Bounce Forward

Bounce Forward is on a mission to give schools, parents, and providers of children services the training, skills and resources they need to build their young people’s mental resilience and emotional wellbeing.

What we did:

Funding from Big Change helped Bounce Forward to expand the reach of their flagship programme Healthy Minds, and the reach of their pioneering research which showed positive effects of the Healthy Minds curriculum for students on five key outcomes: global health, life satisfaction, physical, behaviour and emotional health.

The Spark

Bounce Forward believes that schools should be equipping young people to thrive in life and not just prepare for exams. Bounce Forward also believes that young people are resourceful and capable of fixing their own problems and that often, they just need the tools, skills and space to work things out for themselves.

There is no shortage of data to support the growing need for developing resilience amongst young people to help them overcome setbacks and make the most of opportunities.Yet, Bounce Forward recognised a lack of resources and value placed on facilitating the learning of resilient thinking within the education system.

At the heart of Bounce Forward's belief is that improving the wellbeing of young people starts with the adults around them. They have evidence that shows that training adults to support their own resilience and wellbeing improves outcomes for young people.

The Impact

Big Change backed Bounce Forward in 2017 to expand the reach of their Healthy Minds programme, training teachers in resilience and emotional well-being so that they can in turn authentically model and teach resilience and emotional well-being to their students. Since being funded by Big Change, Bounce Forward has trained over 10,000 teachers, reached over 500,000 young people, and received strong participant feedback with 94% of participating teachers who agreed or strongly agreed that Bounce Forward’s approach will help them improve wellbeing in their school settings.

“Teachers described the Healthy Minds training as delivering high quality personal and professional development for staff, resulting in improved skills and confidence in providing pastoral support...” (Bounce Forward Impact Report, 2019)

Bounce Forward's work has been recognised by the APPG for children’s wellbeing and The Department for Education and HM Treasury where the Healthy Minds programme has been explored as a solution to poor wellbeing.

Healthy Minds teaches you the skills that you don’t get taught at school, so it teaches you for later on in life rather than English, Science, Maths....It’s more about how to be a person rather than be academic.
Student

Bounce Forward has trained over 10,000 teachers

young people reached and received strong participant feedback with

of teachers who agreed or strongly agreed that Bounce Forward’s approach will help them improve wellbeing in their school settings.

Meet the Changemaker

Lucy Bailey

Lucy is the CEO and co-founder of Bounce Forward. She is proud of her beginnings as a youth worker and her 17 years of experience working in, developing, reforming and managing children’s services. Lucy has focused much of her work on education and has been instrumental in embedding resilience curricular in schools and services across the UK. Lucy directed the Healthy Minds research project, has an MSc in Practice Based Research, a BSc in Social Policy and Criminology, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education.