At Sheridan School we believe that the adult–young person relationship is vital when developing the young person’s social and emotional skills, which are essential for life and learning. We strive to demonstrate a relational approach to support social and emotional development and behaviour based on the following six principles;

• We understand that behaviour communicates unmet needs, and we can separate the young person from their behaviour.

• We understand that each developmental stage has a range of typical behaviours, which provides opportunities for adults to role-model and explicitly teach appropriate behaviours.

• We provide containment, predictability and routine to build a sense of safety in the emotional and physical environment.

• We encourage young people at our setting to become accountable for their actions and realise the impact they may have on themselves and others, promoting a solution-focused approach to changing future behaviours.

• We keep in mind that we are the adults and the young people are still growing, learning and developing.

• We seek to restore relationships and change behaviours rather than punish the actions a young person may have taken. Although this does not exclude the use of sanctions, we seek the most appropriate way of supporting our young people to develop robust stress-regulation systems and therefore the skills of self-control, empathy and emotional management.

We ensure that our school has a culture, ethos and practice that strengthens relational approaches and inclusion, recognising the importance of psychological safety. Our school implements Thrive – a trauma-informed whole-school approach to improving the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people.

Our school embeds Thrive into our curriculum, our intention is that children and young people are taught to;

·       develop their stress-regulation system,

·       recognise and verbalise a range of feelings and emotions,

·       build their emotional resilience so they can effectively manage stress,

·       keep themselves safe

·       develop healthy coping strategies and regulation skills.

 All of these skills can relate back to their personalised targets from their thrive assessments and ultimately like into their EHCP outcomes.

At Sheridan school, we are embedding thrive into the whole school approach and curriculum each class is group assessed using thrive online and they then have weekly ‘right time’ thrive sessions to work on their targets. Those who present as needing extra support are referred to thrive practitioners to be individually assessed, they then have weekly 1:1 sessions with these practitioners for 1 term to work towards these targets. After each term, they are individually reassessed to establish if they have met their targets or if new targets may need to be worked towards. These sessions are planned individually considering the young persons targets as well as their preferences, eg lego, crafts or slime, accommodating sensory needs of the young person. This reparative work will continue until they meet the threshold to continue only the ‘right time’ work in the weekly groups.

As we reassess our young people we will see assessment scores slowly improving as a direct result of our reparative sessions, over time our assessments will show that they have developed skills to continue without further reparative work and they can continue with the right time work. This is not a process to be rushed however, it can take a varying amount of time dependent on the individual and the gaps in their development. Within our groups we will see a continued improvement both in their scores and their ability to coexist within their classes.  Our hope is that we will see young people who we have helped to build resilience and coping mechanisms to deal with challenges throughout their lives and this, in turn will show a lower number of outbursts and incidences within the school. We will also see relationships between our young people and our staff flourishing through the consistent use of the thrive approach. Use of PACE and VRFs alongside the knowledge that there is always the opportunity to repair and rupture we may face.  

Our biggest achievement will be witnessing our young people gain confidence in communication, emotional regulation, social interaction and resilience as they are supported by the thrive approach.