It is period 4 on a cold Tuesday afternoon and a group of Year 9 students are wrestling with a GCSE history essay: “Discuss the three most important changes in Britain as a result of the railway.”

Heads are down, each student is writing, engaged and thinking hard. Every piece of writing has a date and a carefully written title, underlined with a ruler. Handwriting is careful and legible, and confidence is high; the only sound you can hear is the scribbling of pens and the occasional sigh.

If I were to tell you that these were the most vulnerable Year 9 students in the year group - low-prior-attaining students with poor self-esteem, numerous barriers to learning and various behavioural difficulties - you might not believe me.

But it’s true. This is one of the teaching groups within the nurture department at The Gryphon School in Sherborne, Dorset. Now in its sixth year, the scheme has been embedded in every year group, and last August we had our best-ever outcomes for low-prior-attaining students, with nearly all achieving or exceeding their benchmark grades - and, more importantly, moving on to their first choices for life after GCSE. In fact, these results were so good that other local secondary schools are beginning to recreate this nurture model in their own settings.

So, how does it work?

We knew we had to reimagine provision for our struggling students after it became clear - through national research - that students in this category were often siloed off from the teacher and had instruction primarily delivered via teaching assistants. The studies suggested that schools needed to find a way to ensure that all students received high-quality, inclusive teaching.

We knew of nurture groups being employed in primary schools. Historically, they are short-term, focused interventions for small groups of children with particular social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. Reviewing the evidence, we could see that nurture groups had “a consistent, significant and large effect in improving social, emotional and behavioural outcomes among children who previously had difficulty learning within a mainstream class” (Sloan et al, 2016). However, there was little research relating to the effectiveness of nurture groups at secondary school.

Rather than putting us off, this inspired us to do some research of our own. At the time, a growing number of students were arriving in Year 7 with increasingly complex issues, weaker academic attainment and poorer confidence and self-esteem. We thought that an intervention in which the whole child was supported to integrate into the secondary setting, through targeted nurture provision, might help these students to achieve academically as well develop emotionally. So we set about making it happen.

The ethos of nurture is simple: to raise academic standards, with particular emphasis on literacy, while providing children with a nurturing environment in which they feel safe, secure and supported. Children are identified as potential nurture students during transition to secondary, a decision mostly based on their academic progress at primary school and level of vulnerability as reported by their Year 6 teachers.

It should be noted that not all students in the nurture groups have a specific diagnosis. However, all students in these groups are falling below the expected level for their age in reading and/or spelling.

Why can’t these children catch up in their normal classes? Greg Brooks, emeritus professor of education at the University of Sheffield, describes how “ordinary teaching does not enable children with literacy difficulties to catch up” and that consequently “children falling behind their peers need more help than the classroom normally provides” (Brooks, 2016). Sir Jim Rose, in his government report Identifying and Teaching Children and Young People with Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties, concurs and highlights that pupils in secondary schools who struggle with literacy need greater support “if they are to make progress and not fall further behind their peers” (Rose, 2009).

The group is taught by a primary specialist for 19 out of 50 periods a fortnight; this is a teacher who understands how to secure key stage 2 skills through a KS3 curriculum. Supported by highly trained teaching assistants and taught in welcoming, purpose-designed classrooms, nurture pupils experience quality teaching in a safe, inclusive environment, one that stimulates learning and raises self-esteem.

There are days, of course, when you question the wisdom of putting vulnerable, low-prior-attaining students in one room together for so much of their timetable. Teaching is tough; a continual call to deliver aspirational lessons and be relentlessly positive can be draining.

It is not a magic quick fix either and, for some students, it is just not the right thing for them at this stage. While being taught in small groups is popular with most of the students, for a minority, it is simply not good for “street cred”.

But despite the challenges, the rewards are worth it.

At the end of the first year, we could see the positive results and had some external validation by inviting a consultant to assess the provision. We decided to extend it further. Now in its sixth year, the model stretches from Year 7 to Year 11 and has a status as a department in its own right. There’s no stigma attached to it: it has earned its place in the school and is an intervention that staff, parents, governors and students are proud of.

The data backs it up as an essential part of the school. We produce Excel spreadsheets, tracking our nurture students’ progress from the start of Year 7 to the end of their time in Year 11, and the data is compelling, with students making as much as 48 months’ progress in a year for reading and spelling. Other impacts include students needing fewer access arrangements; improved attendance; and fewer exclusions and referrals to learning centres and outside agencies.

For me personally, it’s the shine in a student’s eyes when they realise their own value, when they produce a piece of work that they are genuinely proud of, when you look in their faces and see the light of self-belief and the gradual but growing realisation that school might not be all that bad after all.

But even more than that, it’s the words spoken to me by a Year 11 nurture student who, against all odds, achieved such good grades at GCSE that he is now in the sixth form: “You made a difference, Miss.”

In the words of the inspirational educationalist Rita Pierson, “every child deserves a champion”, and while my department will continue to strive for the very best academic results possible for each of our students, it’s their hearts that I want to win. If each of our students can look back at their time in school and say they had a champion, a teacher who never gave up on them, an adult who invested in and cared about their futures, then we can say we have truly nurtured our students.

Katherine McGreal is head of nurture at The Gryphon School in Sherborne, Dorset

This article originally appeared in the 12 June 2020 issue under the headline “Why we should make nurture secondary nature”