Case Study
The 'Go for Goals' Course:
Creating Confidence and Self-Esteem in Children

A partnership approach between Develop Your Child and Palace Wood Junior School. This course is an exciting initiative to help children set and achieve their own goals. Its objective is to increase confidence and self esteem in children and the first stage has just been completed at Palace Wood Junior School.

Mr Handy, Headteacher, explains 'we spend our lives cramming information into children. This approach is completely different: we are asking the children what they think and want'. It started with a group of eight Year 4 pupils based on a model created by Mr Handy and Alan Wilson of Develop Your Child, who are sponsoring the project. Alan Wilson approached Mr Handy to pilot this project: as a parent he became aware of the impact increasing confidence and self esteem had on his own children's learning capabilities. He applied his knowledge and professional skills, developed whilst working with adults, as a fully trained and accredited life coach and NLP Practitioner, to help pupils at the School.

Evaluation of the 6 week Pilot showed that firstly the children had difficulty in identifying and connecting with their emotions when they were successful in an outcome. So we had to create more exercises that helped them acknowledge their feelings and emotions.

Secondly the children could not define a goal for themselves at first, because their current life experiences were based mainly on achieving goals set by 'grown ups'. 'So we had to work a lot harder in helping the children to define a goal for themselves' said Alan Wilson.

At the end of this first stage parents of participants were asked for their opinions of the project, via a questionnaire. Overall there were two main outcomes: one was that the children who spent the most time on homework and exercises linked to each session benefited the most. A parent wrote that his child wanted the sessions to last longer. The other key learning point was that children whose parents supported them on the follow up tasks benefited the most.

The majority of parents were very positive about the course with one parent saying 'my daughter has really enjoyed doing this. I think it is a great way of encouraging children and making them more aware of where they are going in the future'.

Following this Pilot project minor amendments have been made. We hope it will become a 'rolling course' within the school. During this phase Mr Handy and Alan Wilson will be working with the children directly.

Their long-term aim, though, is that following coaching eventually the Year 6 pupils will be able to work with the younger children. Together they will create a supportive culture of children building each other's confidence and self-esteem.

NB This review was written in October 2002 when the course consisted of 6 sessions.

'Go for Goals' course results

Session 1
The following is a report from the Headteacher, Mr Handy, dated 10th December 2003. A group of 8 children were chosen to take part in the Go for Goals course in school during the early part of year 4 in the autumn term 2002.

The children selected were a mixture of those who had scored level 2C or 1 in the Key stage 1 SATs or those whose progress in year 3 was particularly low.

Using the points values for each National Curriculum Level the following averages have been achieved by the Go for Goals group and the year group as a whole.

Session 2
Following the encouraging results from the first session we repeated the course with a different group of children but within the same criteria - scored level 2C or 1 in the Key stage 1 SATs or those whose progress in year 3 was particularly low. This was in the spring and early part of summer 2004 terms, and the following were the results:

The children were asked what benefits they attributed to the course and they reported the following:

• feeling more confident in 'having a go'
• feeling better about making mistakes and learning from them
• sticking at a difficult task instead of giving up
• knowing what they wanted to be able to do
• feeling more able to ask for help

They particularly enjoyed the less formal atmosphere, sharing of experiences, goals and homework's - they were even enthusiastic about doing the homework!