Adversity Protective environment Vulnerability Resilience Using the resilience matrix to make sense of assessment information and evaluate children’s needs Resilience can be defined as: ‘Normal development under difficult conditions’ (Fonagy et al 1994). In their three workbooks on assessing and promoting resilience in vulnerable children, Daniel and Wassell describe the protective factors that are associated with long term social and emotional well-being in the child’s whole world. The existence of protective factors can help to explain why one child may cope better with adverse life events than another. The level of individual resilience can be seen as falling on a dimension of resilience and vulnerability. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1. Dimension on which individual resilience can be located This dimension is usually used to refer to intrinsic qualities of an individual. Some children are more intrinsically resilient than others because of a whole range of factors. … For example, an ‘easy’ temperament is associated with resilience in infancy. A further dimension for the understanding of individual differences is that of protective and adverse environments; this dimension covers extrinsic factors and is therefore located in the parts of the My World Triangle that are concerned with wider family, school and community. Examples of protective environment might include an adult in a child’s wider world, such as a teacher or youth leader, or a grandparent (see Figure 2). Figure 2. Dimension on which factors of resilience around the young person can be located Getting it right for every child: Using the resilience matrix to make sense of assessment information and evaluate children’s needs 03/09/08 – V1.0 1