Wellbeing for All

To nurture a child means to provide the care, support, and guidance necessary for their emotional, physical, intellectual, and social development. It involves creating a loving and supportive environment that helps the child grow into a confident, well-adjusted, and capable individual.

Nurturing a child includes:

Emotional support: Offering love, affection, and reassurance to help the child feel safe, valued, and understood.
Physical care: Meeting the child’s basic needs such as food, shelter, healthcare, and rest.
Teaching and guidance: Helping the child learn important life skills, values, and how to navigate the world around them. This includes teaching them how to manage emotions, solve problems, and interact with others

Nurture is a tried and tested way of relating to children that helps them develop vital social skills, confidence and self-esteem, giving them the skills needed to access learning. The concept of nurture highlights the importance of social environments – who you are with and not who you are born to – and its significant influence on social and emotional skills, wellbeing and behaviour.

The nurturing approach to education offers a range of opportunities for children and young people to engage with missing early nurturing experiences, giving them the social and emotional skills to do well at school and with peers, and to develop their resilience and self-confidence. It encourages pupils to take pride in achieving - addressing the social and emotional needs that can hamper learning.

What is a Nurture Group?

Sometimes children need extra support to help them with their learning and growing into confident, emotionally secure and successful individuals. Nurture groups can help provide support for children, giving them the skills they need to do well at school, and deal more confidently and calmly with the trials and tribulations of everyday life

A nurture group is a specialized, small group in an educational setting designed to support children who may have social, emotional, or behavioral difficulties. The aim of nurture groups is to help children who struggle in a mainstream classroom environment by offering personalized care and attention in a smaller, more structured setting. The focus is on providing a safe and supportive environment where children can develop social skills, emotional regulation, and self-confidence. They are founded on evidence-based practices and offer, inclusive, targeted intervention. Nurture groups address the social, emotional and learning needs of individual pupils by providing the necessary help to remove the barriers to learning.

Nurture groups are psychosocial interventions based on Attachment Theory, the focus being on supporting students to form attachments to loving and caring adults at school. Pupils are immersed in an accepting and warm environment, nothing is taken for granted and everything is explained, supported by role modelling, demonstration and the use of gesture as appropriate. The relationship between the two staff, always nurturing and supportive, provides a role model that children observe and begin to copy. There is great emphasis on emotional literacy, social learning, language development and communication.

Staff supporting nurture groups work with children to develop small, attainable learning targets which can be built upon. The experience of being able to achieve a target and receive praise for this, helps to enhance children's confidence and self-esteem.

AttachmentTheory and Nurture Groups

The Six Principles of Nurture

We are a nurturing school and our nurture provision is underpinned by The 6 Principles of Nurture. These provide the foundation to the emotional, social and behavioural support we give our children. They are based on research in child development and foster a supportive environment where children feel safe to grow, learn and ultimately thrive. Click on the link below for further information on each principle.

The 6 Principles of Nurture

Nurture Groups at BVP

Our Nurture Groups have between 4-6 children and are led by two members of the Pastoral Team. Our Nurture provision is held in The Cottage, a room designed to be a bridge between home and school; a place where children can feel safe and secure. The room aims to replicate a home; has a table to share food, a living room, role play and quiet area to play games and work collaboratively plus a kitchen area to prepare food and snacks.

Children attend four, 2 hour sessions a week either in the morning or the afternoon, currently KS1 runs in the morning and KS2 in the afternoon.

What will my child’s day look like?

Morning sessions :9.00am-11.00am

Afternoon sessions: 1.15pm-3.15pm

All children begin their day in their classroom alongside their peers.
Children brought to the Cottage for the start of their Nurture Group.
Children attend group
Children collected by their classroom adult
Return to classroom for the remainder of the day.

Session Structure

To ensure consistency and predictability the groups follow a set timetable. This is clearly displayed as a visual timetable and referred to throughout the session.

Welcome
Emotion check-in, children place their named peg on how they are feeling
Circle Time- sharing news and a game or activity that encourages the children to develop their communication skills
Learning Activity - Topic based input and related activity. This can include emotional literacy sessions, social skills games, attention and listening activities, crafts and cooking.
Continuous provision- staff join in with the children's play, modelling and facilitating activities and positive relationships, turn taking and working together
Tidy up time
Snack - each week a child is chosen to help be prepare and serve food to the group.
Reflection and relaxation - Storytime, Happy Breathing, Body Scan, mindfulness activities
Goodbye

During the session Children may work 1:1 with an adult, in pairs or in a group to work on particular areas for development that have been identified e.g. interacting with others, sharing and turn-taking, developing trust or self-confidence and self-esteem.

NURTURE GROUP PROVISION SHARES MANY EVIDENCE-BASED
COMPONENTS WITH OTHER EFFECTIVE PSYCHOSOCIAL INTERVENTIONS:

Building affective bonds:
Forming positive, trusting relationships with pupils and being responsive to their individual needs.
Cognitive restructuring:
Perspective taking; recognising triggers of anger; distinguishing between helpful and unhelpful thoughts.
Modelling:
Role modelling of appropriate behaviour/ social skills between two adults participating in constructive interaction.
Consensual goal setting:
Setting achievable targets from the Boxall Profile.
Emotional literacy:
Understanding, identifying and labelling emotions; recognising physical and environmental cues of emotions; providing opportunities for pupils to verbalise their emotional experiences.
Relaxation techniques:
Mindfulness; controlled breathing techniques.

The Boxall Profile and Assessment

What is the Boxall Profile?

The Boxall Profile was created by clinical psychologist ,Dr. John Boxall, to identify and understand the emotional needs of children, and enable more targeted support and interventions. The Boxall Profile is widely used in schools and educational settings.

At Bournville we use the Boxall Profile to identify and assess children who may be experiencing social, emotional or behavioural difficulties, it helps us to understand what lies behind a child’s behaviour and what they may be trying to communicate to us by it. Once identified, we can put in place targeted support to address areas of need and ensure our children get the help and support they need in a way that suits them best.

How does it work?

The Boxall Profile is made up of two questionnaires split into two main strands .

Together the strands help to create a complete picture of the child's emotional and behavioral needs, guiding support strategies and interventions.

Both parts of the profile are considered together because the sections of the Profile are related to each other- the developmental level affects the observed behaviours.

1. Developmental Strand:

Focuses on assessing the child's emotional and social development. It looks at how the child interacts with others, their ability to form relationships, engagement with the world and their emotional maturity. It identifies a child’s strengths.
The Developmental Strands are building blocks, the foundation to be able to successfully learn and function in the classroom. Children must complete these stages to a satisfactory level for successful learning in a mainstream classroom to take place.

2. Diagnostic Strand:

Identifies specific emotional and behavioural difficulties that might be a barrier to a child achieving at school. the child may have. It looks at signs of distress, behavioural issues, or problems with emotional regulation.
Some examples of things assessed here include:

Withdrawal or social isolation

Aggressive or disruptive behaviour

Trouble focusing or completing tasks

Low self-esteem

Difficulty with friendships

It is completed by two adults who know the child well enough to be able to represent their typical behaviour in school.
Children who would benefit from the Nurture Group intervention would have low scores on the Developmental Strands section and high scores on the Diagnostic strand.
Once completed scores are generated for each area of the report , these will highlight any areas of support that the child may need. We can then access resources, strategies and create a targeted learning plan.

A copy of the Boxall Profile Assessment can be viewed here:

Boxall Profile

What is the impact of Nurture Groups?

IMPROVED SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL SKILLS
Children and young people develop confidence and self-esteem and learn to take pride in their work and in behaving positively (Kearney 2005).
They become better at managing their emotions (Cooper and Whitebread 2007) and at empathising with others (Sanders2007), and as a result are able to form more positive relationships with peers and teachers.

IMPROVED ATTENDANCE
As pupils feel safe in the nurture group and in school, they are able to enjoy school more (Sloan et al. 2016) and their overall attendance increases (Estyn 2014; Sanders 2007.)

IMPROVED BEHAVIOUR AND REDUCED EXCLUSIONS
Children and young people’s behaviour significantly improves (Sloan et al. 2016). They feel more settled in their mainstream classroom and are better able to cope with the challenges of the school day, reducing the risk of emotional outbursts and disruptive behaviour. This in turn leads to a reduction in the number of exclusions (Ofsted 2009; March and Kearney 2017.)

IMPROVED PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS
Nurture groups also have a positive impact on the parent-child relationship (Pyle 2015), with children being more affectionate and communicative at home, and parents feeling more confident in being able to help their children (Ofsted 2011.)

IMPACT ON THE WHOLE SCHOOL
Nurture groups help develop affective bonds between teachers and pupils and help create a whole school nurturing ethos (Binnie and Allen
2008; Cooper 2001.)

What is a Nurture Group?

The Six Principles of Nurture

Nurture Groups at BVP

The Boxall Profile and Assessment

A copy of the Boxall Profile Assessment can be viewed here:

What is the impact of Nurture Groups?

School Calendar Colour Key

Bournville Village Primary School

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