The Thrive Approach is a dynamic, developmental, trauma-informed approach to meeting the emotional and social needs of all children and young people. It is informed by recent developments in neuroscientific research, and is underpinned by a theoretical base in child development theory, attachment theory and research into creativity, play and the arts.

Fundamental to the Approach is the finding from neuroscientific research that children and young people’s brains develop in response to their experiences in relationships. This means that if we want to support optimal development in children and young people, we need to understand their specific social and emotional needs at each age and then provide them with the right set of experiences and relationships to meet those needs.

Coombe Boys School have embedded the Thrive approach through training, tools and resources to support students in the following areas:

Understanding of Thrive theory

We use the Thrive developmental model, coupled with insights from neuroscience and attachment theory, to give you an understanding of what young people need at each stage of development and what’s involved in meeting those needs.

Identifying and meeting young people’s age-related needs

Thrives online assessment, action-planning and measurement tool, Thrive-Online, enables us to identify the age-related needs of groups of young people and recommends strategies and activities designed to meet those needs. From this, we can create targeted action plans, which can be incorporated into our schemes of work and lesson plans. Thrive-Online then enables us to track young people’s progress over time, so that we can adapt our plans to meet their changing needs.

Identifying and meeting young people’s additional needs

In addition to age-related needs, some young people have unmet needs from earlier in their development, which we call ‘developmental interruptions’. These interruptions can make it difficult for young people to access learning, manifesting in behaviours such as problems forming relationships with others, difficulties with focusing and staying on task, verbal and physical aggression, agitation, avoidance and zoning . Thrive-Online enables us to identify these young people easily so that we can refer them to our school’s Licensed Thrive Practitioners for more intensive support. The Licensed Practitioners then uses Thrive-Online to conduct a more in-depth profile of each young person’s individual needs and creates a bespoke action plan of strategies and activities designed to address those needs, which they deliver in a series of one-to-one or small-group sessions.

Developing relational skills

For optimal brain development, how you are with young people is more important than what you do with them. For this reason, Thrive offers training and resources in specific relational skills that will enhance our interactions with young people so that we are able to respond to their behaviours in ways that foster emotional literacy, self-awareness and the capacity to self-regulate.

Creating the right environment, policies and practices

Creating a school environment that best supports young people’s social and emotional development involves considering the set-up of the physical environment, as well as the content of the policies and practices that govern how the school operates. To assist us with this, Thrive provides guidance on how to make best use of whatever space we have to create an environment that feels safe for all of the young people in our school and how to adapt our policies and practices so that they take into account the developmental needs of all our young people.