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
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.
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.
Embedding the Resilience Framework: a whole school approach
Due to the poor predicted life outcomes for our pupils, who face significant disadvantage, along with their complex needs, the school has used a whole school approach based on the Resilience Framework for the past year, where we use action research to plan, implement and evaluate our actions.
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.
