Girls from Loughborough High School have helped provide valuable insights to inform a piece of PhD research into addressing the fear of failure, through storytelling.

PhD student at Loughborough University, Jennifer Shuttle, has been researching how storytelling methodologies can be used to positively impact students’ well-being and attainment. Having identified a great deal of perfectionist attitudes in exam-aged pupils through her teaching experience, Jennifer realised the importance of the student voice in addressing fear of failure and perfectionism.

A number of Year 13 girls from the High School took part in a total of ten focus groups for Jennifer to help provide ideas and test out different storytelling methods. Using these helpful insights, Jennifer was able to analyse engagement and identify different themes for specific year groups.

The girls helped to categorise the methods that would work the best, create titles for the different schemes, and were fundamental in the production of resource material, which will be used in the school.

Poppy, Year 13 said of her experience: “I was particularly interested in this because I’m taking Psychology at A Level and I also wanted to help younger pupils and support them with these skills. I definitely would have benefitted from these skills in Year 7. By taking part in this research I feel more confident, having learnt about a growth mindset, and that failure is OK.”

Mrs Simpkin, Assistant Head at Loughborough High School said: “It’s wonderful that the girls were able to provide such important and helpful insights. We now have a set of lesson plans for each year group which will fit within PSHCE lessons from September.  I’m delighted that the resources we will now be using in our school have been created with support from the girls themselves.”

Jennifer said: “The girl’s contribution to this research was invaluable. Their openness to sharing opinions and ideas resulted in both an exciting and enlightening research process. It was particularly encouraging to see the girls desire to support their peers with this theme and for them to take ownership on the co-creation of the materials.”