Practice

Libra is a Thrive community and we have a number of Licensed Thrive Practitioners who ensure that the Thrive Approach is interwoven through our communication interaction with children and through therapeutic work to help children develop emotional maturity.

Thrive is a systematic approach to the early identification of emotional developmental need in children so that differentiated plans can be put in place quickly by the school adults working most closely with the child. It is preventative, reparative, pragmatic and easy to use.

Addressing emotional development needs early builds resilience, decreases the risk of mental illness, prepares children to be ready and willing to learn and it helps those children who are underachieving to become more positive about their learning to improve engagement.

Using the Thrive Approach:

• Benefits children as they show improvements in behaviour and social relating. Incidents of poor behaviour reduce in number and children engage more positively. Children who do not meet the threshold for specialist support receive Thrive support.
• Helps school adults to put in place effective strategies for children.
• Within school provides Local Authorities good value for money placements.
• Improves relationships between school adults and children and supports staff to feel more confident and more competent to deal with disruptive behaviours.
• Contributes to the Libra workforce development producing better informed, better abled staff.
• Facilitates closer collaboration with parents and helps school staff with strategies to support parents so that they feel more included, informed and supported.
• Is an excellent intervention to support ongoing emotional and social development.

Our Licensed Practitioners can assess and identify the learning needs of our children. The Thrive Approach informs every aspect of our provision to better meet the developmental and learning needs of all our children.

Our practitioners are skilled in:

• The observation of children’s behaviour
• Understanding what that behaviour communicates about the children’s emotional and social development
• Screening children’s current emotional and social skills
• Knowing how that relates to their readiness and ability to engage with learning
• How to make conscious use of their relationship with the child to enhance their wellbeing
• Being able to select differentiated strategies to address specific learning gaps
• Changing behaviour management plans to ensure they meet the needs of the individual children in terms of emotional and social skills development.

The Thrive Approach centres around a personal programme for each child which is based on the identification of underlying needs and a straightforward set of actions designed to meet them.

Playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy.

PACE is a way of thinking, feeling, communicating and behaving that aims to make the child feel safe.

PACE focuses on the whole child, not simply the behaviour. It helps children be more secure with school adults and reflect upon themselves, their thoughts, feelings and behaviour, building the skills that are so necessary for maintaining a successful and satisfying life. The child discovers that they are doing the best that they can, and are not bad or lazy or selfish. Problems diminish as the need for them reduces.

Through PACE and feeling safer, children discover that they can now do better. They learn to rely on school adults and trust them to truly know them. They learn that school adults can look after them in a way that they could never do on their own. When children experience the adults doing the best they can to understand them and trying to work out together more effective ways for the child to understand, make sense of and manage their emotions, thoughts and behaviour they start to believe that the school adults really will keep on trying until things get better for all of them.

By using PACE, school adults reduce the level of conflict, defensiveness and withdrawal that we often see in our children. Using PACE enables school adults to see the strengths and positive features that lie underneath more negative and challenging behaviour.