About Thrive and the Thrive Approach
Thrive is a specialist intervention programme which supports children with their emotional health, well-being and social skills; all of which are fundamental in enabling children to feel safe and happy and in turn being able to be ready to learn.
Thrive is based on up to date brain science and research into child development. It helps all the staff in our school to adapt their approach to individual children to build self-esteem, well-being and positive behaviour.
There are four guiding principles of the Thrive Approach:
• Every child is a unique person, constantly developing and learning in different ways and at different rates, each with his/her own abilities, talents and potential to be fulfilled.
• Children’s healthy development, emotional well-being and learning are crucially dependent upon, and promoted through, positive relationships.
• Children flourish when they are confident, self-assured, capable and resilient.
• Children thrive in enabling environments, in which their individual development, learning experiences and needs are understood, responded to and supported through strong partnerships with parents/carers.
The Thrive Approach offers practical, effective tools and techniques that work, built around a web-based assessment and action planning tool. This is underpinned by a programme of training and mentoring support.
Our trained thrive staff in our school are Mrs Smith and Miss Ineson.
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More about Thrive:
Our mission is to positively impact the lives of millions of children and young people, so they feel safe, supported and ready to learn.
Thrive offers a trauma-informed, whole school or setting approach that helps to improve the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people. We do this by providing you with training, resources and an award-winning online tool, so you can better understand the needs of your pupils and provide targeted, effective support where it’s needed.
How – and why – we started
"I've been s'cluded."
This was the response a six-year-old boy gave to Thrive co-founder Roe Lovelock in the early 1990s when she got chatting to his mum in a supermarket and asked him why he wasn’t in school.
The child, who couldn’t even say the word excluded, let alone understand the concept of exclusion, made a big impression on Roe, a social work trainer. To her, it spoke volumes about the flaws in the education system of the day and highlighted what needed to change. Roe and the three other co-founders of Thrive (Jan Banks, a psychotherapist; Julia Bird, a Gestalt psychotherapist and educationalist; and Lynne Tarrab-Snooks an integrative psychotherapist and educationalist) kept hearing about children who had been excluded, often from several schools, and often at a young age. They could see the damage this was doing to a generation of children and young people and the impact exclusions were having on their life chances, including the increased risk of outcomes including criminality, substance abuse and gang membership.
Behaviour stems from unmet need
They believed that children’s behaviour stems from unmet need and that until this need is met, children are unable to change their response to circumstances. The Thrive Approach was borne out of the passion these experts felt to effect change in the education system and to make schools places of compassion and understanding that seek to meet pupils’ need, rather than punish them for behaviour that is not a conscious choice. They combined aspects of theory and expertise in their respective fields to define key developmental needs and provide responses and activities to help strengthen children and young people’s engagement in learning and life.
With the growing crisis in children and young people’s mental health, Thrive is needed now more than ever and our focus has broadened from the specific issue of exclusions to the wider issue of poor mental health in young people including problems with behaviour, attendance and attainment.
