All the strategies were designed using a scientific process called “Intervention Mapping” We gathered information from three main areas:

• Real people
  • People with ADHD, parents of children with ADHD
  • School staff (headteachers, SENCos, teachers, teaching assistants)
  • Educational psychologists, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists
  • Researchers
• Scientific evidence
  • Findings from over 200 studies that have tried out different school-based strategies for students with traits of hyperactivity, impulsivity or poor attention
• Scientific theory (Theories are explanations of how and why different things happen or work)
  • About how humans learn a new behaviour
  • About how humans learn to change their behaviour
  • About ADHD (from different science types, like neuroscience, genetics, cognitive and developmental psychology)
  • About how complicated social places or “systems” like schools work
  • About how behaviour is learned and changes in these complicated places

We did a survey with the groups of people listed above to understand what the most important targets would be and therefore what the modules should be.

We made a very detailed list of what we wanted the toolkit to achieve for each module, linking this to what positive changes we hope this would result in for the student in the short term and the long term.

We then mapped every ‘bit’ of behaviour we would need to change to do this. We split this into the types of people who would need to do something differently, with the focus of supporting the student to reduce the problems their traits are causing them, rather than trying to fix what is essentially a personality trait.

For each bit of behaviour, we considered whether the person would need to improve skills, knowledge, beliefs or attitudes.

We then used something called a “taxonomy” (like a dictionary or encyclopedia) of ways that we know people change behaviour to identify the best ways to design a strategy to achieve the “behaviour bit”, for example whether to include an activity, a video, a quiz or flow charts and decision trees.

We designed the first ideas for all the strategies and the teacher instructions, then we talked about them with those real people we listed above, to get their feedback and suggested changes. We incorporated these and then developed the resources to go with them.