What’s your school behaviour policy like?

[noblegiraffe]

My school has the old C1, C2, C3 and you’re out style of policy, but from reading threads on here, and from the news (Michaela, Great Yarmouth, Plymouth) there seem to be more and more schools heading down the really strict route.

Then you’ve got schools that aren’t the full Michaela, but much stricter than before where you’re booted out of a lesson for mucking around and put in isolation all day instead of lunchtime detentions and the like.

Is the trend towards being much stricter? What does your school do?

noble, I can't actually see a sanction on that page?

Piggy it’s the ‘you have chosen to move to the back/catch up at lunch’ part of the script.

Ah...I thought move to the back was something they were doing that was naughty!!

The thing that annoyed me about Dix is ,despite an APU background, he really doesn't tackle really defiant or aggressive behaviour.

I tried a bit of a script today and got sworn at

And what was the sanction for the swearing?

Or did that count as a secondary behaviour that should be ignored?

Sanction?! Don't be silly!

My school has an issue at the moment where kids are supposed to be kicked out of the room at a certain stage but they are just refusing to go. You’re then supposed to summon support but that rarely arrives and you’re left looking like a pudding while Smuggy McSmugface who you just told to leave is very obviously still in your room.

Noble, no one responds to our alert buttons as well - once kids know that, you’re sunk. I have some very at-risk children and if they decide to go awol and no one responds to my alert, anything could happen. Not to mention, if a fight breaks out or an attack in a classroom and no one comes! An ignored ‘on-call’ system is so dangerous. It’s making me look elsewhere even though I’ve only been at this school since September.

Not sure which is worse : an ignored on call system or no on call system!

If you’ve got no on-call system then surely you must have some way of getting back-up if a kid was being genuinely dangerous in the classroom?

I think if there was no on-call system but if a kid refused to leave then they’d be in isolation the next day then that would be better than an on-call system that’s ignored and no sanction for not leaving because it’s assumed that on-call will deal with it.

We really dodn't . Not an official one. Believe me, this has been raised many times. Some departments have their own system. We have an SLT link for each faculty - some are more helpful than others. It is very unliekly that a child who refuses to leave a room would end up in isolation the next day.

There has been a few times when I have emailed SLT/ HoYs for back up and no one has arrived. They would like the HoDs to do everything but fail to acknowledge that they are usually teaching!

I think that SLT on minimal timetables can control their classes because they’re SLT and the kids treat them differently. They assume it’s because they’re ‘doing it right’ and if only other teachers were like them, they wouldn’t have problems with behaviour in lessons either.

If they were on call and actually had to go into classrooms then that shiny bubble would burst. Safer to stay in the office.

Piggy re swearing: this bit of Dix pissed me off. Being told to fuck off isn’t a reason to throw your toys out of the pram etc etc.

The problem is that he is talking about teachers in alternative provision. Teachers who have knowingly signed up to teach the most difficult students from the most problematic backgrounds.

Teachers in your normal secondary school haven’t signed up to that. They’ve signed up to teach maths or English to teenagers who need qualifications and are generally amenable to the idea of working towards them.

These teachers have a right to do their job in acceptable working conditions for the role, which includes the right to not be a target of unsanctioned abuse.

Yes, it's nonsense. No one else (except perhaps frontline NHS staff and the police) would tolerate being sworn at in their workplace.

And he has obviously seen (led perhaps) ecellent APUs: many of them are chaotic, violent and poorly staffed. Students are then pushed back into mainstream, having been made worse, not better and losing all their tiny class sizes, behaviour concessions and 1: 1 support : not to mention all the lost learning. The girl who swore yesterday being a case in point.

It's his patronsising tone that does it for me.
It seems to always come from a very smug view of 'but you need to understand that you are responsible for that child's behaviour. If a child tells you to fuck off then you should reflect on your lessons and your conduct to understand that you probably created that situation.

I'd have a bit more time for him if he took a job leading behaviour in a challenging mainstream school where most bad behaviour isn't due to big emotional trauma and he effectively turned a school around. Until then he's just another consultant sharing his opinion and making money.

Plus, if you dig behind is pseudo therapeutic nonsense then what you actually get is a terrible view of teens. That they are so fragile and passive that we couldn't possibly expect them to know right from wrong, that they lack any form of agency and that they are so poor at functioning as reasonable polite human beings that the world needs to shift around them as they're only 1 utterance away from a swearing violent meltdown. They're so incapable of adapting that working in a silent classroom is essentially a human rights abuse.
It's a rather crappy way of seeing students when you think about it.

I like his book very much. I do work in an AP school now (one visited by Paul Dix in fact), but I spent 20 years in mainstream before that. His approach is not focused on the individual adult. Nothing will work in a school if if it is just done by a handful of staff. Its all adults in the school. Consistency is the absolute key. This is just as true in mainstream as it is in AP.

Fallen what do you think should happen if a teacher in a mainstream school is sworn at by a student?

There are some useful ideas but then they are true for all behaviour policies:
Build relationships
Consistency with all staff
Try to deescalate rather than escalate a situation
The school I worked in that went for the scripted 'you made the choice to tell me Smith to fuck off. I would like you to make positive choices so we can learn' didn't change behaviour. It became a game for students on getting staff to say set phrases. The issue in school wasn't that lots of children had lots of deep emotional needs. The issue was that for years students (encouraged by parents who also hated school) were allowed to get away with whatever they liked. There were no consequences for poor behaviour because staff would do the scripted thing and then soem fluffy member of SLT would take the child for a hot chocolate task, ask the child about their feelings and what they think the lesson needed to help them behave and then would put them straight in because "It's important Danny knows we want him to learn". Great. Now I have a whole class who have seen you can tell at someone, throw things, call a teaching assistant a paedo and nothing happens.

If you're in a normal secondary, you have signed up to teaching students from the most problematic backgrounds, because they are there. The problems are firstly down to poor or inconsistently applied systems, like your call out examples, and secondly to a lack of thought for what to do with the small minority óf students who genuinely struggle with a firm behaviour policy. Exclusion starts with exclusion from the mainstream classroom, not from school. Many of our kids have spent months in isolation before they come to us. That's where the loss of learning has hit critical levels. And the loss of whatever classroom appropriate behaviour they had. Of course disruption and abuse should not be tolerated. All schools absolutely should have a call out system that works so that learning can continue. We have one in our school. But once you've removed them you can't just do nothing with them. Well you can, but the consequence is either disrupted classes in the mainstream setting, or further damage to the lives of children who may already be seriously disadvantaged.

Worked in one school where the head decided to make his mark by introducing his new behaviour system wankily entitled "the power of three"... basically it was three Paddington bear hard stares > you got told off... back to the start and resume hard staring - rack up three tellings off and you got your name on the board... back to the start and resume hard staring... three names on the board and you got sent out going up until after the staff member's eyeballs had disintegrated from administering the required three hard stares for every step of the behaviour system where you might end up being sent to SLT.

The Maths and Geography department got bored one lunchtime and calculated how many pissed-off looks you would have had to accumulated to earn an exclusion.

The kids had so much respect for this staff member they superglued the door to his office shut - with him inside it.

I think a child who swears at a teacher should be removed from the lesson and have a sanction, consistently applied from the behaviour management system. In any school. And the teacher gets on with teaching, and next lesson goes again. If, with consistent application of the policy, a child is still abusing staff, then I do think it's time to take a more therapeutic approach, not involving hot chocolate, but certainly involving the teaching of some strategies. Because if it's not working there is no point in continuing. Most children respond well to consistency. If they don't, it's worth seeing if there is something else going on. For everyone's sake.

I think the counting thing sucks essentially. There are some behaviours where warnings are fine (chaor swinging, off task behaviour, mild answering abck). the trouble is that some lazy SLT types want the countdown system to include all behaviours - eg swearing, extreme rudeness, aggression. To me those are 'do not pass go ' offences.

Out of interest, fallen, what do you think of the reintegration of AP students into the mainstream ? What happens then when they flounder? This happens a lot in my area as it is 3 tier, so they essentailly get put back in mainstream after middle school, regardless of whether the AP has ' reformed' them or got them ready. It feels a bit like a game of ping pong with thses blighted souls, which is very sad, but also very damaging to the school.

I have little experience of it because our students are excluded in KS4 and the school's don't want them back. So instead ours leave for the even harsher world of FE. I wish the systems were more joined up.

Grrr at that apostrophe

I think a child who swears at a teacher should be removed from the lesson and have a sanction, consistently applied from the behaviour management system.

I think we agree. Dix makes it sound like this is ‘throwing your toys out of the pram’.