Topic:Â Experiences in building resilience around Year 6-7 school transitions – Affy Harris and Stefan Nahajski
Resources: You can download Affy and Stefan’s slides – Part 1 and Part 2 and check out the Smart Moves workbooks.
Summary: There are many aspects of a young person’s life that we have little or no control over, however one major life event that we are aware of are school transitions, in particular from primary to secondary school. This transition is widely recognised as a time of anxiety for young people and can be a trigger for mental ill health. To address this issue Eikon has created The Smart Moves programme. It is based on existing evidence-based resources, the Resilience Framework (Hart, Blincow & Thomas, 2007) and the Resilient Classroom resource (Hove Park School, Boingboing and YoungMinds).
Smart Moves helps students to develop lifelong resilience which helps address some common anxieties when transitioning from year 6 to year 7. It equips teachers to facilitate evidence-based short sessions that give young people small learnable skills (Smart Moves) to build resilience and develop good mental health. Developed in consultation with schools and young people into engaging, interactive and easy to use material for the classroom it is also flexible enough to be delivered in a variety of formats.
This session will take you through the origins and development of the programme, the impact and feedback so far as well as what we have learnt and experienced during the process of developing it and rolling it out across Surrey Schools.
Biography: Affy & Stefan have both been involved in supporting young people for over 15 years. Affy has experience working directly with young people both in formal and informal settings, managing youth specialists in school and delivering youth work projects. She has also worked closely with several schools to develop their strategy and implement changes around pastoral support. Affy is Project Lead for the Smart Moves programme, developing the material and implementing the roll out across Surrey.
Stefan set-up and led a young people’s charity (WVYP) for 10 years. In 2016 WVYP, Reflex Woking and Eikon merged to bring together their range of expertise and local relationships with the aim of having more positive impact in more young people’s lives. Stefan is passionate about finding the most effective ways to improve outcomes with young people. Stefan leads Innovation, Development and Partnerships at the Eikon Charity. Eikon is a young people’s charity based in Surrey. It works to improve young people’s outcomes through work in schools, neighbourhoods and families by using one to one’s, group work and training. Eikon is part of the new Mindsight Surrey CAMHS service that was commissioned from April 2016.
Who might be most interested: Practitioners, school staff, academics, researchers, students, parents, carers, community workers, volunteers, public sector workers, young people and those who support them.
Key readings: The Resilience Framework, the Resilient Classroom resource and the Smart Moves Workbooks.
This session took place on Thursday 8 December 2016.
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