🎯 Supporting SEMH Learners Through Positive Risk-Taking

Why SEMH learners need chances to take safe risks.

👋 Welcome to SEMH Education!

Every week, I share insights, strategies, and tips from my experience working with children and professionals on social, emotional, and mental health (SEMH) in education. This week, we’re exploring positive risk-taking for children with SEMH.

Positive risk-taking is a really hard skill to master for all children, let alone those with SEMH needs. When we talk about positive risk-taking in this post we are referring to; the act of stepping slightly outside your comfort zone in a safe, supported way to build confidence, resilience, and personal growth.

Children with SEMH needs can sometimes get wrapped in a bubble of protection, and for good reason. They’ve often experienced exclusion, dysregulation, trauma, or unmet needs. So we plan predictability, reduce demands, and lower the stakes.

At some point, growth requires risk.

That doesn’t mean throwing children into the deep end! It means offering safe, scaffolded chances to stretch, to be uncomfortable just enough to build resilience.

🔁 Avoiding Risk Can Reinforce Fear

When we remove every challenge, we can unintentionally teach that:

• Discomfort is dangerous

• Success only comes with certainty

• Failure is something to be feared

For SEMH pupils, this often shows up as: 🚫 Refusal (to protect themselves from shame), 😡 Dysregulated responses (when things feel out of control), 😐 Apathy or masking (to avoid vulnerability).

We need to rebuild trust in stretching, not just safety. Finding that balance between the right support and not overprotecting children is often incredibly difficult.

You may think you’re supporting a pupil well, until you ask them to complete something independently, which can then result in crisis!

🧑‍🏫 Own Experience: As you’re supporting these children, it’s imperative to make sure you’re not wrapping them in cotton wool. Removing all of the demands and lowering the stakes to 0 will often result in children needing 1-1 support to complete anything independently.

The result may look like the following scenario: supporting and scaffolding an activity with a small group. They give feedback that they understand the task. You walk away to support another group. You return later to realise none of the group have completed the task, even though they could verbally explain to you what they had to do.

This could be for several reasons. However, if you’re noticing this pattern of behaviour with a specific pupil throughout the year, it may be that they have previously had all the risks removed from them, so they are virtually unable to complete tasks independently.

For these pupil’s there’s often a significant fear of failure. They won’t attempt tasks independently due to the overriding fear that they’ll do something wrong and be humiliated or punished for it. You can support these children out of this mindset, but it takes time.

In my experience, I’ve found that taking small, positive risks every day can foster a stronger sense of independence in these pupils. These risks don’t have to be academic-related either. In fact, starting off with risks outside of academia often work better.

✅ What Positive Risk Looks Like

Positive risk isn’t recklessness. It’s a purposeful challenge that’s:

• Developmentally appropriate

• Emotionally safe

• Followed by reflection and celebration

Examples might include:

• Reading aloud in a small group

• Joining a new lunchtime or after-school club

• Trying a food they’ve previously avoided

• Slowly increasing their time without their trusted adult

• Attempting a new activity with a peer

These may feel tiny to others, but for these children, they’re huge steps!

🧑‍🏫 Own Experience: As I mentioned previously, these initial steps are often best completed outside of academic lessons. It’s all about building up the child’s resilience to independence. I found this was best done through other means, as attempting it in academic lessons often left the children feeling unsupported and out of control of their environment.

I once taught a child who believed he couldn’t read or write, as he’d become used to having everything read and written for him. When encouraged to engage with phonics strategies such as segmenting and blending, he would refuse outright and sometimes resort to tipping over his table in frustration.

Instead of persisting with literacy-focused interventions in isolation, we shifted the focus toward building his independence in other areas of life. He began cooking pizza bagels, joined a lunchtime club, played football at break, read comic books that genuinely interested him, and even started attending a kickboxing gym outside of school.

These activities helped him feel more in control and confident. As a result, he became increasingly open to academic support, eventually working alongside a teaching assistant to co-write a 13-page story. At one point, he was so motivated that he chose to stay inside during breaks to finish it.

Have you had an experience like this? Let me know in the comments!

🧠 Key Ingredients for Safe Stretching

🎮 Choice + Control
Where possible, let the pupil opt in. Risk must be voluntary to feel empowering.

🪜 Scaffolded Steps
Break the task into micro-risks. Instead of “present to the class,” start with “share an idea with a peer.”

😊 Emotional Check-Ins
Prep the child emotionally beforehand, and debrief afterwards.
Ask: What helped you? What would you change next time?

🎉 Celebration (Not Reward)
Praise the effort, not just the outcome.
“You tried something that felt scary. That’s brave.”

Are we protecting this pupil from risk, or from growth?

🧰 Try this in your classroom this week:

Discuss “Positive Risks” before home time

• Invite pupils to name a challenge they took on this week.

• It could be social, emotional, academic or sensory.

• You could even add it to a classroom wall with their permission:
  “I read a new book.”
  “I joined a different lunch-time club.”
  “I tried some new food at lunch.”

These tips will help to build self-efficacy and show pupils that growth isn’t about perfection but about showing up.

As with a lot of things for SEMH learners, this might feel like a long way around to encourage children to become more academically independent. But trust me, it works! A lot of these pupils have little to no self-confidence, and they need that built up before feeling safe and secure enough to try academic tasks independently.

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