The Thrive Approach in Northcott School
For everyone at Northcott School, our first priority is to care for every child in a secure, friendly environment enabling them to believe in themselves, Belong to a community and blossom into life! We have embraced the Thrive approach to support all children’s emotional and social wellbeing throughout their school day. We do this during lesson times, break times, in one to one or groups sessions. All staff have been taught how to use thrive language when communicating with our pupils and we have a specialist team of staff that work reparative to support any pupil who may need the support of Thrive
What is the Thrive approach?
Children cannot always put their needs into words, but the way children behave can tell us a lot about how they are feeling. The Thrive Approach draws on the latest research from current neuroscience, recent attachment research, and Current studies of effective learning and current models of child development in order to help the school to understand the needs being signalled by children’s behaviour. It gives us targeted strategies and activities to help them re-engage with learning and life.

The Hub
The Hub offers a bespoke, enriched, and sensory environment that allows our pupils to access learning and personal growth in a safe and nurturing space. This allows our stunts a place to develop their emotional well-being and resilience. This calming environment is equipped with sensory resources comfortable seating and engaging activities tailed to individual needs.
The Hub serves as a retreat for pupils who need a break from the demands of the classroom offering a space to rebuild confidence, mange anxiety’s and develop essential social and emotional skills in a supportive setting.
What support can we offer?
Children who need a little bit of extra help are identified through our whole-class screening process, by class teachers, or through communication with families or outside agencies. For some children there may be an obvious reason why they need a bit of extra support. This might be bereavement, family break down or an identified medical condition such as ADHD. For others, there can be no obvious trigger to why they are finding some aspects of school and/or home life difficult. Working closely with parents and class teachers, our Thrive Practitioners: Josh Harrison and Laura Edwards will carry out full assessment to identify children’s social, emotional and behavioural needs. This helps us to build a bespoke Thrive Action plan or activities for the child.
Who gets Thrive?
Everyone! Though they might not realise it. All our Pupils have access to regular class based Thrive activities; we have our gorgeous school animals, most classes are taught using language from the Thrive Approach and we use specific whole class Thrive PSHE across our curriculum. But if your child needs regular out of class Thrive time, one to one or in a small group, you will be consulted and asked for your input into their assessment and action plan.
What makes Northcott a Thrive school?
At Northcott School we don’t consider Thrive to be an intervention for just a few children, We consider it to be a whole-school approach. We believe that all behaviour is communication and that communication needs to be understood and supported. Thrive feeds into everything we do; assemblies, getting to know everyone and their families, shearing all achievements not just academic ones, celebrating our diversity, playtimes and of course learning time.