A therapeutic programme for primary schoolchildren that was designed by the Kids Company founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh, is to be rolled out to more schools after a pilot scheme showed a dramatic improvement in test results.
The Nurture programme, which supports children who face multiple adversities in their lives, has been running in a single primary school in central London. Not only do Sats results appear to have gone up, attendance and attention have improved and there has been less disruption in class, the school says.
Batmanghelidjh, who died earlier this month, had devised the programme after joining forces post-Kids Company with the Oasis charity, which runs more than 50 schools in five regions of England, often in areas of severe disadvantage, as part of its work.
Steve Chalke, the founder of Oasis, said there had been a 40 percentage point increase in key stage 2 Sats results for 10- and 11-year-olds at Oasis Academy Johanna in Waterloo, where the trial has been running. Now in its third year, the programme will be rolled out to other Oasis primaries and a Nurture guide will be made available to schools across the country.
It would be Batmanghelidjh’s “living legacy”, Chalke said. “It was Camila’s idea. It’s taken Camila’s philosophy of a child-centric, child-first approach. Camila had a completely unique way of understanding what should sit at the heart of education.”
Nurture is an attachment theory-based programme aimed at supporting children who, because of challenging situations in their lives, find school hard to relate to and can behave in destructive ways, harming themselves or distracting others, Chalke said.
Rather than punishing children who “kick off” in class, Nurture helps them to “connect to themselves and others and, in this way, to become more resilient whenever something upsets them or makes them anxious”.
The programme “is not a quick-burst diagnostic intervention to respond to medical or mental health conditions but instead a longer-term programme, enabling children to rebuild trust, often damaged where attachments have been impaired”.
