care leavers, Boingboing, the Virtual School for Children in Care and the University of Brighton. Navigate your route towards resilience! Take your time to explore the activities, enjoy the images and take inspiration.
Changing Lanes – Promoting resilience to reoffending
Changing Lanes is a research-based toolkit that helps us understand what can be done to support young men who have been involved in crime to find different paths. The toolkit shares the voices of 8 young people who took part in the research.
Mental health and the Resilient Therapy toolkit
This book is for any parent or carer who is concerned about the mental health of their child. It is written by young people who have themselves experienced mental health issues, with a little help from a couple of adult friends.
Our schools-based resilience projects
Our schools-based resilience research adapts the Resilience Framework for use in schools and helps schools make resilient moves across the whole school community. Many different types of school are working with us on this.
A Kinship Carers’ Resource – Using Resilience Ideas in Practice
Becoming a kinship carer can be a hard job. It may well be harder than anything that you have ever done before. Kinship carers care for grandchildren, nieces, nephews or children who are friends of their family.
Make Your Mark Film about Visual Arts Practice for Resilience
This documentary about the project includes footage from the resilience-building arts workshops, the project exhibition showcasing the young people’s art work, and interviews and artists statements from the young people experiencing mental health complexities and /or learning difficulties who participated in the workshops.
Visual Arts Practice for Resilience: A guide for working with young people with complex needs
The aim of this guide is to offer practical advice and ideas that are affordable and accessible, and can be put into practice with groups of young people. As well as showing how you might put resilience theory into practice and facilitate art based activities.
Building resilience through arts resources
An arts for resilience practice guide has been produced by the project team (including young people). It contains instructions on how to conduct a range of practical visual arts activities that we have identified as being resilience promoting.
The Resilient Classroom Resource
This resilient classroom resource was created and developed to provide practical help for tutors and other pastoral staff and is suitable for use in the tutor group setting. It supports the tutor group structure and helps build relationships between tutors and students. Students and heads of years have been involved, through consultation and participation, in providing useful and appropriate exercises.
The Insiders’ Guide parent carer support course
Parenting has got to be one of the hardest jobs there is – and it’s tougher when you have a child with additional needs such as a disability, special educational need, complex health or behaviour issue.
