Research School Network: The Tide Project – piloting a programme to help improve pupils’ attendance, behaviour and wellbeing We explore a 12-week school-based intervention designed to support disadvantaged pupils and increase motivation and engagement.

Over a number of months, the school identified a small cohort of female pupils in Year 9 who were presenting with challenging and highly avoidant behaviours, including poor attendance to school, on-site truancy, and a high amount of behavioural incidents.

What felt like the greatest barrier for these pupils was that they appeared to have no sense of belonging in school, making the pupils’ ability to sustain positive relationships difficult.

The knock-on impact of generational trauma on the young people we identified was that they found it hard to identify as learners in a school context, and didn’t always get the support externally that other more advantaged pupils received.

For these pupils, coming into a school where their narrative doesn’t fit with societal narrative was very difficult, and they presented as outliers to the vast majority of other pupils within the school.

Considering the effectiveness of existing interventions

As a school, it felt like we were inputting a high level of support for these pupils. However, there was no real impact seen on the pupils in school in regards to the key markers of attendance and behaviour, and we had to be really honest with ourselves to reflect why.

These pupils received multiple interventions which, on reflection, didn’t seem to cohere with each other and were spread across a number of different professionals and services – this may have diluted the impact of them.

Additionally, the high level of need that the pupils presented with seemed to require something that was more regular and intensive in order to have any countering impact on the trauma they’d experienced.

Our solution

To better support these pupils, we devised a pilot project with our SEMH department: The Junction. The Tide Project is a 12-week programme designed to work with an identified small number of pupils and their families aimed at improving pupils’ attendance, behaviour and wellbeing in school.

Specifically, the programme started with a home visit to families. This helps:

• to get a sense of the pupil at home;
• to explain to parents and carers the aims of the project (acknowledging that they may need some support as well); and
• to build a positive bridge between home and school.

For the pupil, it involves them checking in with The Junction staff every morning. Pupils are on a monitoring report from Monday to Thursday every week where they collect positive points for successful lessons as well as for managing their social time appropriately.

The week at a glance

The morning check-ins at The Junction happen during tutor time and involve pupils sitting and eating breakfast together, whilst having discussions about the previous day at school and an emotional check-in, using strategies such as mood scaling.

The discussions about the previous day mean that there is a collective response in regards to potential useful strategies in specific situations, with celebration being a key part of the check-in as well.

Two mornings a week, there is a longer session which continues through the first lesson of the day with a workshop prepared and delivered around aspects such as:

• emotional regulation skills;
• understanding hypervigilance and how it impacts within daily settings;
• problem-solving; and
• effective communication.

Friday acts as a celebration day. If a pupil has accumulated enough positive points throughout the week, they can attend the reward-based session which was designed by the pupils themselves.

Interestingly, the reward sessions that the pupils chose were not financial: they wanted to play board games, do arts and crafts, take part in a cooking and fitness session. For the biggest reward at the end of the project reward session, they actually chose to go to the park for a picnic together.

It must also be noted that if a pupil did not get enough positive points, then they have a bespoke reflection space 1:1 to work out the reasons why they didn’t achieve the high enough level of points.

What is the current impact on the pupils?

The data that we have at this stage is soft data, but is none-the-less very positive:

• Pupils’ attendance to school has improved;
• Teachers have been making more positive comments about the individuals being more engaged with their learning, with improvements to attitude to school;
• We have seen big reductions in the time that pupils are needing to be removed from classrooms due to poor behaviour.

What are the key ingredients that have made The Tide Project successful?

As a team including members of the SEMH department and the Senior Leadership Team we identified the key ingredients making The Tide Project a success:

• A strategic approach from a leader who has a combined understanding of mental health and previous experience of implementing these kinds of projects;
• High staff:pupil ratio (3:6) to ensure that the pupils receive a bespoke experience and immediate response to any safeguarding concerns if needed;
• Staff expertise in supporting pupils with emotional wellbeing;
• High level of planning and expert knowledge around the delivered sessions – but with the expertise to be flexible to adapt the sessions on the day if required;
• Collective buy-in from the wider staff body and understanding of the impact of trauma on children.

Where does it go from here?

It may seem tempting to scale-up this approach – as in: we’ve seen this work for this small cohort, so why not a larger one?

Actually, we feel that this would be the wrong way to go and we would lose our ability to deliver on the active ingredients.

What feels successful is the smaller cohort and the ability to be more intensive with those pupils, which would be diluted if we were to attempt to have a wider reach.

More secure evaluation of the pupil progress is needed to better monitor the wider impact across the school. All the signs to-date show that The Tide Project has been a success, but we have more work to do in terms of evaluation – we already use the Strengths and Difficulties questionnaire with pupils and key staff and will add to this with further data.

The pilot project has been useful to better understand a targeted approach to supporting disadvantaged pupils – the clear progress we have seen with the pupils is something we will build on and evolve for the upcoming year.