PROVINCIA DE BURGOS

Launching the intervention throughout the school was identified as a way of ensuring greater engagement with the intervention across all school groups. This would be strengthened via:

l devoting more resources to timely launch events, targeting both students and staff

l a greater web presence, including interactive online content to engage schools during a Phase III trial

l the use of locally adaptable newsletters to inform staff and students about the activities and outputs

arising from the intervention

Needs assessment survey

Needs assessment data collection and tailored reports for each school were an acceptable and powerful external input that helped all the school action groups to identify priorities. This should remain integral to the intervention approach and logic model. It could be improved by:

l ensuring that needs assessment data are delivered to intervention schools in a timely and accessible

manner at the start of the intervention (i.e. September–October)

l adopting a needs assessment approach that aims to identify the‘positive’ features of the school

environment as well as challenges and needs (i.e. an‘assets-based’ approach)

l continuing to compare each school against the average, but ensuring facilitators aid in the

interpretation of these data, including through benchmarking against other schools with a similar socioeconomic intake as well as the average overall

l ensuring that all reporting is accessible and student centred

l using annual surveys in intervention schools to monitor progress and identify new/ongoing priorities.

Action groups

Action groups are an innovative and powerful mechanism for supporting student-led change to address key school-level risk and protective factors for aggressive behaviour. The action groups could be

improved via:

l recruiting students from a mixture of years (e.g. years 7–9) into the action group and, when necessary,

inviting particular students to participate in order to ensure a diverse group

l ensuring that the head or deputy head teacher is a member of the group to make sure it has sufficient

power to change school policies

l external facilitators working with the action group co-ordinator to identify the best time(s)

for meetings locally and helping them consider any practical barriers and how these might be overcome

l providing what students and staff identified as a‘grown-up’ environment for group meetings.

External facilitators

External facilitators were consistently reported to have provided a highly valuable,‘external push’ for

schools. This support should be maintained in a Phase III trial. Ideally, the existing facilitators should be retained if possible, and additional educational consultants also recruited. External facilitators will continue to be educational consultants with former school leadership experience. An intervention manager will be required, to provide training and support to ensure programme fidelity by the external facilitators, including through use of a virtual learning environment to share resources and examples of best practice online. The intervention team should be managed separately from the research team, and should be housed within an educational institution, which we envisage would be the Institute of Education at the University of London. Key roles and responsibilities for external facilitators will include:

l establishing an effective ongoing working relationship with the SMT in their schools

l arranging a‘catch-up’ call with school’s intervention lead in advance of each action group meeting to

support planning, allocation of tasks and administration

l advocating for both students and staff to promote‘equality of voice’ and effective decision-making

involving representatives of the whole school

l supporting the co-ordination of training and curriculum implementation as required at their school(s).

Staff training in restorative practices

Staff training in restorative practices was consistently identified as being a critical component in

implementing a whole-school restorative approach to behaviour change. However, a number of challenges emerged in terms of delivery and staff engagement. In a future trial, it would be essential to ensure

trainers are aware of each school’s particular context, and improve the timeliness and reach of training.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

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Therefore, the external facilitators would themselves be trained to provide training in the schools with which they work. Training would also be improved via:

l ensuring that training is undertaken at the start of the school year to pump-prime other activities and

increase awareness of the intervention across the school

l a comprehensive pre-training audit to identify schools’ needs, what they hoped to achieve and the

most appropriate method to‘cascade’ learning through the whole school

l more engaging, interactive training methods using‘realistic’ examples from similar secondary schools

l ensuring that students from the action team attend the training, and they are included and

engaged in it.

Social and emotional skills curriculum

The student social and emotional skills curriculum was consistently identified as being a valuable and flexible component. In our pilot trial, as a result of the time needed for curriculum planning, this was delivered only in the third (summer) term. The curriculum could be refined further via:

l greater advanced planning and preparation with each school’s PSHE lead

l the addition of more interactive activities.

New intervention partnerships

New intervention partnerships should also be developed with the Department of Education and Ofsted to maximise synergy with the broader policy environment and assessment frameworks within which English secondary schools operate. Similarly, consultations with further public health stakeholders in England should take place to explore how this intervention can be integrated and mainstreamed with ongoing policy programmes that aim to increase access to psychological therapies and support the social and emotional aspects of learning more strategically.