From Trauma-Informed to Trauma-Invested: The Ravenscote Junior School Story

Neil @ Future Action
20 hours ago
5 min read

KEY IMPACT:

55% improvement in student mental wellbeing
44 point improvement in School Wellbeing Scorecard (46% to 90%)
4 out of 8 wellbeing indicators moved from Rarely to Often for Sport Sanctuary pupils

It is a Tuesday afternoon in Frimley, Surrey. Gary Pearson has a group of young people in front of him and a simple goal: make sure every single one of them belongs here.

Not just in the session. At Ravenscote.

Gary runs inclusive team activities where every child has a role, every child is needed, and nobody is on the outside looking in. He is deliberate about this.

The games mix year groups, require co-operation, and create the kind of easy low-pressure connections that are hard to develop in a busy classroom.

Week by week, something starts to shift. Children who struggled to settle begin to regulate. Not just with Gary, but with each other.

Connection comes first. Once children feel safe, feel seen, and feel that they belong, Gary introduces the self-care toolkit: the stress busters and repeaters, the movement breaks, the RISE Rewards Passport.

Not as a programme handed down to them. As something they are ready to receive, because someone took the time to make sure they felt they were worth investing in.

A school that already cared, and wanted to go further

Ravenscote Junior School in Frimley, Surrey is part of the Engage, Enrich, Excel Academies Trust and has 621 pupils on roll.

When Future Action arrived, it was already a school with a strong trauma-informed culture.

Amy Wells, Headteacher, knew which children arrived overwhelmed. She knew the ones whose low-level behaviour was dysregulation, not defiance. She had the care and the instinct.

What she was looking for was a framework to go further. RISE Up gave her that.

In July 2025, Future Action delivered whole-school RISE Up training to every member of staff.

Then 32 colleagues completed the full online Trauma Informed PE course, giving Ravenscote one of the highest concentrations of trained practitioners Future Action has seen in any partner school nationally.

The stopwatch system

Grant Simmons, PE Lead, and Gary Pearson, Sport Sanctuary Lead, took the RISE Up framework and built something remarkable.

24 identified children, grouped by stage rather than year group, were given weekly Sport Sanctuary sessions.

They learned to identify what their body needed: the difference between a stress buster and a repeater. They learned that movement was not a treat.

It was a tool. Their tool.

And then Gary and Grant gave each child a stopwatch.

When a child felt they needed to regulate, mid-lesson or at any point in the day, they set their timer, went out to the Sport Sanctuary area, did their movements, collected a token, returned to class and earned a stamp in their RISE Rewards Passport.

No adult had to notice. No lesson had to stop. The child identified their own need, managed their own time and earned their own reward.

What the staff noticed first

Low-level disruption is one of the most persistent pressures in primary schools. It is rarely dramatic. It is the constant low hum of children who cannot quite settle, cannot quite focus, cannot quite get through a lesson without something spilling over.

At Ravenscote, staff began to notice that hum getting quieter.

Mrs Brookes, Deputy Headteacher, put it simply: "When I have been called to support with behaviour, I found suggesting the Sport Sanctuary and using this to help facilitate a dysregulated child a great tool. There is a good understanding from the children of what this means, and having done it, they return to class."

Miss Morris, a Year 5 teacher, saw the same shift in her own classroom. "Sport Sanctuary has been a great outlet for the children in my class. They like building up their passports. The breaks are being used properly. The children come back and they are ready to learn."

Ready to learn. For a class teacher managing 30 children, those three words carry a lot.

Bringing families in

In February 2026, Amy, Grant and Neil stood in front of a room full of Ravenscote parents and explained what their children had been learning. They explained the Sport Sanctuary. They explained what self-regulation means, and what families could do to support it at home.

One mother had been sceptical at the start of the year. She was worried about the time her son would spend outside class and uncertain what it was all for.

By February, that same boy was walking into school smiling every morning. He has just happily completed the Year 6 residential without incident. She is not sceptical any more.

The moments that told the story

A Year 5 girl at Ravenscote: autistic, deeply attached to her mum, for whom every morning transition was distressing. She is not sporty. She has never been sporty.

But she became one of the most consistent members of the Sport Sanctuary cohort.

Through the programme she learnt to recognise when she needed to regulate. And then she began approaching Gary mid-lesson, walking across the classroom calmly, collecting her token, in front of everyone. And returning to her seat. Ready.

"She has been able to use what she has learned to take those regulation breaks herself," said Amy. "And she is doing that independently now."

A Year 4 boy, all energy and presence, who struggles with the classroom environment, filled in his feedback form at the end of the programme. He wrote that he did not like Sport Sanctuary because it was five minutes.

His teacher understood immediately. He did not mean he disliked it. He meant he wanted more.

For a child who would previously resist almost any structure, that is a profound statement.

The Impact

By spring 2026, the numbers confirmed what the staff could already see and feel.

The School Wellbeing Scorecard moved from 46% to 90%, a 44-point improvement. Mental Fitness, which had started at 0%, reached 88%. Whole School Impact reached 95%.

The SWEMWBS wellbeing assessment of the 24 Sport Sanctuary children told an equally powerful story.

Average wellbeing scores improved by 55%, rising from 50% to 77.5% of the maximum possible score.

Four indicators; optimism about the future, dealing with problems well, feeling close to others, and managing their own wellbeing, moved from Rarely to Often.

It will not drift

We began with a Tuesday afternoon in Frimley. We end with Amy’s words.

"RISE Up has refreshed our trauma-informed approach and moved us towards what we are now calling a trauma-invested approach, because it is not just about having something in place.

It is about the importance of movement and the importance of continuing to invest in it.

It reminded us that this matters, and it will not drift."

One is a policy. The other is a commitment.

Every school that has ever put something in place and felt it fade will understand exactly what Amy means.

A huge thank you to Amy, Grant and Gary, and to every member of staff at Ravenscote who showed up, learned something new and gave these children the tools to know themselves.

And a big thank you to Sarah Williams at Active Surrey for the vision to create, champion and fund the Surrey RISE Up pilot.