RISE 2: Resilience in Schools and Education

The Importance of Resilience

By Dr Lee Randall

The RISE programme is Now Live! Find out more here.

Resilience refers to the capacity of an individual to cope with, adapt and respond to challenge, difficulty and adversity. It is not the absence or avoidance of distress or hardship, rather, resilience is the ability to confidently face challenges, adapt and even grow as a result of these. So, it’s not that resilient people don’t struggle, but that they have the capacity and psychological tools to be able to successfully persevere and overcome the challenges life throws at them.

The research literature (consisting of over 4,000 journal articles, and hundreds of relevant books at the time of writing), demonstrates that resilience is one of the most significant factors in determining progress, success and wellbeing of children in their education, with resilient children better equipped to (amongst other things) overcome setbacks, form positive social relationships and develop personal and academic independence. Resilient individuals are better equipped to explore and take opportunities, protect themselves against the impact of adversity and achieve self-actualisation. As such, it is fair to say that resilience is a vital life skill that is particularly relevant in the current global context; it would be desirable therefore to seek to develop this skill in our children if we are able to.

“Resilience is not the absence or avoidance of distress or hardship. Rather, it is the ability to confidently face challenges, adapt and even grow because of them.”

If we wish to develop resilience in our children, it would be prudent initially to think about the differences between those able to show resilience, and those who struggle to do so. In order to identify the factors which lead to resilience in adults and children, studies tend to approach the problem in two primary ways:

• Firstly, they look at those who’ve been through traumatic experiences such as those who have been prisoners of war, suffered assault, or lived through a natural disaster. They then identify what enabled some people to come through those experiences stronger than before whilst others struggled to cope.

• Secondly, they examine intervention programmes – tracking to see the impact of different techniques which build children’s and adults resilience.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the importance of resilience for children however, a specific and coherent programme for understanding and developing resiliency has never been developed. Much of the research on resilience uses intervention programmes developed by the researchers for the specific purposes of their research. These interventions are often incomplete, covering perhaps one or two aspects of resilience rather than delivering and examining a comprehensive programme of intervention exploring all of the primary aspects of resilience. This is problematic for those in education as it leaves us in a position where we know developing resilience is important for our children, but we don’t have a coherent and straightforward way to do it.

That is why we have developed RISE: Resilience in Schools and Education training programme…

This is part 2 of 3 blogs in this resilience series.

• See Part 1: ‘Education in a time of COVID-19’

• See Part 3: ‘RISE: The Resilience in Schools and Education programme’

To find out more about whole-school RISE (Resilience In Schools and Education) training for your school, click here.

Find out more about Dr Lee Randall.