Rebuilding Belief in Birkenhead: The Impact North West RISE Up Journey

Neil @ Future Action
Mar 2
6 min read

When young people stop believing they belong in school, academic progress is no longer the first problem. Belief is.

This week, we’re focusing on the brilliant work of Thomas Quinn, Head of PE & Character Education Lead at Impact North West Schools in Birkenhead.

Working with young people who haven’t thrived in mainstream education, Thomas and his team have used the Wirral RISE Up programme to rebuild confidence, regulation and self-belief through relationships, intentional movement and character development.

Here’s Thomas’s story, in his own words.

Context

Impact North West Schools is an independent special school, based in Birkenhead on the Wirral.

We work with young people across Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 who, for a variety of reasons, have not thrived in mainstream education. Some have struggled with attendance, some with behaviour, many with anxiety, confidence and self-belief.

Our purpose is simple but significant: to ensure that every young person who comes through our doors has the opportunity to reach their educational potential in a setting that genuinely meets their needs.

Ultimately, the goal is reintegration, whether that’s back to their referring school or onto a new pathway with us as a school allowing them to thrive with our curriculum.

But to get there, we have to rebuild more than academic skills. We have to rebuild confidence, regulation and belief.

Character development sits at the heart of everything we do. As part of the Wirral RISE Up programme, we committed to strengthening that character work through a more structured, movement-based, trauma-informed approach to wellbeing.

We knew we were doing good work. But we wanted to be more intentional. More consistent. More impactful.

Intent

When we joined the Wirral RISE Up programme, my thinking was clear.

We needed students back in lessons. We needed them moving more. We needed them to feel more confident walking into a classroom.

Not just in PE, across the school.

Many of our students weren’t refusing to engage because they didn’t care. They

were overwhelmed. Anxiety, low self-esteem and poor regulation were creating barriers that then showed up as behaviour or absence.

Our intent was to use relationships and movement as a lever. Not as an add-on, not as an afterthought, but as a deliberate strategy to help students regulate, reconnect and re-engage. We wanted to build confidence, reduce anxiety and give students practical tools they could use when things felt too much.

Implementation

We didn’t attempt a dramatic overhaul. Instead, we focused on embedding consistency.

Through the Wirral RISE Up programme, we strengthened our understanding of how movement can support regulation and engagement, and we built that deliberately into the school day.

We embedded structured movement breaks so that every student now experiences around 40 minutes of movement within the timetable.

This happens through structured lunchtime opportunities and within lessons themselves. In PE, movement became more intentional, used as a way to engage the whole class from the very start of a lesson.

One of our early challenges was ensuring that all staff fully understood the purpose behind movement breaks. It wasn’t about “burning off energy”. It was about regulation, focus and readiness to learn. Once staff began to see the connection between movement and engagement, standards improved and consistency followed.

The impact on extracurricular participation has been significant. Sport and PE activities are now 45% higher than any other subject area. We have seen a 76.92% increase in competitive fixtures up until February 2026 already, compared to the previous academic year.

This figure is expected to grow until the end of the year, which highlights the consistent drive to better the opportunities of our learners.

For the first time, we introduced an all-girls squad competing in Glow Sports Festival and MAT Ball competitions, which has been a proud milestone for us. Breaking down this barrier has been a massive win, we have been able to engage students in competitive sport who previously would not have dreamt of it.

We have plans to further expand on this milestone. We have also strengthened links with WISSA, Panathlon and Wirral School Games to broaden opportunities for our learners.

Importantly, the least engaged students began to show up more consistently. Movement wrapped in care became an entry point back into school life.

Impact

The headline is simple. Student wellbeing improved by 52%.

Using teacher perception measures aligned to the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS), we tracked how our target group appeared to be feeling and functioning before and after embedding RISE Up.

Staff perceptions shifted from an average of 2.63 out of 5 (“Rarely / Some of the Time”) to 4.00 out of 5 (“Often”).

That 52% uplift wasn’t in one area, it was across all eight measures: optimism, feeling useful, feeling relaxed, dealing with problems, thinking clearly, feeling close to others, making decisions and managing wellbeing.

I also completed the School Wellbeing Scorecard pre and post intervention to evaluate the school’s overall provision. The results showed a shift from 42% to 90%.

That is a 48% improvement in whole-school wellbeing provision.

Pre Intervention School Wellbeing Scorecard

Post Intervention School Wellbeing Scorecard

But what makes that shift even more significant is that it reflects perception across a group of young people who previously struggled most with engagement, regulation and belief. And it wasn’t just student wellbeing that changed.

This tells a powerful story. RISE Up didn’t just impact students. It strengthened systems. It improved consistency. It embedded clarity around why movement matters.

The provision moved from emerging to embedded. And that systemic shift is what made the 52% improvement in student wellbeing possible.

Beyond the data, the day-to-day changes were visible. Students entered lessons calmer. They handle mixed classes with greater confidence. They are more resilient when things don’t go their way.

Participation became voluntary rather than compliant. They aren’t just attending. They are engaging.

Next Steps

Phase 1, through the Wirral RISE Up programme, was about re-engagement and consistency. Phase 2 is about depth.

My focus moving forward is to align our “Personal Best” approach more explicitly with the PE curriculum so that character development and skill development run alongside one another.

We are investing in more inclusive equipment, including boccia and new age curling, to ensure that all learners, particularly those less confident in traditional

sport, feel able to participate.

We are also placing greater emphasis on building confidence and reducing anxiety within core PE lessons, particularly when classes mix together, which can be a trigger point for some students.

Ultimately, our aim is not simply to increase activity levels, but to ensure that students leave us with transferable tools, confidence, self-awareness and strategies for managing anxiety, that support their reintegration and long-term success.

Reflection

For us at Impact North West Schools, being part of the Wirral RISE Up programme has strengthened what we already believed: movement is not just physical. It is relational. It is emotional. It is developmental.

By embedding it deliberately, we have seen students begin to reconnect, not just with sport, but with school.

And in our context, that reconnection changes everything.

Thank You To Thomas And Our Wirral RISE Up Colleagues

A huge thank you to Thomas and the whole team at Impact North West Schools, and to all the schools involved in the Wirral RISE Up programme.

We recently released the interim report showing an average improvement of 30% in teacher perceptions of student mental wellbeing. You can read more here. Fantastic work by an awesome group of educators.

We would love to say a big thank you to Oliver Terry and the team at Wirral Virtual School for supporting the Wirral RISE Up programme. We are delighted to be partnering with all the schools and council for a second year of the Wirral RISE Up programme.