Resilience is both a quality that children possess, and something that needs to be explicitly taught and developed. It is needed of us as practitioners, and it comes from a deep understanding of ourselves and our own needs and triggers. Resilience is developed through adversity and is different in different areas of our lives – physical, mental, emotional and learning resilience are all different, and can operate at different levels in the same person at different times.

Resilience is not about avoiding adversity: it’s about being supported through adversity and developing the skills and habits to traverse it again, if need be, without being broken irreparably. Resilience is not a human term, but a manufacturing one. In this sense it means to ‘recover quickly’ or to ‘return to shape’. As humans this can be difficult, and as educators we are responsible for creating the conditions that enable a child to build their own resilience with our help.

Resilience comes through a mixture of confidence, social support, adaptability and purposefulness, and these are all things that we can both incidentally and strategically develop in our children through relationships, environments and systemic choices.