School is a crucial part of creating positive life journeys, but the available resources within school to remove barriers for the most vulnerable and disengaged pupils are limited.
emerge has developed a range of services which can be tailored to the individual needs of school and a child and have had incredible success by underpinning our professional interventions with a significant positive relational approach.
“We are very proud to work alongside emerge in providing often much needed support, guidance, compassion and care to children and young people in our community. The compassion, determination and creativity of their team is second to none.”
Matthew Langley, Headteacher, Bowling Park Primary School
Every school has pupils who seem disengaged, have high rates of absence, display unexplained behaviours, and appear anxious or stressed without obvious reason. These pupils may be journeying through bereavement, struggling with poor mental health, family pressure or be overly vulnerable to poor self-esteem and peer pressure. All too often these factors result in pupils achieving lower than expected results and progressing at slower rates.
We know that every school is under pressure to use its limited resources wisely, and that the statutory support services which have existed in the past are less, or even non-existent. We believe that emerge working in partnership with your school staff and systems, can be part of the answer for your most vulnerable learners to start achieving their potential.
“Our focus is on developing emotional capacity, self-esteem and patterns of behaviour that enable a child to re-engage with learning and establish stability and resilience. Results are often seen in a matter of weeks and our presence proves to be a lifeline for many children.”
Andy Sykes, CEO
Within your school, we can provide the following for pupils you identify as needing extra support:
One to One Intervention
A bespoke programme developed around the needs of an individual young person. We aim to build their self-esteem and develop their resilience whilst targeting their specific area of need. Our trained workers use a coaching approach to engage the young person and empower them to progress positively through their situations. We use a suite of tools, resources and measures to enable and track our impact and are happy to use your systems to record our work.
Group Work Intervention
We have designed material to target key issues faced by young people that become barriers to learning effectively. Delivered with groups of young people that display similar needs we enable them to understand and work through their feelings, thoughts and actions, and progress to different behaviours. Our most commonly used topic areas are: Bereavement, Stress management, Self-esteem, Understanding anger, Transition, Self-awareness, Friendship and Relationships.
We also offer two specific programmes:
Support for ‘Children Looked After’
We have been working closely with Bradford Virtual School and currently support approximately 40 CLA young people across many schools. We have initiated a programme to aid the wellbeing of young people across transition from primary to secondary education and we are able to support Looked After young people as they continue through their education.
The Archbishop of York Award – Community Engagement and Citizenship
We have run this programme very successfully with both year 8 and year 9 young people, enabling groups of young people to take part in a creative curriculum which explores Leadership, Spirituality and Citizenship through a hands on, practical approach.
Bradford Academy
a long term partnership
emerge works with both Bradford Academy Primary and Secondary – and we have done so since the school was built!
We are a foundational part of the pastoral care and support systems for vulnerable and struggling pupils and deeply integrated into the structures of support within the school.
What We Do
Our current work at Bradford Academy includes:
- One to one work with an active case load of over 80 secondary young people we see weekly
- A rolling programme of group work as required on various issues, recently topics include:
- Understanding anger
- Self esteem / confidence
- Healthy relationships
- Extra support for a small cohort of Looked After children across years 6 to 8
Our Impact
Through hard data gathered from school systems and from a range of softer outcome measures we know that our work has the following impact:
- Almost all young people increase or maintain their attendance at school even though often referred at a point of crisis.
- Young People improve their progress educationally – for 50% this can be seen within the term of support.
- Young people’s wellbeing improves – over 65% of young people attribute better score on a recognised wellbeing measure to the impact support in school has had.
A connected approach
Bradford Academy is in the centre of East Bowling – one of our core communities. We open a youth work session in Bowling Park across from the school gates every day of the week, enabling us to engage many of the same young people in positive activities, offer them and informal ‘check in’ each day and create a positive, holistic approach to inspiring change.