Best Practice

Making nurture provision work for your school

Pupil wellbeing Attendance Pastoral issues Mental health Behaviour
There are more than 2,000 UK schools using nurture group approaches amid concerns over children’s mental health and the impact of the cost of living crisis. Suzanne O’Connell speaks to two schools about how they have made nurture work for them
Image: Adobe Stock -

The principles of nurture group provision can be traced back to 1969 and the work of Marjorie Boxall in Hackney and the emergence of John Bowlby’s attachment theory.

Basically, if a child’s early experiences lack nurture, care, and love this can have a significant impact on their social, emotional, and cognitive development.

A guide to nurture provision was published by the charity Nurture UK in 2019 and includes links to the full research base behind the approach.

But fundamentally, the idea of in-school nurture groups is to help children to develop the relationships that they might have missed out on during their earliest years. Without this intervention, pupils’ needs risk going unmet, and their problems will only get worse.

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