The disengagement of young people from the education process is an increasing concern in school systems across Europe and beyond (Meijer 2002; Zay 2005). Although it is often the most 'visible' pupils - the noisy, the disruptive, the actively resistant - who are most readily identified as in need of intervention (Adi et al 2007) there is a significant 'silent' minority, who resist schooling in less obvious ways. These are the 'quietly disengaged'  (Holroyd and Armour, 2003) children who 'get by' but without much real enthusiasm for or engagement with  learning (Riley 2002; Spratt et al 2006).

The Pyramid Club is an intervention offered by the UK organisation 'ContinYou' (www.continyou.org.uk), designed to improve the well-being of disadvantaged individuals, families and communities, mainly in urban areas. The specific focus of Pyramid is school-age children who are 'quiet, shy, anxious, isolated or withdrawn’ and aims to raise self-esteem and develop skills like resilience (Anthony et al., 2009) and social confidence.  The Pyramid programme, which includes games, cooking, art and craft, has a consistent structure, but  is flexible enough for adaptation to local contexts.

The approach of Pyramid has echoes in nurture groups (Cooper And Tiknaz, 2007) which offer a secure in-school environment for young children with low self-esteem and a poor self-image, and who may lack the motivation and/or strategies to become more academically engaged. While Pyramid clubs typically operate outside of school, common to both approaches is the promotion in children of enjoyment of the learning process through improved self-confidence, in order that they may re-engage with and achieve in a mainstream school setting.

Looking across evidence from a number of (mainly small-scale) evaluations of Pyramid Clubs, the general message is that attendance can improve children’s pro-social behaviour and reduce emotionality  and behavioural problems. Focus group interviews with parents mainly confirm that such effects are sustained at home, while teachers are generally positive about the impact that the scheme has on classroom behaviour and learning engagement (Wells, 2000l Ohl et al., 2008).

There is, nevertheless, considerable variation in these studies, with some reporting significant positive gains, where others have found only modest changes. Moreover, while some have explored the effects of  independent variables such as gender, what is mainly absent from these evaluations is any serious investigation of the range of social, personal, institutional and processual factors associated with these differential outcomes.

The University of Leicester has been commissioned to design a detailed, in-depth pilot study of a single Pyramid Club, with a view to eventually exploring such issues at a national level. The present paper reports on the outcomes of the study, the key purpose of which is to develop a sufficiently robust and trustworthy model for the larger scale, national study. The aim is to identify the relevant individual and interactional effects of the above factors with a view to building these into the larger study. The paper reports on the outcomes of the pilot in terms of indicative factors associated with effective outcomes from the case-study scheme, and the resulting research design for the larger project.       

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