St. Wilfrid's Story: 25 Lancashire Minds

St. Wilfrid’s Story

Building resilience, one lesson at a time

In today’s world, building resilience from a young age is more important than ever. That’s why we’re so proud to see the positive impact of Bounce Forward – our interactive resilience programme in Year 5 at St. Wilfrid’s C of E Primary School in Ribchester.

How would you describe Bounce Forward and the impact it has had on pupils?

Year 5 at St. Wilfrid’s C of E Primary School, Preston
Class teacher – Emma Taylor

Bounce Forward is a really great, fun, interactive programme where the children are being taught coping strategies and things they can do to be resilient and get through tough times.
We’ve seen the children demonstrating the strategies being taught throughout their school day, it’s fantastic to see them repeating things back to me. They’re telling me, “to be resilient and to bounce forward from things”. It’s clear they really enjoy the sessions.

I think we live in a world that is really tough, and in this modern world we need to prepare our children to be resilient and to be able to cope in life – and Bounce Forward is a preventative programme. So it’s giving them those strategies before things get too tough.

I think every school should take part in Bounce Forward. It gives the children strategies to cope in a really difficult modern world that we live in. The sessions are fun and interactive. The children love James. He puts the sessions together in a really child friendly way, and it’s good sometimes to have another adult from outside the school coming in and working with the children. Giving them the same sort of messages that we want them to to have, around the growth mindset of being positive and moving forward from challenges.

In our lessons daily, the children are saying things to one another and to me and in front of the whole class about being resilient and persevering. Some of the things that James has suggested that they have in their ‘Resilience Record’ books, which the children are filling in, coming back after lunch sometimes, and in the morning I can see them writing down times they’ve been resilient and thinking about which resilient framework that comes from.