Let Teachers SHINE winner 2025: Ruth Coleman – Highfield Resilience Tracker
A transformational project aims to nurture and develop young children’s personal, social and emotional resilience from when they start nursery and move into primary school.
The Highfield Resilience Tracker, designed by Ipswich headteacher Ruth Coleman, has secured a Let Teachers SHINE award of £20,000 to roll out the resource to 66 nurseries that feed into 22 Co-op Academy primary schools in Greater Manchester, Stoke on Trent and Merseyside.
Ruth believes that early intervention will bring long term benefits for children.
“The goal is to start building resilience before children even start reception. The earlier you do this work with families and children, the bigger dividends it pays out,” said Ruth.
“If we can get them to a higher starting point at reception, we know we’ve set them on the right foot in their education.”
Originally developed before COVID, Ruth and her colleagues now see an even greater need for the Resilience Tracker due to children’s post-pandemic struggles with communication and self-control.
“We know that the pandemic has undoubtedly had an impact on children’s prime areas of learning,” explained Ruth, adding: “A higher proportion of children joining nursery or reception are below age related expectations.”
“Early years staff report that areas of learning and development most affected have been personal, social and emotional,” Ruth shared.
The Highfield Resilience Tracker aims to address these challenges – giving staff a way to monitor, support, and provide early interventions to help children catch up.
Each child’s development is recorded by their teacher on an excel sheet during regular staff meetings using statements beginning with ‘I am’, ‘I can’ and ‘I have’. This enables staff to monitor and respond to children’s perception of themselves over time.
The project also includes training for teachers to learn simple, effective techniques to support parents with building their child’s resilience and self-regulation at home.
“Parents tell me that they don’t know how to build resilience in their children, so a significant part of the training supports practitioners to help parents at their setting,” Ruth said.
It is hoped that working alongside families will create strong relationships between the child’s early years setting and their caregivers, helping to nurture comprehensive positive development.
“Support from parents and practitioners can truly make a difference in how children grow and succeed,” said Ruth.
On receiving the SHINE award, Ruth said: “I was absolutely thrilled! It’s amazing to be able to make a difference to those communities. Over two years our project will work with 22 schools and 66 pre-schools – that’s an enormous number of children who can be positively impacted.”
“It’s really encouraging to see something I’ve developed being recognised in this way by SHINE, and it motivates me to continue refining and expanding the project.”