Chapel St Community Fund are pleased to have funded an important community building training opportunity for staff and schools in the Chapel St family. Last week, Chapel St Community Schools Trust hosted Jim Conwey, senior trainer from the world renowned Search Institute, for a week of training on the “Developmental Assets.” The seminars were attended by Chapel St staff from across a growing family of schools.
The framework of ’40 Developmental Assets’ demonstrate important factors or features, that when present in a young person’s life have an important impact on their growth, development and understanding of the world. The Developmental Assets model identifies a set of skills, experiences, relationships, and behaviours that enable young people to develop into successful and contributing adults. The Search Institute’s Developmental Assets framework and approach to youth development has become widely utilised around the world.
The Developmental Assets programme will help to build strong foundations that enable children to thrive in school and later life. Decades of evidence have demonstrated that this programme helps children to do better in education, training and employment, become more resilient as individuals and avoid potentially risky behaviour as they grow up. Regardless of gender, ethnic heritage, economic situation or geographic location, this programme promotes positive behaviours and attitudes and helps protect young people from many different problem behaviours.
Diane Thompson, Principal of Westbridge Primary School said, “I thoroughly enjoyed the Developmental Assets Training, as it provided a common sense approach to identifying and developing assets and characteristics that children and young people need to lead fulfilling, successful lives.”
“We found the DA training inspirational,” said Clare Edet of Benedict Primary School. “It provides a very exciting approach to identifying and developing the needs of children to ensure they become lifelong learners and positive citizens. It will also enable the school to regain its role at the heart of the community.”
The Search Institute is a non faith-based institution and has, for over 50 years, partnered with many different organisations, schools, and community coalitions around the world to solve critical challenges in the lives of young people. The Developmental Assets programme dates back to 1985 when Dr Peter Benson became President of the Search Institute. As a result of Benson’s work, “The developmental assets framework became the predominant positive youth development approach in the world, cited more than 17,000 times…[the] surveys … have been used with more than 3 million youths in more than 60 countries,” (American Psychologist, 2012). Since then this number has risen to over 4 million young people and families who have benefited from this transformational programme.
Chapel St is utilising the Developmental Assets programme across our growing family of schools to ensure that we teach and nurture every child in a unique way that builds upon their many gifts and strengths while helping them to respond to the individual challenges that they face. Likewise, this tool makes it possible for our staff to work with parents and carers so that they are fully involved in their child’s learning and development.
Currently the Search Institute is working with the U.S. Department of Education, Save the Children Canada, the MasterCard Foundation, the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Altria Group, Real World Financial Education and Capital One, World Vision International and The Salvation Army. We are delighted that our children, families and communities will also benefit from this work.
Dawn Forshaw, Head of Burnley High School described the event saying, “There were two big positives to come out the training for me: as an organisation we now have a framework to use as a way of communicating the behaviours that we would like all adults working in Chapel Street Schools to make a conscious effort to demonstrate towards our young people; second, we now have a way of quantifying the impact that these small but proactive actions have over time on the outcomes that we are delivering for our students.”
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