10 Questions with…

Dr Jo Walker and Dr Simon Walker, co-founders of STEER, a cutting-edge toolkit for teachers to give personalised support and demonstrate its impact on wellbeing.

Dr Jo Walker and Dr Simon Walker, 2021 Bett Awards

1. What inspired you to start Steer Education, and what gap in the education system were you hoping to fill?

In the last 15 years schools have learned the value of tracking students’ academic development. However, they did not have an equivalent means of tracking their social-emotional development. We founded STEER to fill that gap. Parents invest in education not just so their child gets good grades, but so that they are equipped to thrive in the world beyond school. STEER’s data is designed to give schools data to evidence that every child at their school isn’t just succeeding academically, they also developing emotionally, so they will leave with the key soft skills they need in life and the workplace. Such skills are becoming more important by the day with the advent of AI, when human soft skills are those AI cannot easily replace.

2. Can you tell us about the early days of Steer Education? What challenges did you face during the development phase?

STEER started in 2011 when we were invited to innovate such a tracking system by the owners of the Thomas’s London day Schools, where Prince George the future King of England was educated. We spent four years in R&D running trials on our prototypes across more than twenty schools. We worked closely with Sir Anthony Seldon at Wellington College, an early STEER user.

Our biggest challenge was designing a tool that teenagers couldn’t game- existing tools like the SDQ from wellbeing or clinical backgrounds were easy to fake and most adolescents do not want to share their real concerns with teachers. When we got our breakthrough in 2015 showing we had cracked this, we celebrated. Our peer reviewed paper was published in the Open Psychology Journal in 2024 having kept our solution secret until we had established our market presence.

3. How has Steer evolved since its inception, and what have been some of the key milestones in your journey?

Achieving our peer review, which backs up our pioneering science, means teachers can trust STEER’s solution. Our 2022 BETT award was an important validation that STEER Tracking doesn’t just work on paper, it works in schools, Monday to Sunday, 24/7 within the busy demands of a school day in the hands of every teacher. In 2023 we moved our platform fully to the Cloud so it is 100% global. A big milestone is that STEER is now used in schools in all six continents in leading schools across the world. In 2024 an independent study backed up that STEER reduces mental health risks and increases teacher confidence in addressing it. This means schools don’t have to take our word for it.

4. What makes Steer’s approach to student well-being and mental health unique compared to other solutions available to schools today?

Most mental health and wellbeing solutions use surveys with explicit questions about whether a student is happy, has good friends, can talk to teachers, has thought about self-harm etc… Research shows that 8/10 adolescents do not want to give their teachers honest answers to those kinds of questions, so the data you get from them is very patchy and often misleading. At their worst, they even prime students to consider things they hadn’t before (Have you thought about self-harming..?)

STEER developed a different way of assessing the mental health risks facing a young person, based on how they use their imagination. We did the primary science ourselves, built the model, engineered the tool and tested it. The result is that it is 82% accurate in detecting concerns such as bullying, anxiety, pressure and self-harm and yet young people find it a playful, engaging process.

Most important, STEER doesn’t just DO the test to students. Students are active in understanding their own STEER data, and self-improving. The STEER platform provides algorithmically selected in-built guidance for both teachers and students. Statistically, 75% of students improve their mental wellbeing when schools use STEER.

5. In what ways does Steer Education help schools in Asia address challenges like student engagement, well-being, and academic performance?

Research shows that the ability to self-regulate is the greatest factor in predicting and accelerating a student’s academic performance. Self-regulation gives a child the ability to collaborate, ask questions, reach out for help, manage pressure healthily, give a presentation or work alone. All of STEER’s teacher strategies (and there are over 3,000 of them), improve a student’s ability to self-regulate. STEER doesn’t just just stop children crashing; we teach children to steer.

So, every teacher at a school using STEER will become trained with skills that improve their teaching, their understanding of their students and their confidence in responding to wellbeing needs. For a student, this changes their experience of school- they experience it as a place where they are known, understood and personally supported. It becomes a place they want to engage with, because they thrive there.

6. Could you share a case study or an example where Steer Education had a significant impact on a school or student community?

In one school, the STEER data showed that girls in Y9 (aged 15) were unusually low-disclosing. Low self-disclosure has many risks, including of self-harming and anxiety, and when they asked some of the girls admitted to experiencing these. The school used the data to select 20 girls most at risk, and then used the right STEER strategies to improve self-disclosure through specific activities. The plan worked; self-disclosure increased and the girls’ self-harm dropped.

Another school had eight boarding houses each with their own Houseparent. One was a young teacher who was adopting some different pastoral approaches. The STEER data showed that students in his house exhibited 50% lower wellbeing risks than those in the other houses. Not only that, they were also improving their self-regulation which was likely to help their learning and exams. Because the STEER data evidenced the positive impact of his approach, the Headteacher asked the Houseparent to share what he was doing with the others, which he did for the next term. As a result, the wellbeing of all the boarding houses improved over the coming year.

In another school, the STEER data showed that when students reached Y4, their STEER data got unexpectedly worse. The school realised this was the year teaching went from form-based to subject-based and children no longer had their own form classroom. As a result the school changed their policy and held this transition back to Y5 when the students were more ready for it.

7. How do you ensure that Steer’s platform is adaptable to the diverse cultural and educational environments found across different schools in Asia?

Currently, STEER is used by schools in Thailand, China, Hong Kong and Singapore. Some of these schools are very large (3,000 students) and others small, just a few hundred. STEER provides a lot of flexibility in how it is delivered, so it can work in a wide variety of school types and settings.

STEER also provides a dedicated School Manager to work with a school for the first year and guide them in their launch and implementation. We are now pretty experienced at helping culturally diverse
schools succeed. The schools themselves need to be well led, willing to learn and able to align their staff behind a common approach.

8. What kind of data or insights can educators and administrators expect to gain from using Steer, and how can this information be used to improve student outcomes?

STEER’s data can answer questions like: What impact is our school actually having on our students’ wellbeing? Is this better than it was last year? Which year groups or genders are currently most vulnerable and may need additional support? Where are examples of best practice in pastoral care in the school at the moment? We put in a new pastoral programme in Y6-8 last year; how effective it has actually been? Student X has been seeing a counsellor for 12 months- is their self-regulation actually improving? Not all students need the same messages about preparing for exams; how can we tailor our messaging so the right student hears the right message rather than just broadcasting the same advice to all?

STEER enables you to be precise, forensic in your pastoral care. Rather than guessing and intuiting, it enables administrators to have confidence that what they are doing is working, to amplify best practice and target areas that need support.

9. Can you speak to any specific success stories where Steer has helped a school or a particular group of students overcome academic or emotional challenges?

In its 10 years of tracking student self-regulation, STEER has identified a growing and concerning trend. More and more adolescents are starting to ‘over-regulate’. If healthy social-emotional self-regulation is like driving a car and being able to steer, over-regulating is like being in a constant driving test- hypervigilant, self and socially monitoring. It sometimes exhibits as over conscientiousness or perfectionism.

Crucially, students who over-regulate will, in the long run, dysregulate; they suddenly veer off the road with a sudden and unexpected crisis, breakdown or acts of self-harm. Schools often see this before exams. This is because over-regulating is extremely tiring for the brain and can’t be sustained.

STEER identified that over-regulating increased after the pandemic. In response, we have developed specific workshops to help schools address and reduce over-regulation. We are already seeing the positive effects of this; we are seeing schools report fewer students dysregulating before exams and teachers knowing how to apply pressure in a healthy rather than unhealthy way.

10. Looking ahead, what are your goals for Steer Education in the next 5 to 10 years, and how do you see the role of technology evolving in the education sector?

The impact of social media has been hugely damaging for adolescent wellbeing. Reducing phone time is one thing, but young people need guidance to manage their own emotional development, just as they do their academic development. At the same time, AI will mean that human soft skills are more in demand than ever. STEER sees its 5-10 year role as helping prepare the next generation for these challenges. The future for society is not just children with exam certificates but citizens with strong emotional resources and foundations.

If you are interested in STEER tracking for your school and would like to speak to a member of our team, contact us today.

Article written by Stephanie Hobler