The Centre for Emotional Health Nurturing Programme Evaluation

Working in partnership with staff and parents in Oxfordshire schools

This report is an evaluation of the Centre for Emotional Health’s application of the Nurturing Programme across a group of Oxfordshire schools.

The Nurturing Programme underpins all the work of The Centre for Emotional Health. The programme is designed to develop the understanding, skills and ability to lead an emotionally healthy life and to support positive relationships.

Over decades, staff in schools have been trained to deliver this programme to parents, aiming to build individual and family emotional health.

The Oxfordshire project was an attempt broaden and adapt the content of the programme through:

• Working alongside schools for 4/5 years.
• Training and supervision for all staff, alongside programmes for families.
• Working with the whole community, not just individual schools.

Overall, our assessment finds that this whole school approach was successful in creating more emotionally healthy environments. Some of the benefits of which included:

• Improved staff morale, wellbeing, and resilience. This helped recruitment and retention.
• Calmer, happier school cultures, including changes to school policies and communication.
• Perceived improvements in children’s behaviour and attendance.
• Anecdotal evidence of benefits for individual children and families.

However, engagement with the programme was sometimes hindered by external factors like school inspections, Covid-19, and varying degrees of prioritisation by senior leadership teams. This meant that individual schools progressed at different rates and that the most ambitious aspects of the programme needed more time.

This evaluation is mostly based on qualitative interviews with school staff and parents, and we did not seek to ‘measure’ change. This was deliberate because qualitative research is better suited to exploring the elements of the relational approach at the heart of the Nurturing Programme.

While this limits the generalisability of our conclusions, we feel that the passion of the positive feedback from staff and parents does indicate the potential of this approach. We hope that this evaluation can be the foundation of a theory of change for The Nurturing Programme and an inspiration for more schools to investigate its potential.