Olivia’s journey to creating The Story Project

A post written by our lovely founder and CEO, Olivia, about the inspiration and research behind The Story Project.

It’s quite a long piece, but we would encourage you to read to the end. It is truly fascinating. A tale of trips to America, time spent with convicts, a new role, an inspiring walk, and a PhD… and ultimately how a love of stories has created something incredibly special.

Inspiration

I started my career as an English teacher because of my lifelong passion for stories. Stories had always been my comfort and escape in challenging times and a place of joy and for learning about the world.

I felt excited to share this passion with the children I taught and to help them find a connection to literature too. When I first started teaching in a secondary school in 2009, I found myself teaching a staple of the GCSE English Literature curriculum, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, to three GCSE classes. As the children strived to learn what was expected of them to pass the exam, some of the children had lost all interest in what the story was about and didn’t seem to connect with the story at all.

It was at this time that I organised a speaker called Andy French to come and visit our school. Andy had been in and out of prison his whole life and had never connected to learning until his attention had been captured through an in-prison programme called Stories Connect. The programme had focussed on connecting inmates with the themes in novels that were relevant to them, such as friendship, work and loneliness in Of Mice and Men. This experience had helped Andy to turn his life around. He had broken a cycle of incarceration and was now studying to be a teacher.

This was inspirational for my students and I, but it also sparked a lot of questions for me: What were they doing in the prison programme that had captured Andy’s attention in a way that had not happened at school? Is there more we could be doing in the classroom to help connect children with the novels we are reading? Could my subject really help turn people’s lives around?

Digging Deeper

These questions felt extremely pertinent as I was aware that many of my students were struggling with personal issues and mental health problems that made it difficult for them to achieve their best academically. In fact, 1 in 9 children across the country were experiencing a mental health problem at the time, this number has since risen to 1 in 5 (NHS 2023)

Andy’s visit made me interested in how emotional support could be linked with academic work and I decided to delve further into Stories Connect and how it operated. Unfortunately, due to funding restraints Stories Connect was winding down by the time I contacted its founder Mary Stephenson, however she put me in touch with Robert Waxler the founder of Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL), an American programme that had inspired Stories Connect.

In a fascinating twist, CLTL were taking things a step further than Stories Connect, in fact people were being sentenced to join CLTL clubs rather than spending time in prison for petty crimes: The judge, probation officer and the individual who had been sentenced would all attend a book group, where novels with themes relevant to the individuals lives would be read and spoken about as equals. Compared to spending time in prison, these programmes had a 50% reduction in recidivism.

Observing Best Practice

By now I was determined to find out as much as I could, so I applied for a Churchill Fellowship, that enabled me to visit CLTL groups in the U.S. I used the opportunity to also visit 11 other programmes in the U.S. and Canada that were all using reading and writing to support children and young people with their wellbeing in some way.

I visited after school programmes, universities, high schools, youth centres, nurseries and more. They were all engaged in supporting children and young people’s wellbeing and literacy

During this trip, I witnessed many transformational experiences. For example, when I took part in a CLTL session at Lowell and Lynne County Court, where females who had been found guilty of petty crimes connected and supported each other through discussing and dissecting the text Sula by Toni Morrison. Many of the women had not accessed education when they were younger and had very low self-esteem, but they all had interesting insights into the text, which meant for the first time in a lot of their lives they could speak on an equal footing with people who had always felt superior to them, including the judges who had sentenced them. As one woman self-deprecated herself after making an astute comment, it was refreshing to hear another woman comment to her ‘You seem real smart to me’.

Recommendations for the UK

The variety of the programmes and the scope of the possibilities and implications for how this work could be used in the UK were vast. I completed a report into my findings and managed to narrow the recommendations into three different areas:

1. Social and emotional learning (SEL)

2. Choosing the right type of literature

3. Choosing the right type of writing activities

Each area has several important and far-reaching recommendations, spreading across a wide variety of settings and age groups. There was a lot to think about.

At this time, I was introduced by a friend to the Headteacher and Special Educational Needs Coordinator at St Paul’s C of E Primary School in Surrey. The school were looking to improve their wellbeing offering and were excited by my research. They were recruiting for a role that would allow me to work 1-1 and in small groups with children who were struggling with their wellbeing. This allowed me to trial some of the recommendations I had made. I transitioned into a newly created role as the Wellbeing Lead Teacher, overseeing interventions and the whole school approach to wellbeing.

Defining Wellbeing

I realised that the first job I needed to complete within this role was to define what was meant by Wellbeing. This was a very difficult job, as there are several terms that are taken as similar or synonymous with wellbeing.

To define what we meant as a school when referring to children’s wellbeing, I started by asking the parents, teachers and children what they thought wellbeing meant. Through this activity I was able to create a list of skills, I then combined this with recommendations from the PSHE association to create a wellbeing curriculum that lists the skills children need to develop at primary level.

This definition of wellbeing takes wellbeing away from being a fixed state and instead focuses on wellbeing being a set of skills to be taught and developed throughout our lives. When looking at whether children have improved their wellbeing, we are looking at whether they have learnt the skills being taught- evident through their work and classroom contributions and whether they have developed the skills so they can implement them in their real lives, as seen in their behaviour and attitude.

Once I had a definition of wellbeing and the skills needed to achieve this, the next stage was to work out the best way to help children develop these skills.

At this point I turned to my research and started to find stories that related to the different wellbeing skills in the curriculum. Oatley (1999) refers to stories as a ‘laboratory space, that, relative to real life, is safe and can make the relations of emotions to goals and action easier to understand.’

Literacy and Wellbeing

With this in mind I wanted to find stories that were engaging and still helped children develop their literacy with exciting plots and challenging vocabulary, but that also provided this safe space to explore the wellbeing objective. Eventually I was able to find six books per year group that between them covered the whole curriculum.

I was also aware that simply providing the books and telling teachers which objectives they cover would not ensure that the books were being used in an effective way, so I started to prepare resources that accompanied the books. During a walk one day, I had an idea for an acronym that ensured each session would include different aspects of what I had learnt during my research. The S.T.O.R.Y. structure was born! You can read more about this here.

As you can imagine creating the resources took a lot of time, and this wouldn’t have been possible without a ‘Let Teacher’s Shine’ award from SHINE. This award is designed to give teachers who have a promising idea the funds to get it off the ground. The funding enabled me to dedicate time towards the project. I am proud that The Story Project is still working with SHINE.

Impact and Further Development

The resources were received well by St Paul’s, and it didn’t take long for other schools to hear about the project. Soon I had twenty schools signed up and the results of this trial were really promising.

90% have seen a positive improvement in children’s wellbeing

90% have seen a positive improvement in children’s emotional vocabulary.

90% have seen a positive improvement in children’s ability to manage their emotions.

90% have seen a positive improvement in engagement in PSHE

100% would recommend The Story Project

After receiving this positive feedback, I wanted to understand the impact of The Story Project better so I applied for a Farmington Scholarship during the 2020-21 academic year. The scholarship matched me with Professor Anthony Towey at St Mary’s University and allowed me to look closer at what was happening in Story Project classrooms. I began to pick out themes such as stories as a shared laboratory space, stories to build interpretation skills/critical thinking, the benefits of having a familiar structure and the importance of teacher training alongside resources.

However, this scholarship only allowed me to touch the surface of these topics and Anthony encouraged me to apply for a PHD, so I could investigate this in more depth.

My application to carry out a PHD on The Story Project was successful and the PHD is designed to look at the work that has been done on The Story Project so far, by speaking to the teachers who have been implementing the work in their classrooms and analysing the key themes that emerge.

Whilst completing this research The Story Project has continued to grow. In 2024, we received further funding from SHINE to work in Bradford over a three-year period. This has allowed the programme to be further fine-tuned, taking in-depth feedback and evaluation from teachers across the city.

I am really proud and grateful to have a fantastic team to work with and to have supported over 100 schools over the years.