Promoting resilience in the classroom : a guide to developing pupils’ emotional and cognitive skills

Abstract

The twin needs to raise educational standards for all and to improve access to educational opportunities for the most vulnerable members of society continue to be major challenges facing educators throughout the world. The persistent link between socio-economic status and educational attainment is one of the few truly dependable outcomes of social scientific research. Children who come from socially deprived backgrounds are at much greater risk of educational failure than children who come from more privileged backgrounds. In the USA, in 1979 individuals from the top income quartile were four times more likely to successfully complete a four-year college degree programme than individuals from the bottom quartile (Barton1997). By 1994 the disparity had increased from 4 to 10 times (ibid.). In the UK similar concerns have been noted by the DfES (2004).There is a further association between educational failure and social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (ibid.), as well as an association between social, emotional and behavioural problems and social disadvantage (Schneiders, Drukker, Ende et al. 2003). The interaction between socio-economic, educational and socio-emotional factors is clearly complex and multi-faceted. It is certainly not the case that any one of these factors necessarily precedes either of the others. Resilience factors of various kinds come into play for some people, enabling them, as individuals, to buck the statistical trends. Temperament, social and cognitive strategies, personal values, external social support structures, and parental personality characteristics, can help to create opportunities for unpredicted positive educational and socioemotional outcomes for individuals who appear to be in the most dire socio-economic circumstances (Rutter 1987). Unfortunately, there are counterbalancing risk factors, which will combine with disadvantage for other people to create serious life problems (e.g. Patterson, Reid and Dishion 1992). It is all too easy to place the blame for a child’s educational failure and disruptive behaviour on family and/or neighbourhood factors, and to write off whole geographical areas as being populated by ‘undesirables’. It is perhaps because of the dangers of provocative, negative stereotyping of this kind that we sometimes neglect the socio-economic correlates of educational disengagement and social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. A crucial factor that can be both a cause and effect of educational failure is what David Smith, in the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, describes as ‘attachment to school’ (Smith2006). Attachment to school can be defined in terms of the degree of commitment towards and engagement with schooling that students feel. Students who have a strong attachment to school have feelings of attachment to teachers, and believe that success in school will lead to significant rewards in later life. Weak attachment to school is characterised by indifference or hostility towards teachers and scepticism about the value of schooling. Weak attachment to school can lead to disaffection and alienation. These are problems of a psychological nature that impair the individual’s capacity for social and academic engagement that can, in turn, lead to reduced life chances. Innovative Learning for All offers a series of publications each of which considers ways in which schools in the 21st century can address the needs of vulnerable students and contribute to their effective attachment to school and engagement with educational opportunities. Each author in the series offers insights into different ways in which these goals can be achieved by drawing on the best available, and in some cases original, research evidence. At the heart of the series is the shared view that educational standards for everyone will improve if we focus our efforts on promoting the educational engagement of the most vulnerable. There is also a strong consensus around the need to value all children and young people as individuals and to maintain a commitment to their positive growth, and for these values to be translated into practical support that is informed by a firm conceptual and technical understanding. This is not to say that education is a cure - all for the dysfunctions of society. Far from it, the ideas and practices described in this series depend upon political will and government action to achieve their best. On the other hand, the programmes and approaches dealt within this series will not be made redundant by enlightened and effective measures that address social and economic deprivation. However, they will, undoubtedly, be aided by such measures. It follows, therefore, that the authors in this series all hope that some of the ideas that they put forward will contribute to both the thinking and practice of educators as well as of politicians.