We also know that pupils who are happy at home and school tend to achieve more in the classroom. It is important as professionals that we look at addressing poor behaviour in terms of building the confidence and happiness of pupils, in conjunction with more traditional behaviour policies.
This is something we strive to achieve at Harrington Hill School. We are situated in East London in what is considered one of the most deprived areas of Europe and yet we have a happier and healthier school that many expect from our location. This has come from my team’s unwavering commitment to give pupils a strong sense of emotional wellbeing.
This emphasis has seen a real reduction in incidents of poor behaviour at the school and an increase in children’s achievements.
Many behaviour policies are reactive and we wanted to be more proactive in getting children to understand their emotions before an incident takes place. To manage this, we introduced a program called Second Step which supports our view that children need to learn social emotional skills. This has certainly helped children learn intervention and prevention strategies which allow them to develop confidence in their ability to manage situations in and out of school. At Harrington Hill children are encouraged to discus what is deemed suitable behaviour and what real learning looks like and we use assemblies to openly discuss emotions and the impact that has on our learning and understanding of events.
We have a clear stakeholder-agreed behaviour policy as this helps regulate the way behaviour is managed. The policy is followed up with regular staff training for consistency across the school and to reinforce what is acceptable behaviour and what is not.
The behaviour policy also ensures we are all giving a consistent message to children, which is essential if we are to achieve the results we want. For example, each incident of poor behaviour is graded on a 4-step chart, with 1 being a minor misdemeanour and 4, a more serious issue. We use the same system to praise good conduct and achievement as this is an effective way of raising a child’s expectations. Incentive stickers and certificates for behaviour and effort back this up and smiley faces are awarded for whole class achievement to encourage group motivation. A clear policy ensures we place greater emphasis on recognising good behaviour – important in developing a praise culture that builds pupil’s confidence.
Our SIMS .net information management system (IMS) allows us to regularly record behaviour to help the school monitor the success of the policy. The detailed information lets us spot patterns that might be forming in the behaviour of groups or certain pupils. We can analyse the data on behavioural incidents over time and see overall trends in low-level disruption in class. Problems or challenges can then be dealt with quickly, before more serious behavioural issues begin to develop and we have the information we need to start asking the right questions about the behaviour.
The data in SIMS provides a wealth of information which staff can draw on to help inform decisions on what support might be appropriate for pupils. We can view behavioural incidents alongside attendance data, test scores and other pupil information to see if there are any underlying reasons that might be causing a child to misbehave. Attendance records could reveal that a pupil has missed a number of lessons due to illness and may need additional learning support, for example.
Recently, we introduced a new curriculum in Year 3, designed to encourage pupils with a wide range of different learning styles. Using the IMS, we could monitor the success of the new approach by looking at pupil engagement. We analysed the number of low-level classroom behavioural incidents and pupils’ assessment results and this gave us the confidence that the changes we made were having an impact. Pupils were happier and more enthusiastic in their lessons and their levels of achievement surpassed all our expectations. This new curriculum and the new style of teaching have since been rolled out across the whole school this term and we have noticed a dramatic reduction in low-level disruption.
At Harrington Hill School, we are passionate about education. We recognise the importance of the physical and emotional wellbeing of our pupils and the effect it has on achievement. We want to know that the children coming to this school every day are happy, healthy and enthusiastic about what they are learning. If we can gain greater insight into the effect an emotion such as self-esteem has on behaviour or achievement, the future for many children could be much brighter.
