The UPRIGHT project consists of 4 main building blocks:
1) Co-creation and validation of the intervention in EU regions. The overarching objective was to adjust a universal whole-school resilience program to different socio-economic and cultural contexts of the different EU regions. By hearing the voices of the stakeholders, who confirmed the accuracy, the credibility and the validity of the program by incorporating their knowledge and experiences, especially those from the adolescents in UPRIGHT, the resilience-based UPRIGHT program was developed by experts in the Consortium.
2) Deployment of an innovative school-based resilience intervention. The intervention comprises two programmes, Well-being for US and Well-being for ALL, to be deployed in two consecutive school years. As a whole school approach, it uses the internal (i.e. school staff, school buildings, school funding) and external (school contacts, community services, other departments, families) resources to create a culture of well-being in the school.
3) Overview of results. More than 4100 adolescents, 2700 families and 550 teachers participated in the evaluation in 5 European countries (Spain, Italy, Poland, Denmark and Iceland). Both groups of adolescents, the intervention and control, showed a deterioration in their mental well-being over time. From one side, it is common for the mental well-being of adolescents between the ages of 12-14 to deteriorate. From the other side, COVID-19 erupted in March 2020, which impacted on the level of perceived stress and increased the complexity of adapting positively to a changing and uncertain context. However, adolescents who received the UPRIGHT intervention reversed this negative trend of deterioration and slowly approached the well-being levels they had at the beginning, before the pandemic. This represents the effect of resilience on them. The qualitative analysis showed that all stakeholders presented a high level of satisfaction, with skills related to emotional management, self-awareness and social awareness standing out. UPRIGHT promoted more positive social relationships, both at family and school level.
4) Exploitation and dissemination: The UPRIGHT Consortium has been active in disseminating the project, with a number of presentations in conferences, workshops, one book chapter and 6 scientific articles published so far. The UPRIGHT intervention is published on School Education Gateway website as part of the European Toolkit for Schools, an initiative of the European Commission. In addition, all the materials and the resilience programs will be available, free, in the website: www.uprightproject.eu. Several initiatives are ongoing in the different regions of the participating countries to maintain and extend the use of the intervention in other schools. Also to include UPRIGHT as part of the teachers’ university education. All, as a result of the communications with the Education Authorities and the Universities, are part of the exploitation plan.
