Making it real and making it last! Sustainability of teacher implementation of a whole-school resilience programme

Life for children and young people in the twenty-first century includes the need to master the usual developmental hurdles along with relatively new challenges such as cyber safety, greater family mobility, higher levels of family breakdown and easier access to addictive drugs and alcohol. These contemporary challenges have prompted widespread interest from governments, policymakers and educators around the world into how educational policy and school practices can help children and young people develop greater resilience. This chapter reviews the importance of resilience for both teachers and students. It then draws on lessons learned from the implementation over 5–12 years of a whole-school resilience programme in ten schools. The research findings demonstrate that a combination of school factors, school system factors and programme-specific factors facilitate all teachers’ implementation of a resilience programme. This same combination of factors was also found to be crucial for the capacity of the school to sustain the implementation of the programme over many years and thus achieve positive outcomes for both students and staff.