Without the PROGRESS Programme, we might have gone off on tangents which would have been totally useless and missed out on areas that were very important. We felt that communication within the school was very good because we tell them everything. But unfortunately they hadn’t heard what we were telling them. We could have gone on quite happily believing that we were communicating, but we were not. Without that discovery, we wouldn’t have made any progress at all. The good things that have come out of PROGRESS wouldn’t have come about if we had just gone along each assuming that we understood where the other was coming from.

The PROGRESS Programme was incredibly valuable for us. Once staff could see the processes that were going on, they realised that there was a need for them to look after their own wellbeing. Working ridiculously hard and become stressed wasn’t the way to solve problems. Students were picking it up and responding in ways that we didn’t like.

It allowed us to assess the emotional climate accurately, to look at what the main concerns of staff and pupils were and then to create from that a very effective and realistic starting point. We knew exactly how to go forward, what things were important and what were the things we needed to address in our action planning.

Before the school council would talk about things like how you could provide more water fountains. Now it talks about how you can improve learning in class. We had an opportunity nobody had had before to discuss things with teachers. It was good to discover that we were all coming from the same place. The student voice is now respected more; so we feel we have enough power to actually affect things.