Thrive
Who we are
- The Thrive Approach® was developed more than 25 years ago in response to rising exclusion rates in UK schools. It is underpinned by neuroscience, attachment theory and the latest developments in child development research. Our mission is to help children and young people become more emotionally resilient and better-placed to engage with life and learning.
- Thrive is a business that works with local authorities, multi-academy trusts, individual schools and other settings across Great Britain and beyond. To date, more than 75,000 staff have received Thrive training, ensuring that over 795,500 children and young people have access to the Thrive Approach, changing lives and increasing educational attainment levels. We do this through our whole-school approach to wellbeing - proven to improve attendance, behaviour and attainment.
- Through the unique combination of our training and Thrive-Online®, our online mapping and monitoring tool, Thrive equips educators to meet the mental health needs of children and young people so they feel safe, supported, and ready to learn. It informs and underpins behaviour and wellbeing policies at a strategic level and provides day-to-day activities to help classroom and support staff to increase pupils’ wellbeing and resilience. It is a powerful resource that is used by school staff at all levels.
- Settings using the Approach report that attendance, attainment, staff morale, relationships with parents and carers and behaviour have improved while fixed-term exclusions, absenteeism and long-term mental health problems have decreased. They also report that they are saving money on interventions and additional staffing costs to support poor behaviour and that they are well-prepared for Ofsted inspections because they have data to evidence pupils’ progress with behaviour and wellbeing.
- Thrive is an adaptable and dynamic approach that can be used where a child is experiencing social or emotional problems in school. The Approach identifies gaps that may exist in their social and emotional development that may be the underlying reason for their behaviour and provides bespoke solutions for how these gaps can be filled. But it is perhaps even more impactful when it is used as a whole-school approach to mental health. This is where the Approach is embedded across the whole school day - from meeting each child at the school gate in the morning to after school activities as well as across the whole curriculum. This fosters a culture of wellbeing that works to prevent mental health problems and results in significant improvements to attendance, attainment and behaviour.
What we do
Our training provides help for anyone who wants to support the mental wellbeing of children and young people. We offer a range of events and courses that start with one-off, online sessions featuring either a keynote speaker or a specific area of pedagogy and go up to in-depth courses that last for several months and equip delegates to lead on wellbeing in their setting and train others to do the same.
- Our popular Thrive in Action sessions are free and offer practical tips on topical issues such as anxiety, behaviour, transition and staff overwhelm.
- We have recently launched a one-day course aimed at tackling specific areas of need that our community have highlighted to us. Our Positive Behaviour Management course meets the Education Endowment Foundation's recommendations for improving behaviour in schools as well as guidance from the Children and Young People's Mental Health Coalition's 'Behaviour and Mental Health in Schools' report.
- We offer a Mental Health Lead course over four weeks, fully-funded for eligible schools in England by a grant from the Department for Education.
- Our Building Emotional Health courses run for five weeks and provide a thorough grounding in the neuroscience of wellbeing and best practice in the classroom.
- The next level is to become a Thrive Licensed Practitioner. This is our flagship course with Early Years, Childhood and Adolescent versions. Courses run over 14 sessions and equip delegates with the skills needed to use Thrive as a whole-school wellbeing approach, carry out interventions and lead on wellbeing and pastoral matters.
- We also offer advanced, specialist training in areas such as building relationships with families and training Licensed Practitioners.
As well as high-quality training, what really sets us apart from competitors is the unique resource of Thrive-Online. This powerful profiling and mapping resource allows educators to create personalised action plans and monitor improvement, allowing for a data-based method of measuring and tracking progress that can be used to evidence a trust’s approach to wellbeing. Thrive-Online has more than 1,000 suggested activities and interventions to equip educators with a toolbox full of strategies for any scenario. This content is regularly reviewed and updated, with special attention paid to advances in neuroscience and child development theory.
By making wellbeing progress measurable, we allow settings to truly put mental health at the heart of school life and to have confidence that what they do is effective. This is also helpful when reporting to both internal and external stakeholders and allows for a consistent approach across a trust. Schools can therefore report on pupils’ wellbeing in the same way they do for other key indicators eg attainment and attendance. It also allows wellbeing data to be compared at scale, for example, within trusts or local authorities.
The impact Thrive has on children and young people and the communities around them has been
evidenced in a number of studies. These include: Thrive helps to develop resilience in young people (Hart and Heaver 2015). Staff using the Thrive Approach feel more equipped to manage behaviour and better able to support more vulnerable children (Office for Public Management 2013). Thrive closes the gap for vulnerable children across a range of measures including attainment, behaviour, relationships, self-confidence and attendance (McGuire-Snieckus et al 2015).
The impact of Thrive has also been praised during school inspections. Inspectors have commented on the use of Thrive to help manage behaviour more effectively, in particular when used for early intervention, helping students to become more open to learning. For example, the Ofsted report for
Hagley Primary School, in Worcestershire, one of our Schools of Excellence, states: "All pupils benefit from the Thrive Approach used by staff. This has played an important part in supporting pupils’ mental health and well-being.”
How we help
Our offering includes free resources, podcasts, webinars, articles and videos. We hold regular, free, online events aimed at sharing best practice and providing expert guidance on topical issues such as attendance, bullying and anxiety both for classroom staff and for senior leaders involved in shaping policy. All of our resources aim to effectively support educators, whether classroom- based or senior leaders, to make a tangible difference to the children and young people in their settings. We regularly survey our community to research their greatest areas of concern and we make sure that we respond accordingly, devising new course content or resources to meet their needs.
At the heart of the Thrive Approach is the belief that behaviour is the communication of unmet need. As an organisation, we are passionate about meeting children and young people’s needs and helping them to fulfil their potential.
Thrive was founded by four inspirational women who shared a commitment to improving children and young people’s mental health and to helping them to access education. Working in the fields of social work, education and psychotherapy in the 1990s, these women came together in response to a problem they were hearing about in their respective fields. They had all worked with 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.
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 born 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.
Thirty years later, 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 including problems with anxiety, behaviour, attendance and attainment.
