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When it comes to addressing long-term challenges in pupil behaviour or mental health, schools often assume that a long-term intervention will be the answer. Short-term interventions that last only a week or two are dismissed as inadequate - as “bolt-ons” that can’t solve longer-term problems.

However, two years into my Economic and Social Research Council-funded doctoral study of a week-long residential at a therapeutic farm, I’ve found that this isn’t the case. Short-term interventions can bring real, long-term benefits.

Jamie’s Farm, the charity I am researching, works with pupils aged 10-17 experiencing challenges related to behaviour, absenteeism and poor mental health.

The intervention involves 12 pupils spending a week together at a residential farm site, working on the farm, walking, cooking, gardening and engaging in therapeutic conversations.

The shows 94 per cent of visiting staff see improvements in young people’s self-management during their visit, and 56 per cent of those referred for being at risk of exclusion are no longer at risk six months after their week-long visit.

I’ve spent the past two years observing this programme and interviewing pupils and staff about their involvement in it, including interviews with pupils months or even years after taking part in the week-long residential.

What has become apparent over the course of these observations and interviews is that short-term interventions like this one are not a compressed version of longer-term support; they work through completely different mechanisms. My research has tried to unpack what those mechanisms are.

Here are my key takeaways about how short-term interventions work:

1. Children can leave old versions of themselves behind

Change is hard to enact in front of people who already know who you are and how you tend to behave. In a classroom surrounded by staff and peers, children are often reluctant to try on a new way of being - the social risk of being called out or being laughed at is too high.

However, children in the setting I am researching repeatedly described feeling able to act differently because there were fewer familiar faces there. The residential staff had no prior version of the child to compare against, and this seems to have opened up new potential.

2. Unfamiliar adults enable conversations

Children often tell things to adults they have just met that they have never told the adults they’ve known for years.

My research found that disclosures that have safeguarding implications and trigger the referrals that keep children safe frequently surface during the short-term residential.

This is perhaps because the children have no pre-existing, ongoing relationships with the residential staff, which they feel the need to protect and maintain. The children feel they can say the unsayable things to these adults, precisely because they won’t be there tomorrow.

3. Practising good endings

The fact that short-term residential interventions are over within a week offers a unique chance for young people to practise a positive ending. The end is necessarily built into the structure of the intervention in a way that is understood by children at the outset.

Lots of us find endings hard, although they are an inevitable part of life and worth practising.

For children whose early experience of endings might be inconsistent or painful, being supported by staff who are skilled in holding space for the complicated or difficult feelings that endings might bring up gives them a safe space in which to practice saying goodbye.

4. Positive memory associations

Child psychiatrist Bruce Perry’s work on memory suggests that when children complete a familiar daily activity in a new setting, such as brushing their teeth, the memories and emotional associations formed there stay attached to that action - and are reactivated each time the action is repeated back in their familiar home environment.

Children I interviewed months and years after their week at the farm spoke about daily moments when they are taken back to their memories of the farm. This is perhaps why short-term positive experiences in a new setting can lead to long-term positive effects.

5. The ‘fresh start’ effect

There is evidence that people are more likely to successfully enact change when it’s anchored to a sense of a new beginning, or “temporal landmark”.

Ongoing, long-term support, while still valuable, can’t offer this sense of newness.

A short, bounded, intensive intervention, on the other hand, is a new chapter, and children can draw on that framing to give themselves permission to change.

Short-term residential settings also strip away a child’s usual (sometimes unhelpful) coping mechanisms and habits, giving the child a chance to explore and practice new ways of communicating and acting, without the scaffolding of old habits.

What this means for schools

I’m not suggesting that short-term interventions should replace all long-term support. However, schools should not dismiss the long-term impact that short-term interventions can have.

Short-term interventions do something structurally different, which should be evaluated on those terms, rather than benchmarked against long-term interventions.

When schools are asked to monitor and evidence the impact of interventions, they need to consider mechanisms like novelty, the absence of history, the safety of practising new identities and the openness unfamiliar adults can invite.

Get the short-term support right, and a few intensive days in a new setting can do work that months of well-intentioned, familiar support cannot.

Clare Dash is a doctoral student at Loughborough University and a former secondary English teacher

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