Resilience: How far does the intervention ‘Bounce Back’ impact on children’s resilience in an Upper KS2 setting?

This research project’s main aim was to find out how far the intervention ‘Bounce Back’ impacted on developing children’s resilience in an Upper Key Stage 2 setting. The Bounce Back programme is an intervention scheme from Australia, which attempts to develop children’s resilience, particularly those who show a lack of it, by allowing them to gain a better understanding of the term and how to learn from their mistakes. It teaches many skills through many different activities that engage the children. Throughout this research, the school will be referred to as MMPS. The thesis is the second part of research about resilience within this setting. Last year, I conducted an investigation (Gibson, 2018) into how children in Year 5 perceived their resilience by gaining an understanding of how the children reacted to new challenges in school and how they self-analysed in relation to their own resilience in order to identify the main issues for future interventions. Using the findings from that research project, led to the second phase of the investigation of how well the Bounce Back intervention scheme can develop a child’s resilience in Primary School. This study seemed vital at MMPS, as we have witnessed for many years a recurring issue that our children do not show many signs of resilience. In my previous study, I argued that many of our parents seem to stifle their children’s independence by allowing them to give up easily on activities, homework, clubs and work. Whilst last year I investigated the resilience within children of ages nine and ten to gain evidence that they declared low levels of resilience, my colleagues and I felt that this year an intervention was needed to see if we could try and improve these issues in school, without parental involvement, within Years 5 and 6. I commented on the work of Newman (2002 p34) who quoted, 'Where social capital is high, the probability of children in even unfavourable environments developing resilient characteristics is significantly increased' (Gibson 2018 p1). At MMPS, because of the nature of our parents and the backgrounds they come from, one might assume that our children would be very resilient. Unfortunately, that has not been the case for us at all. In fact, it has been quite the opposite. Our children are given many life experiences outside of school but they show signs of being too frightened to fail at new challenges and lack resilience overall.