Naomi Parkhill leads on provision for more able learners at Challenge Award-accredited Mulberry House School. Here she shares five key steps in the school’s successful focus on developing intellectual and emotional resilience – coined the “Mulberry mindset”.

The Mulberry House School is a co-ed, independent pre-prep school in North London with 211 students aged 2-7 years old. We aim to develop a love of learning within each child, encouraging them to reach high to be the people they want to be, to be respectful learners and to enjoy every challenge they face.

We have been working with the NACE Challenge Framework since 2013, having successfully completed our second cycle in June 2019. During this we embarked on a more research-based approach through undertaking case studies. One of these, focusing on strategies to improve the resilience of more able learners, had an extremely positive impact. We noticed that not only our more able, but all learners, now have increased levels of confidence in problem-solving and attainment. There has been a strong focus on intellectual character in the context of personal and academic development. The overall impact on children’s mindsets has been measured both through staff observations and using our annual wellbeing questionnaires.

Following on from the success of this work, here are my top five tips for improving emotional and intellectual resilience:

1. Understand the importance of resilience

The first step of any element of school improvement is to understand its importance. Look at how improved resilience will impact your school. For us, the impact was just as important for the children’s personal development as for their academic achievement. With regards to our more able learners we recognised that they were naturally able to shine academically when faced with written work and extensions tasks, but when it came to problem-solving and stretching themselves to apply critical thinking and look outside the box, they panicked and became very self-critical. We recognised that by improving resilience in this group and for all learners, we would notice a significant improvement in this area.

2. Introduce opportunities for risk-taking

Although the word “risk” often triggers an immediate connection with danger and caution, providing opportunities to take risks is an integral part of supporting learners to develop resilience. Without facing and taking risks, they will not learn how to manage them, work through them and overcome any barriers. This process alone lends itself automatically to increased resilience. Ways in which we have increased opportunities for risk-taking include developing our outdoor learning provision, collapsed timetable weeks which include lots of problem-solving, and peer-peer learning throughout the school.

3. Celebrate mistakes

Introducing the celebration of mistakes within the work already being done on growth mindset was one of the biggest steps we took towards improving the resilience of our learners. Using strategies such as “my favourite mistake” within maths lessons has proved extremely successful. By using this as a formative assessment tool we have been able to allow the children to unpick their mistakes, analyse where they went wrong and provide them with the skills to learn from this, correcting their errors. This works well as the children work together to correct the mistake and it is a great recap of the strategy. The children now know that a mistake is something to celebrate, offering an opportunity for learning and improving.

4. Embed these values in the wider school culture

For work to be successful across the school, our management team understood the importance of embedding these, and other values of importance to us, within the wider school culture. Coined the “Mulberry Mindset”, we introduced this ethos throughout the entire school. Following training from C.J. Simister, an expert in the subject of independent learning, staff became even more invested in developing this side of our curriculum.

5. Share the approach with parents

We pride ourselves on strong parent partnerships. Our open door policy allows us to give daily feedback to parents and carers, and the impact this has on the children’s personal and academic progress is invaluable. For learners to truly build resilience, they need to be able to apply this in every area of their lives. By sharing our approach with parents, they can continue to support this outside of school.