Beyond lessons

Many schools provide lessons to develop young people’s emotional skills. The evidence for such lessons and teaching is, at best, mixed. In some cases, teaching children about emotional risks, wellbeing and practices like mindfulness can even be harmful.

The reasons for this are complex, but often to do with the fact that emotional wellbeing is best lived in practice, rather than learned in a lesson.  Rarely does understanding about a disease make a person healthier; instead we become well by learning how to steer the real world challenges in front of us.  Support is best received in situ rather than within discreet teaching events, and will vary for each of us.

STEER’s toolkit goes beyond lessons, enabling teachers to give the right support to the right child at the rich time. As a result we help your students develop protective factors such as healthy self-regulation, stronger social relationships and greater self-awareness.

Personalised feedback

STEER has pioneered a personalised approach to student emotional skills training. Our Student Wellbeing Development Platform delivers personalised feedback for each student from Y7+, each term, with targeted goals to work towards.

We use our brief termly STEER assessment to track the needs a student has at any time. The result are that: 

• Every student appreciates a current strength, and also focuses on an area that needs work

• Students work on their goals within relationship: their tutors are enabled to support them

• Students gain a sense of personal agency, with milestones from the age of 8 up to 18

Holding the whole story

We believe that the greatest resource any of us owns, is our own story. Understanding our own story, and in particular, how we have navigated the obstacles and challenges of our lives, provides the backbone to our emotional resilience.

When a school implements STEER, we track how each student steers four social-emotional factors from the age of 8 until they are 18. The four factors are their:

– Trust of them self

– Trust of others

– Self-disclosure

– Seeking change

The pathway of how these fluctuate reflects how that young person has steered the challenges they have faced. Together they form an objective record of social-emotional development during adolescence.

We store this information securely, under GDPR, in a vault only the school can access until, aged 15, it is shared with the young person. We provide two carefully designed curricula for schools to share the data and enable each student to understand and learn from it.

We see our role at STEER as holding the whole story for each young person, before we carefully give it back to them as they head out into life beyond school.