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“There is an argument that kids are becoming less resilient. What’s your view on that?”

Katie Barry sits back in her chair as she considers my question. It’s the last week of term and she’s about to step down as headteacher of St George’s Church of England Community Primary School in Lincolnshire - a role she’s held for the past 20 years.

“I think our children’s behaviour is worsening,” she muses. “So yes, I think I probably would say they’re less resilient now…We certainly have more children showing more heightened behaviours, and resilience is not all of that but [it is] part of that.”

Barry is not alone in this assessment. The belief that young people are lacking the ability to bounce back from setbacks is widespread, and successive governments have pointed to the need to develop pupils’ resilience for the sake of their mental health, school attendance, academic attainment and future life chances.

Over the past decade, schools have taken that message to heart, delivering programmes to build “character”, cultivating “growth mindset” and running assemblies on “grit”.

But there’s a problem: the evidence for school interventions designed to develop resilience or similar character traits is not compelling - it’s mixed. On top of this, some argue that it’s unhelpful to tell children that they can overcome adversity if they only put their minds to it.

For example, St George’s is in the town of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, where there are high levels of socioeconomic deprivation. For Barry, that means the picture on resilience is complicated, and that’s why she hesitated to answer when asked if children have less of it.

“In a lot of ways, you’d think our children were not very resilient because they don’t always have the skills and the capacity to push themselves, to be self motivated, to be goal-orientated. But in other respects, I think they’re exceptionally resilient because of the adversity that they face day in, day out,” Barry explains.

Ministers pushing the idea that these children need more “grit” is, she says, “not helpful at all”.

So, if there is little evidence to support teaching it and a chance the most vulnerable young people could be negatively affected by focusing on it, why does resilience still hold weight in education? Have teachers been hoodwinked by buzzwords like “grit” and “growth mindset”? Or is there something in these ideas worth sticking with?

Should schools be focused on resilience?

Debates about the nature of resilience were reignited last year when Bridget Phillipson and Wes Streeting (then education secretary and health secretary respectively) wrote about how the government’s extension of mental health support hubs would help children to develop .

But as far back as 2014, politicians were pushing similar narratives.

Nicky Morgan, education secretary in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, launched a multi-million-pound to make England a “global leader” in teaching character, resilience and grit.

The scheme offered grants to schools to develop character projects and recognised the most successful through . Morgan also commissioned a series of school-based trials into character education programmes, led by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).

At the same time, Labour shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt was also extolling the benefits of teaching character, claiming that developing children’s resilience was more important than focusing “purely on good grades”.

This thinking drew on popular US research, in particular the work of Carol Dweck, who coined the term “growth mindset”, and Angela Duckworth, who is widely known for popularising the term “grit”. Models based on this body of research were already being used in successful US charter schools, which lent further weight to the Department for Education’s proposals.

For teachers, these ideas also made intuitive sense. It seems a given, for example, that the ability to reframe perceived failures as opportunities to learn is helpful, as Dweck’s theory of growth mindset argues.

Yet by 2017, Morgan’s character scheme had already been discontinued by her successor, Justine Greening, and the research trials she had commissioned were returning their results. Overall, the findings were not positive.

Several programmes showed minimal or no impact. For example, the Changing Mindsets programme (which delivered teacher training and pupil workshops in growth mindset approaches in primary schools) was found to have . For this reason, the EEF urged teachers to be “cautious” about using such approaches.

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Despite this, in February 2019 new education secretary Damian Hinds announced that the DfE would develop a to support schools in helping pupils build character, “character and resilience are as crucial to young people’s future success as academic qualifications”.

But by this point, other voices were beginning to raise concerns about what they saw as policymakers’ fixation on resilience.

In a , the British Psychological Society said that while “supporting children to thrive and safeguarding their future is an important goal… there is a debate about how a child’s resilience and character contributes to achieving that goal and what the government’s role in developing them should be. Psychologists who work with children and study character and resilience are concerned about how these terms are used and how well the concepts are understood”.

“The government’s focus on children being able to ‘bounce back’ if they do not succeed at something first time is not appropriate for many children and young people,” the paper continued. “It does not account for their wider socioeconomic context and its impact on their wellbeing.”

Similar concerns remain today, including among some who work in schools.

“I don’t think that sort of ‘stiff upper lip’, soldier on and get on with it attitude is helpful at all,” says Gemma Corby, a secondary school Sendco. “Obviously, we do want people to be resilient, but it is a big ask for a child.”

Rhiannon Philips-Bianco, head of wellbeing at international schools group Globeducate, agrees.

“Often the way resilience gets represented in schools is that one small element gets taken out that is basically pitched as perseverance: you need to keep going, whatever the cost… And resilience, of course, is so much broader than that,” she says.

And David Clayton, chief executive officer of Endeavour Learning Trust, who has written about his own challenging upbringing for ����Vlog, says we need to be cautious about centring the issue on the child.

“I really worry about the language of resilience,” he says. “I think we’ve got to be really careful that we don’t create a narrative which is if you’re finding something hard, it’s because you’re the problem.”

Considering that the evidence picture has also not vastly improved, does this mean that any work in schools to develop children’s resilience should be consigned to the intervention scrapheap?

It’s not quite that straightforward.

Supporting children’s wellbeing

Experts still suggest that having resilience is a good thing, particularly in light of spiralling problems with youth mental health. , one in five children and young people aged 8 to 25 had a probable mental health condition, a figure that has been rising since 2017. And a into mental health, conducted by Professor Peter Fonagy, found there has been a in mental distress among children and young people.

“It’s important for all children to learn how to deal with life, how to deal with disappointment, how to deal with not getting your own way, how to not take things personally,” says Linda Graham, director of The Centre for Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

And Willem Kuyken, Ritblat professor of mindfulness and psychological science at the University of Oxford, says that resilience “does really matter, but we have to be really clear about what we mean here”.

“I don’t think it’s helpful in schools to think of the unit of resilience as the child,” he adds.

Lauren Bellaera, who was speaking to ����Vlog in her former role as director of research and insights at ImpactEd Group (she is now chief research officer at TASO), also recommends caution in how we define resilience.

“The concept is really nebulous,” she says. “When we’re talking about resilience…we’re actually talking about a number of interrelated outcomes and constructs together.”

This picture is further complicated by the fact that resilience is often lumped together in schools and education policy with other character traits - or substituted for related but unique concepts, such as “grit”.

While Duckworth, who popularised the term “grit” in the context of character education, narrowly defines it as “the combination of passion and perseverance to pursue long-term goals”, the word is now routinely used interchangeably with “resilience” to describe the general ability to bounce back from setbacks - including by politicians, as outlined above.

But grit and growth mindset are not actually the same as resilience. Furthermore, as Graham warns, these ideas are sometimes simplified in education to the point where they “become a meme, basically”.

Schools may, for example, tell kids to have a growth mindset while modelling the opposite thinking. “We talk about intelligence as though it’s a fixed thing and then we model that through sets and streaming,” she points out.

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At the root of this confusion, some argue, is the fact that resilience is often positioned as a character trait when it should be thought of as something more structural.

“[Resilience] isn’t a fixed trait a child either has or lacks,” Kuyken says. “It’s better understood as the fit between a young person and their circumstances - their peer relationships, their school climate and the conditions of their lives, particularly their home environment. So the question isn’t only ‘how do we make children more resilient?’ but ‘are the systems around them supportive of resilience and resilient themselves?’”

Tamsin Ford, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry and head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, adds that this fit between the child and their circumstances does not remain static.

“Resilience is a dynamic construct - it is not just a product of an individual but also highly dependent on their context (family, school, community) and will change over time,” she says.

The Covid-19 pandemic is a perfect example of how a young person can be resilient one day and then suffer a series of unavoidable knocks that “undermines their ability to cope”, adds Kuyken.

For this reason, he suggests, schools might need to be cautious in how they frame work around resilience.

“The risk in the ‘bounce back’ or ‘grit’ narrative is that it locates the problem inside the child. If a young person can’t bounce back, that gets read as not being gritty enough - which adds shame to difficulty and lets the context off the hook. It also tends to ask the least-resourced children to solve, through personal effort, problems that are really about poverty and inequality.”

In a recent interview with ����Vlog, Duckworth herself made a similar point about grit, saying: “I don’t think blaming anyone for not having grit, whether they’re 12 or 42, is helpful.”

She, too, pointed to the importance of context: “If you don’t understand the power of the situation… you can just say, ‘Well, these kids don’t have grit,’ as though that’s the problem.”

Of course, many teachers and school leaders are already well aware of this, particularly those like Barry, who work in areas of high deprivation.

“[The children] are sometimes hungry. They are often cold. They are tired. They are sharing beds with siblings, and yet they still get up and get dressed and come to school every day,” she points out.

So, if context plays such a huge role, does this mean teachers ultimately don’t have the power to shift the dial on resilience?

Bellaera doesn’t think so. “There is a debate around, is it a state that you can move? You can. It is teachable,” she says.

Measuring ‘mental strength’

In recent work with the charity the High Performance Foundation (along with other organisations, including E-ACT and Lift Schools multi-academy trusts), Bellaera has helped to develop a measure of , which aims to capture the various constructs that combine to support young people to cope with life’s challenges.

While resilience is an “absolutely core part” of this, looking at it alone felt “too simplistic”, explains Chloe Dannatt, CEO of the High Performance Foundation.

“You can be resilient but your self-belief can be on the floor,” she says. “Or you might have resilience because life’s hard and it keeps throwing things at you but your emotional control might be over the place.”

With this in mind, the team identified six “pillars” that combine to form “mental strength”, with resilience being one of these. They have developed a tool to measure this and are working to validate it with UK pupils. That’s important, says Bellaera, because many existing measures of resilience and related traits have only been validated in the US, often with university students.

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“We don’t actually know if they are suitable for our pupils, and especially if you’re thinking about pupil premium or SEND, that really matters,” she says.

Both Bellaera and Dannatt believe that resilience is something we can teach, but what might that look like in practice?

From the research, it seems clear that a blanket, whole-school approaches may not be the way to go.

“[Resilience] can be supported but I’d be cautious about the idea that you can reliably teach resilience to a whole year group through a set curriculum,” says Kuyken. “In our - one of the largest of its kind, 85 schools and over 8,000 students - school-based mindfulness training didn’t improve students’ mental health overall. We’re not an outlier; several well-designed trials of universal programmes have found the same. And what helps one child can be neutral or, occasionally, unhelpful for another - especially those already struggling.”

This makes sense, given that resilience is so dependent on the individual fit between a child and their circumstances.

As an alternative, Ford suggests schools could provide training around skills that “promote coping, such as emotional regulation, problem solving and conflict resolution”, and do so “in spiral curricula that repeat and reinforce with greater complexity as children progress through school”.

Graham similarly suggests the best approach might be to “teach the building blocks” of resilience, in the form of the “social and emotional competencies that we want children to have”.

“So, responsible decision making, empathy for others, understanding yourself, managing your emotions,” she says. “Through social and emotional learning comes resilience, and that is the key.”

Crucially, these approaches come with the backing of evidence. The social and emotional learning (SEL) approaches have a positive impact, on average, of three months’ additional progress in academic outcomes over the course of an academic year.

“Alongside academic outcomes, SEL interventions have an identifiable and valuable impact on attitudes to learning and social relationships in school,” the EEF adds.

There are several frameworks that have good evidence of impact, including the framework, which Kuyken recommends.

Schools may also need to give young people ample opportunities to put these skills into practice, through a broad range of educational experiences.

Manny Botwe, headteacher of Tytherington School in Macclesfield and acting president of the Association of School and College Leaders, gives the example of taking part in a school production, where “you’ve got to work as part of a team. You’ve got to turn up, even when you don’t want to. That is where you learn things like accountability and getting through things, even when they’re tough”.

There are also, he adds, “things within the curriculum which may not be explicitly about resilience but are actually central to it”.

“Let’s ensure the curriculum is really challenging. Let’s provide [pupils] with practical opportunities where they will be exposed to challenge, and let’s talk them through it so that they understand that this is part of the natural process,” Botwe says.

Barry adds that building resilience is “far more about culture and opportunity than it is about your PSHE curriculum”, but notes that schools need funding to offer those opportunities.

At the time of our interview, St George’s had a trip booked for the autumn term, which the school could not subsidise as fully as in recent years. As a result, the trip was undersubscribed, leaving doubt as to whether it could go ahead.

“So then you’re going to get a group of children who maybe don’t get to go on a residential, where their resilience would genuinely be put to the test,” says Barry.

Meanwhile, Clayton emphasises the point about culture; he sees a role for leaders in setting the climate for students to take planned risks.

“We might think that what we need to do is test kids more and challenge them more and create situations of difficulty because that’s how you build resilience,” he says. “I think it’s the opposite. Yes, it’s about exposing them to risk, but it’s about creating that really nurturing environment around them and that safety net so that they feel empowered to take risks in a safe way.”

Building the right culture

For Kuyken, this gets to the heart of the matter. The key shift for schools, he says, is “from trying to teach resilience into children towards building it around them”.

One of the findings of the MYRIAD study, he adds, was that “school climate and relationships matter, and that looking after teachers is part of the infrastructure of children’s resilience”.

In fact, everything about the resilience conversation likely applies just as much to staff as it does to students, suggests Philips-Bianco - as children aren’t the only ones the sector routinely expects to bounce back.

As well as considering teachers, experts suggest schools need to pay particular attention to vulnerable children - such as those with SEND or with a history of adverse childhood experiences - who may lack the resilience-boosting architecture their peers take for granted.

In terms of what schools should be doing in practice, Ford sums it up: “I would prioritise school climate (shown to influence the mental health of pupils), coping skills, and prompt and timely evidence-based interventions for those who are struggling either with accessing education (due to SEND or problems with attendance) or mental health.”

Overall, the message seems to be that schools and policymakers actually aren’t wrong to make building resilience a goal of education. However, a few inspirational assemblies or a slick whole-school programme won’t be enough to realise that goal.

As Kuyken points out, schools are facing significant problems around young people’s mental health, attendance and behaviour. It is understandable to hope for a simple solution. That’s why the political messaging around resilience is so seductive.

“But it’s not a simple answer,” he says. “It’s going to be an answer that is in [children’s] peer relationships. It’s going to be about their home life. It’s going to be about their school life. It’s going to be about the pressures that young people experience.”

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