The Academic Resilience Approach (ARA) is a whole-school-based community development model designed by Angie Hart and Lisa Williams with input from school practitioners and young people. It aims to equip schools with the tools to support students to overcome adversity and improve their mental health, and, in turn, educational outcomes.
This intervention is based on complex systems theory and a social justice-oriented Resilience Framework. The community organisations YoungMinds and Boingboing have adopted the approach and are working in partnership with schools to apply it across the UK and to research its impact through evaluation.
You can find lots of information about the ARA and ARA resources on our Boingboing website. On this page we have brought together a number of articles, links and course listings that relate to the ARA to help you find out more about the approach and access our free ARA resources to get you started with putting it into practice in your work or school context.
See also
Top pages
All Academic Resilience Approach pages
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.
The Academic Resilience Approach
Our resources help any school establish systems to build ‘resilience approaches’ that support disadvantaged pupils over time through a whole school approach. Benefitting all pupils and increasing academic resilience, the ARA helps everyone in the school community play a part.
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.
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.
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-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.
