Our Approaches and Interventions
Our Approaches and Interventions
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Emotion Coaching and Trauma Informed Practice
At Sprowston Community Academy, emotion coaching is embedded into the whole-school approach to wellbeing, relationships and behaviour. Staff are trained in emotion coaching and trauma-informed practices in their daily interactions to recognise, validate and respond to students’ emotional states. For example, when a pupil is reluctant or distressed, staff take time to connect, listen, and explore what is behind their feelings rather than enforcing rules immediately. They aim to build trust and psychological safety so students feel understood and supported. Across form time and pastoral support, pupils are helped to develop emotional awareness, self-kindness and strategies to manage their feelings. This not only helps improve behaviour and engagement but strengthens the sense of belonging, resilience, and supportive relationships across the school.
For more information about Emotion Coaching, please click on the button below.
For more information about Trauma Informed Practice, please click on the buttons below.
Restorative Pratices
Sprowston Community Academy embeds restorative practice as a core part of its behaviour, pastoral and wellbeing system—seeing it as more than a conflict-resolution tool, but as key to building relationships, trust and inclusion across the school. The approach is aligned with STEPS and emotion coaching, where staff are trained to understand students’ emotional states, trauma, or barriers, and to respond with empathy rather than simply imposing sanctions. Staff use restorative conversations to repair harm:
Asking what happened
How people have been affected
what is needed to put things right—and set up agreements to move forward.
The five core questions we use in restorative practice conversations are:
What happened?
What were you thinking and feeling at the time?
Who has been affected by what happened, and how?
What do you need to make things right?
What needs to happen now to move forward?
These questions encourage reflection, accountability, and empathy, helping everyone involved to repair harm and restore relationships.
For more information please click on the button below.
Norfolk STEPS
Sprowston Community Academy in Norwich integrates the Norfolk Steps approach to foster positive behaviour and emotional resilience among its students. This approach is part of a broader commitment to inclusive education and early intervention, aligning with the academy's ethos of high-quality care and relationships.
Norfolk Steps is a county-wide initiative that provides training and resources to schools for managing challenging behaviours through early intervention and prevention. It offers two main programmes:
Step On: Focuses on non-restrictive strategies such as de-escalation, behaviour analysis, and positive reinforcement.
Step Up: Covers the safe and effective use of restrictive physical interventions within current legislative frameworks.
These programmes are underpinned by evidence-based principles and are supported by a specialist team with extensive experience in inclusion and special educational needs (SEND). Broad Horizons Education Trust promotes the use of Norfolk STEPS within all its schools, of which Sprowston Community Academy is a part of.
Zones of Regulations
At Sprowston Community Academy, emotional regulation is woven into the pastoral and wellbeing support systems, and the Zones of Regulation approach is incorporated to strengthen this further with particular pupils. Applying the Zones framework, allows us to teach students to recognise when they are in different emotional states (such as calm/ready to learn, heightened, or distressed), label those feelings, and then engage in strategies to move back to a regulated state. By embedding Zones of Regulation, we hope more students become resilient, more able to self-regulate, and better prepared to engage in their learning.
For more information please click on the button below to find the Zones of Regulation website.
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