LOCHGELLY High School visited Lendrick Muir Outdoor Centre as part of their resilience programme and the youngsters showed just that.

The Times spoke to S1 pupils, Ellen Ranklin, Reece Thomson and Carla Masterton about how they have benefitted from the programme.

Reece said, “Resilience means we should never give up if we have a goal. If we fail, we try to aim to get back up. The programme has really helped me because some classes when I started school were hard and then resilience came in and told me that I should never give up, and try and aim for my goals. I’ve become a lot better in lots of subjects.

“The growth mindsets programme has really helped me too. I always want to get easy sums in maths but I realised that if I was going to challenge myself I needed harder sums and I will end up building up my knowledge in other subjects too.” Ellen and Carla said, “We learned lots about friendship and how to keep friends when we first came to the school. It was really interesting because it was was how to make friends and keep them. Resilience helped us learn about new friends and cope better than we thought we would. It’s helped our confidence.

“We went on a trip to Lendrick Muir and that was all about resilience. There was a huge climbing wall and we weren’t sure if we wanted to do it but everyone was encouraging us and we got to the top and were very proud.” Their teacher, Mhari Paton, is involved with the resilience programme and said, “It’s been a huge thing through the year and at Lendrick Muir. It teaches how important encouragement is – encouraging friends and being encouraged. The support seems to have helped.

“It’s all about co-optive learning. Bringing groups together, building relationships within teams with common goals. It builds confidence.

“This year it was identified in the school that there was a need for building confidence in our pupils. That’s why we started this programme in first year to start them off with that knowledge and the thinking that it’s OK to make a mistake as long as you learn from it and encourage yourself from it.

“Nearly everyone went to Lendrick Muir and it was great for teachers to to build relationships with pupils. We saw a phenomenal difference in how they were dealing with things from day one until they left.

“I have seen a huge difference in confidence (with Ellen, Reece and Carla) in the past year. It’s been a really good thing opening their minds up to the different opportunities that they can have in the school.”