How Alison Knowles is Making a Difference in Education

Alison Knowles has been nominated in the NLP in Education category for the NLP Awards.

Alison was inspired to create ‘Ollie and his Superpowers’, having found a creative approach to support children therapeutically. The ‘Ollie’ model is based on NLP, parts therapy, story work and metaphors.

At the heart of the ‘Ollie’ concept is a passion and commitment to building resilience and wellbeing in young people. It works with children’s strengths so they come to befriend their emotions as superpowers and strengths to be worked with rather than ignored or acted out on.

The child’s superpowers are elicited using submodalities so the solution is bespoke for each child. The superpowers are based on integrating and working with parts, positive and negative ones and the resources utilise metaphors and stories like the magic library, the equivalent to time line therapy and the magic workshop, a purpose built source of personal anchors and resources for strengths and strategies to manage life’s challenges. The aim of the model is to support prevention as well as a cure.

Since its creation, Alison has written three children’s books and trained ‘Ollie’ coaches from all over, who work therapeutically in schools and with parents to use this dynamic approach to boost children’s resilience and wellbeing.

Alison uses outcome measures in her practice in schools, the Strengths and Difficulties questionnaire for the adults around the child and a bespoke set of scales to measure the child’s desired outcome and progress towards it. The initial data is evidencing rapid change with this brief psychological intervention.

Alison is described by those who nominated her as an inspirational lady with a passion for improving children’s lives in order from them to reach their full potential. She has proved her approach and methods to be highly effective in not only relieving children’s troubles but also in helping their parents and teachers to gain a better understanding of how things are for the child.

Alison’s vision is that her methods of working will result in her team of coaches being out of work in 20 years because the word will spread and all the children will know Ollie and be supported to be the happiest and best that they can – now wouldn’t that be wonderful.

The NLP Awards shortlists have been put together from nominations by an independent judging panel. The NLP Awards will be presented at a Gala Dinner on Saturday 19th May at the NLP International Conference. More details of the categories and shortlisted nominees can be found here.