National Nurturing Schools Programme

As one method of helping us to identify children’s social and emotional developmental needs, the academy has purchased the Boxall Profile which is a questionnaire completed by teachers to pinpoint where a child may have a specific need or difficulty. The results of the profile are used to look at targets for small groups of children. This forms the first of the 6 key principles of the Nurturing School approach, that being that children’s learning is understood developmentally, or stage rather than age. As adults, we recognise that children don’t all develop academically at the same rate, with some children picking up learning such as Phonics straight away whilst others need additional practise and repetition. The same can be said for children’s emotional growth and development. The Boxall Profile helps the adults working with your children to recognise their key strengths and the areas that they may need more support with, so they can be developed to grow emotionally as well as academically.

A key priority for the start of this academic year was planning classroom environments to offer all pupils a ‘safe space’ for when they may be feeling dysregulated and need somewhere they can go until they feel ready to engage again. The teachers and pupils have thought about what these need to look like and how and when they will be accessed. The classroom environment and looking at what an ‘emotionally and psychologically safe’ environment means also provided the focus for staff training, to ensure that this is at the forefront of daily classroom practice.

As an academy undertaking the Nurture approach, wellbeing is at the forefront of our provision. All adults invest the time needed to get to know each child as an individual, with children encouraged to share their interests and successes out of the academy too. Celebration assemblies and the bulletin provide another platform for celebrating children’s successes.  In developing trusting relationships, adults are also well placed to recognise when children may need some additional emotional support in school. Support such as check-ins with the class teacher / TA, a quieter place to play in the outdoor drawing zone and small group activities such as ‘talk time’ would be the first port of call, with more specialist interventions such as ‘Draw and Talk’, ‘Lego Therapy’ and ‘Nurture Club’ where an additional need was identified by class teachers and the SENDCo.

In order for children to be able to express how they are feeling, they need an understanding of the language associated with emotion.  As an academy, we have adopted the ‘Zones of Regulation’, explicitly teaching children to be able to identify different emotions and to understand what each emotion may look and feel like for them.  Recognising different emotions is the first step towards understanding how they feel and then having the vocabulary to communicate this with an adult or their peers. 

For children who are unable to communicate verbally, when feeling dysregulated, communication cards are used as an effective way of being able to communicate their needs to someone who could help them. Children are then taught to recognise early warning signs of anger or anxiety and develop their own strategies that work for them, to help them begin to self regulate. If you are interested in understanding more about the Zones of Regulation, zonesofregulation.com has some useful information. What are the Four Zones of Regulation?

There is also a great video clip, showing clips from Pixar films,  for helping children to understand the zones of regulation and identifying how others are feeling. Watch it with your children and see if they can identify which zone each character is in:

Developing strong connections between adults and pupils is at the heart of our whole academy nurture approach. A really good explanation of the thinking behind the principle that ‘all behaviour is communication’ is summed up beautifully by Stephanie Grant, PhD, with reference to one of the final scenes in the film Moana. 

‘In the film, you have a goddess of life, Te Fiti, who has her heart stolen and as a result death and destruction come to the world. Moana, our teenage heroine, finds Te Fiti’s heart and sets off across the ocean to restore it to her. Along the way she runs into monsters, the greatest of which is Te Ka, this giant raging lava monster.  As Moana is trying to battle Te Ka, using all her normal strategies (sarcastically enter behavior charts and reinforcement here), she finds herself failing. Then all of a sudden she has this realization that Te Ka is actually Te Fiti…this is what happened when her heart was stolen. So rather than getting into power struggles and battling against Te Ka, Moana shifts gears. What we see next is that our heroine takes the behaviours Te Ka was using to push her away and uses them instead to pull Te Ka in closer into a relationship. A beautiful song plays in the background with the following lyrics (small adjustments made):

I have crossed the horizon to find you
I know your name
They have broken the heart that’s inside you
But this does not define you
This is not who you are
I know who you are

Then Moana and Te Ka connect, Moana restores her heart, and Te Ka experiences healing and is restored back to Te Fiti.  And that’s how you do trauma work. You realize that the raging lava kids spew at you is happening because they are terrified and hurting and they don’t remember – or often never learned – that they are someone who is valued and loved. And then you push into that, connecting and seeing them when no one else does.  And that’s when the really cool work happens. Inside that messy relationship when we see who a person is instead of getting distracted by the chaos they use to protect themselves.’

Developing our transition times throughout the day and across the year has been another one of our priorities over the last 12 months. At the end of last academic year, all children received a transition booklet which was shared on Google Classroom and by email, to give them some information about their new teacher and what their day would look like in their new class. We had lots of positive feedback from parents about this and they proved a useful tool to help allay some of the fears that all children have when preparing to say goodbye to their class teacher and starting the learning journey again in a new class. We have also looked at transition times throughout the day, changing how our lunchtimes operate, to make them smoother and maximise the time that the children have to play and eat by having all of the coats and lunchboxes stored outside of the hall to speed the process of coming in from lunch play and going back out again.