Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from disappointments, difficulties and adversity. A common term for it is to ‘bounce back’.

Resilience in education is vital for students to educationally thrive. All educators know that resilient children outperform non-resilient children and have better overall mental health.
Children without resilience may give up at the first signs of things being difficult, they may not continue as soon as they get a question wrong or give up on a liked subject because they got back low marks in a test. When children don’t have inner resilience, they do not understand that the process of learning is about making mistakes and getting things wrong.

Low resilience can often be seen when children are doing homework. If they suddenly get frustrated, and can’t continue, or start learning spelling words then stop and refuse to start as soon as they get a word wrong, these are signs of low resilience. There is often not a great difficulty with the child starting the task, but there is a huge difficulty in continuing as soon as there is a bump in the road.

The good news is that resilience skills can be learnt. With focused tuition, all children can learn resilience and carry that resilience – learning to recover quickly from disappointments, difficulties and adversity.