Exploring the impact of the Solihull Approach Understanding Your Pupils Behaviour on a range of teacher variables and on their perceptions of their work with young people

Mental health promotion policy emphasises the need to develop primary prevention programmes that intervene as early as possible to support children and young people in developing into healthy coping adults. The Solihull Approach was developed to help frontline workers be more effective in their work as they are in the ideal position to intervene early in any potential emotional or behavioural difficulty for a child. The Approach has been developed for both early years’ practitioners and those working with young people in their school years. The theoretical model has been developed from three concepts: containment, reciprocity, and behaviour management, taken from psychotherapeutic, child development and behavioural models respectively. A new programme specifically for schools, Understanding Your Pupils Behaviour, has been developed.
At present most of the evaluation and research has been on the 0-5 year work with Health Visitors. Further work needs to look at the effectiveness of this in the school years and in other settings outside of the health sector. The piloting of the Solihull Approach in a school setting to help school staff better understand their pupils behaviour provides an ideal opportunity to assess the impact of the approach in this setting. The current project was a collaboration between the developers of the approach, the schools and an applied psychology centre within a university interested in knowledge exchange with community based services. The university offered the training to the schools during inset and twilight training sessions. Six (one hour) follow up sessions with a group of staff have also been undertaken.

A mixed method design combining both quantitative measures and qualitative interviews was used to assess the impact of the training. The study focuses on 2 primary schools, an experimental school that received the training and another matched control school. Data was collected pre-training and 6 months after the final training session. The teacher variables measured included anxiety, burnout, compassion satisfaction and fatigue, self-concept and teacher efficacy. Interviews with 7school staff who have received the training were undertaken.

The presentation will offer an overview of the training offered as well as the quantitative and qualitative results and an analysis of these data. Reflections on the collaboration between a university and schools in a process of knowledge exchange in order to develop the capacity of the school in supporting young people with emotional and behavioural difficulties will also be explored.

The approach is both a theoretical framework and a comprehensive resource pack to help workers be more effective in their work with children young people and their families who are affected by behavioural and emotional difficulties.