This is the second of a two-part blog by guest author Daniel Wilsher, Founder of LifeX.
Catch up on part one here.
Table of Contents
The language a young person hears becomes the story they believe
Something I notice in almost every school I walk into is that when a young person is struggling with their engagement, their attendance or their learning, nearly all of the language aimed at them is corrective. It’s about fixing the behaviour. “You need to sort this out.” “This isn’t good enough.” “If you carry on like this, it’s going to cost you your future.” I understand why, those words almost always come from adults who genuinely care and want the best for them. However, it’s worth stopping to think about what that young person is hearing, day after day after day.
If the language a child receives from the world about themselves is relentlessly negative or corrective, they don’t just hear “I’m behaving badly.” They hear “I am a problem, and I have problems.” And once that becomes their identity, they start to behave in accordance with it, which produces further challenges. They live up to the story the world keeps telling them about who they are. That’s why correcting behaviour on its own so rarely sticks. We’re trying to change the behaviour without ever touching the belief sitting underneath it, and that belief is a tough thing to shift.
Yet, underneath all of it, every single young person is craving the exact same things you and I crave: praise, recognition, the feeling of being rewarded and to be seen for something good. But the kid who’s struggling with engagement, attendance or learning is usually the very last one to receive that kind of language. The ‘easy’ ones get praised. The ‘difficult’ ones get corrected and so, the gap between who they’re told they are and who they could be just keeps widening.
This is exactly where it turned for that Year 8 pupil that I referenced in my earlier blog ‘The power of hope: why building the self is vital for vulnerable young people’. When you help a young person connect to themselves, when you build up the strengths they already have and shine a light on their brilliance, and when you help them craft a vision for their future that they genuinely believe is possible, something shifts.
Why trusted relationships are essential
There’s one part of that equation people so often miss: it has to come from someone they respect, someone they feel trust to truly understands them. The same words land completely differently depending on who’s saying them and whether the young person feels seen by that person. Get that right, and on the other end you get a child who, often for the first time, sees the brilliance in themselves. Their view of the world changes, and more importantly, their view of themselves changes.
Once a young person can understand who they are and what they actually want by picturing a future worth working towards, they can be shown a route to it that feels genuinely attainable and start to believe in themselves as a result, they become more hopeful. Hope grows in the space between who a young person is right now and a future they believe they can actually reach.
How to re-engage the most disengaged learners
So, what does this mean for the young people who’ve drifted furthest from traditional learning? It means the behaviour, the attendance, the missing homework, the attitude in the corridor, all the things we’re so often tempted to treat as the problem, are usually nothing of the sort. They’re the symptoms. The real problem, almost every time, is a young person who has stopped believing a good life is in reach for them.
When you build the self first, when you build genuine hope, you change the person underneath the behaviour, and when the person changes, the rest follows. I see it again and again: behaviour starts to settle because a hopeful young person has a reason to make better choices. Attendance climbs because school becomes somewhere they feel seen rather than judged. Wellbeing improves, because they’ve reconnected to who they are and what they’re capable of. And learning and outcomes lift right alongside it, because a young person who believes in their future will finally invest in it.
Start with one young person
I know it can feel like a huge undertaking to build all of this into a whole school or trust, but it doesn’t start there. It starts with one conversation, one young person, one moment of letting a child know that you see the brilliance in them, especially when they can’t see it in themselves.
If there’s one thing I’d ask readers to take from this, it’s this: think of the young person in your school who everyone’s been warned about, the one who’s a little lost right now. Before you address the behaviour, spend five minutes building the relationship. Get curious about who they are. Catch them doing something well and tell them. Give them a small bit of responsibility and watch what they do with it.
Hope is built in the small human moments of connection, and the beautiful thing is that the whole eco-system benefits when even one young person starts to believe in themselves again.
