Vulputate eu scelelrisque felis imperdiet proin fermentum leo. A iaculis at erat pellentesque adipiscing commodo.

The thinking behind Circles for Learning

Non tellus orci ac auctor augue mauris augue neque gravida. Nunc lobortis mattis aliquam faucibus.

How the project fits with whole school objectives

Aliquet lectus proin nibh nisl condimentum. Aenean euismod elementum nisi.

Developing positive foundations for mental health and wellbeing

Dui faucibus in ornare quam viverra orci. Ornare massa eget egestas purus viverra.

How the project can be used to build resilience in children

Duis tristique sollicitudin nibh sit. Nec sagittis aliquam malesuada. bibendum arcu vitae.

What teachers say

Mauris ultrices eros in cursus turpis massa tincidunt. Ultrices eros in cursu.

About the founder

Discover more

Explore the project

What we do

What is the Circles For Learning project?

Circles for Learning is a unique whole class or small group project that is focused on developing the five essential elements that enable positive foundations for mental health and wellbeing to develop.

Positive relationships: including social skills, empathy and restorative practices, and the learning relationship.

Positive relationships

Emotional literacy: including recognising and managing emotions in ourselves and others.

Emotional literacy

Self-awareness: including self-concept, self-esteem, self-regulation, resilience and self-image.

Self awareness

Skills for learning: including learning dimensions, emotional barriers to learning, working with others and problem solving.

Skills for learning

Understanding the brain, learning, and behaviour: including brain development, the stress response, trauma, and mindsets.

The brain, learning, and beahviour

Circles for Learning trains and then supports teachers to bring a parent and young child into the classroom (KS1-KS3) once a month for a year. This amazing experience allows children to observe the development of relationships, watch learning unfold, understand how our sense of self develops and observe and understand emotions and the ways in which they impact on our behaviour.

With the guidance and support of their teacher they explore and think about what they have seen and how this may link to their own development, learning, thinking, behaviour and ways of interacting with others. These parent young child observation visits are the provocation or stimulus to follow up work led by the teacher exploring each of the five essential elements that form the foundations for positive mental health and wellbeing.

How the project works

With their class teacher’s support, the Children and Young People observe, explore and discuss the interactions, learning and emotions being played out in front of them. They get to watch how a baby responds to a loving adult and how this important relationship enables them to be curious and explore; how they behave when frightened or overwhelmed; and how they learn to do things or manage the frustrations when they are not able to. They get to watch how emotions become the driving force to a range of behaviours and how the baby starts to put together an idea of who they are and how they can interact with the world around them.

Working alongside their class teacher, the children and young people explore how someone else might feel and how that feeling influences their actions. Whilst doing this the class teacher is in a privileged position to help the children link what they see to their own learning, emotions and behaviours.

What will children learn

Emotional competencies, so that CYP can talk about how things make them feel and how to manage those feelings.

Social competencies, so that they have the skills and knowledge to develop positive relationships and manage conflict.

Greater self-awareness, so that they can discuss the strategies they use to motivate themselves or self-regulate, the self-talk they employ when stuck and the strategies they use for solving problems.

The ability to recognise the needs of others and think about ways of supporting them.

Strategies they can then use to manage learning when it doesn't go well, or they become stuck.

Awareness of how their emotions drive their behaviour and how their behaviour may affect others.

Strategies to manage themselves when things don’t go as planned or they experience overwhelming feelings.

Benefits for children

The Circles for Learning project focuses on staff development as well as on work with the children and young people. To enable staff to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to run the project there are a range of online training courses. Each course is supported by a coach who has developed Circles for Learning in their own classroom. Due to the wide variety of knowledge and experience that Teachers have, the training is specific to their needs and the needs of their school. For some, this may mean completing the 5 courses, however for others this may mean completing only one or two.

Circles for Learning offers schools the opportunity to develop a proactive approach to supporting CYP’s mental health and wellbeing with prevention at the core. It supports staff development enabling staff to develop a classroom environment that builds and grows the 5 essential areas that have been shown to create positive foundations for mental health and wellbeing. Courses are all interactive, low cost and CPD accredited. Evidence demonstrates that teaching strategies enabling children and young people to talk, share and cope with a variety of issues and difficulties has a positive effect on their mental health and wellbeing in the future. Circles for Learning is a very powerful project which, through a range of research, has demonstrated positive impact both for CYP and the staff who take part. It has demonstrated that it can make a real difference to: CYP’s social skills, empathy, resilience, emotional literacy, self-awareness, behaviour and the ability to develop positive relationships in and out of the classroom.

Circles for Learning offers schools the opportunity to create a pro-active approach to mental health and wellbeing with relationships at its heart.

Benefits for schools

Circles for Learning is not your average project that supports children who are struggling in school. It has been developed to really make a difference and is based on science and research in real schools. It enables teachers to build the skills that underpin positive mental health and wellbeing that children need to flourish and learn. It has been designed as a class programme, not an intervention to support our most vulnerable children but a programme that works with all the children so that those with strong skills in emotional literacy self-esteem, emotional regulation and social skills ca support and model these vital skills with others. It is fully inclusive.

To ensure the success of each school that uses this programme our experienced coaches support each practitioner throughout their first year. We help you set up the programme, identify the areas that are most appropriate for your children and young people to develop and ten deliver a range of exciting activities to support their learning. Oh yes and help you manage the amazing sessions when you parent and young child visit your classroom.

With carefully designed and written online training modules, exciting resources and lesson plans as well as online coaching we ensure that the stress of running a new project is removed, ensuring that teachers can really focus on the learning of the children and young people they are working with. Teachers have enough to do without the addition of the stress and worry of a new project.

The Circles for Learning programme consists of 3 main parts:

Exciting resources and lesson plans to use with children and young people

Supportive coaching sessions for the first year