THE IMPORTANCE OF RECOGNISING THE ROLE OF SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL AND MENTAL/BRAIN HEALTH DEVELOPMENT

Our school works hard at developing its understanding of the research-led information of the influences that effect children’s behaviour. We adopt a Thrive© led approach which means we offer a bespoke approach to helping pupils with their social and emotional development. Thrive teaches us to understand the impact that our early experiences have had on our brain development and how this affects our behaviour. Thrive improves all children’s emotional wellbeing and social skills and for our more vulnerable children, whose earlier experiences have not equipped them with a sufficient stress regulation system, it enables them to feel safe, to concentrate, to be curious or to work collaboratively. It helps them to develop a way to regulate their emotion, putting language to feelings and to communicate them rather than reacting solely on feelings.

In Thrive terms, we are teaching our children to:

Feel          Stop          Think           Choose            Behave

For children who have had ‘good enough’ life experiences where adults have helped them to regulate their emotions in different situations, this model shows what most children are able to do.

For those children who have had a trickier life experience, this is what they tend to do:

Feel           Behave

As a Thrive school, it is our job to help them ‘catch’ the feeling, to understand it and to help them regulate it and deal with it in a safe way so that their emotional learning develops to reflect the first model.

Science shows us that it takes 500 times to change a pathway in our brain – changing our emotional development takes time and commitment.

We teach our pupils the brain science behind their feelings and their body’s responses so that they are more able to understand the reasons behind their behaviour and how we can work together to change it.