About the Study

SOLutions In Schools (SOLIS) is an 18-month study co-designing and piloting a whole-school solution focused programme with school staff, students, and parents/carers.

SOLIS is an innovative whole-school programme, training staff to use solution focused approaches in their everyday conversations with students, colleagues, and parents/ carers.

The SOLIS study aims to investigate whether we can support school staff to have better conversations with students, colleagues, and parents/carers, using a promising approach called Solution Talk.

Positive, forward-looking conversations that help children, young people, families, and school staff focus on what matters to them

They help people to think about what they want to be different or better, by exploring their skills, what they’re already doing that’s working well, and celebrating success.

Developed through a co-design process in an all-through (ages 4-18) school in East London, the programme trains staff to have positive, strengths-based conversations, shifting away from problem-focused discipline.

We will investigate how students and staff experience solution focused conversations and whether it has a potential impact on mental wellbeing, communication, behaviour and school culture.

The study is funded by the Barts charity and is being led by Professor Rose McCabe and Dr Fiona Robinson at City St. George’s, University of London.

Schools have a statutory duty to promote wellbeing and, in the UK, whole-school approaches are recommended. However, school staff are generally not trained in supporting wellbeing.
Disruptive classroom behaviour is an increasing problem – impacting students’ learning, concentration, and motivation to attend school, as well as staff job satisfaction.
Everyday student-teacher conversations play a key role in promoting social-emotional skills and a growth mindset.
In turn, this has significant potential to improve children’s education and future life outcomes.

This study aims to co-design and pilot a whole-school solution focused programme, with students, school staff, and parents/ carers.

We will:

Create a manual, resources, and video training materials for how staff can use Solution Talk in their conversations with students, staff, and parents/carers. We will create this in collaboration with students, staff and carers.
Train up to 170 school staff in Solution Talk and provide ongoing supervision. We will assess how students and staff experience and implement Solution Talk by observing student-staff conversations and conducting interviews and focus groups.
Test student and staff outcomes (e.g., mental wellbeing) before the training and termly throughout the 2025-26 academic year.
Refine the programme, training package, and resources, for use in larger evaluation of the programme.