Tackling Behaviour in your Primary School

A practical handbook for teachers

Ken Reid, Nicola S. Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136317408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Tackling Behaviour in the Primary School provides ready-made advice and support for classroom professionals and can be used, read and adapted to suit the busy everyday lives of teachers working in primary schools today.

This valuable text sets the scene for managing behaviour in the primary classroom in the context of the Children Act 2004 agenda, making it highly relevant to trainee primary teachers, learning school mentors, classroom assistants, behaviour specialists and senior management teams. As experts in the field of behaviour management, the authors draw on their many years of experience to provide evidenced whole-school strategies, extensively-researched concepts and step-by-step behaviour programmes. Topics covered include:

• Understanding behaviour
• How to measure behaviour and why this can be an effective approach
• Using and implementing whole-school behaviour policies
• Honing your classroom management skills
• Managing bullying
• Dealing with specific classroom difficulties
• Working effectively and supportively with parents.

Drawing on case-studies throughout, this handbook will help you to understand and deal with the most confrontational of classroom behaviour. Tackling Behaviour in the Primary School provides all staff, parents and carers engaged in health, education and social services with a ready-made resource packed full of strategies, ideas, activities and solutions to help manage behaviour in even the toughest of classrooms.

Part I

Setting the scene

Chapter 1

New approaches 1

Managing behaviour in the primary school

Introduction

Managing behaviour in the primary school is a fast evolving field. The subject has moved quickly away from the old notions of control and discipline to the point where pupils’ rights and views are respected and incorporated into the planning processes. The whole concept of both the meaning and content of primary school management has changed. The new philosophy incorporates such concepts and topics as values education, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary practice, inclusivity, diversity, individualised learning plans, well-being and respect and relationship policies, the role of the school council and respecting parents’ and teachers’ views and rights, the creation of pupil support plans, restorative justice, sharing good practice, the use of specific websites, e-mail and the combating of unfortunate acts of cyber bullying, to name but a few of the emergent fields.

Reading the texts of thirty, forty or fifty years ago, you would find none of these ideas. In fact, in those days very few books on primary school management even existed. The area was largely represented and dominated by secondary textbooks written about discipline, control and punishment, with the ideas applied to primary schools. Today, everything has changed to the extent that it is possible to find whole texts written solely about individual aspects of primary school management such as applying restorative justice schemes or understanding cyber bullying and children’s rights.

Similarly, thirty, forty or fifty years ago the whole landscape of primary school classrooms was different. For the average practitioner it was about teaching your class of perhaps thirty to thirty-five pupils on your own on a daily basis, finding time to undertake reading sessions with individual pupils, mounting classroom displays and, occasionally, talking to parents. Operating at a higher level above you as your inspiration and mentor was your experienced teaching head teacher or, in the larger primaries, your non-teaching head as a full-time administrator or manager. There were no computers, word-processors, laptops, mobile phones or the ilk. The curriculum was largely unstructured and open-ended. How staff of that era would feel looking inside the modern primary school classroom of today would be difficult to imagine. Would they be envious? Would they revel in the challenge?

Today’s primary school classrooms are about much more than the teacher and her class. They are about the teacher, her class and her support team, and how together they manage the curriculum, behaviour and the pupils’ learning and workloads. Your school, its size and location and where and how you teach, as well as the composition of your class (e.g. pupils with special or additional learning needs), may determine the culture and teaching styles inside your classroom. Your class may involve, in addition to the class teacher, such staff as one or more of the following: classroom assistant (CA), learning school mentor (LSM), home–school liaison officer (HSLO) or specialist behaviour or attendance support professionals. The teacher and head teacher can be involved regularly with a range of support or caring professionals such as education welfare officers, education social workers, advisers, consultants, educational psychologists, initial training or in-service tutors, voluntary support staff, health and social service professionals, parent helpers or parent/carer groups, local authority (LA) support staff, playground assistants, amongst many more. The head teacher and classroom teacher will play the leading professional roles, managing the school or playing the role of extended leader in the classroom, guiding a specialist team in implementing the National Curriculum, and supporting the pupils’ diverse learning support and developmental needs. Included in these latter tasks is the management of pupils’ behaviour and this is what the rest of this Handbook is about.

The position is complicated further by the contrasting educational frameworks and policies being implemented and carried out by different United Kingdom governments and by different administrations, local governments and states around the world, such as in Australia, Europe, Canada and the United States. For example, in Wales primary schools now follow the Foundation Phase National Curriculum, which is play-led and pupil-centred for pupils aged between three and seven, and all of these different national policies and strategies have an effect upon the ethos, organisation and culture of primary schools and teachers’ classrooms.

There is abundant evidence also that many primary school teachers and head teachers and primary-support professionals (NBAR, 2007, 2008) feel strongly that they have a wide range of training needs and practical deficits on aspects of managing behaviour in their schools and classrooms. In extreme circumstances, these deficits and their inabilities to manage challenging pupils in their classrooms can impact negatively not only their professional lives but also their personal daily lives and even lead to some teachers leaving the profession, which is, if nothing else, a waste of scarce resources in these difficult financial times. The failure to be able to manage challenging pupils is regularly reported to be the number one cause of stress amongst teachers in frequent teacher-based surveys conducted by both professional organisations and researchers. Other reports and surveys often refer to the inadequacies in or lack of training provided on school behaviour management at the initial teacher education, induction and in-service phases, whilst requests for specific training on aspects of primary school management feature at the top of surveys into teachers’ professional development needs (DfES, 2005; Cole, 2007).

For all these reasons, the content included in the rest of this book is broad, practical and intended to be both informative and helpful to all those staff interested in managing primary schools effectively as well as interested professionals and parents. The content covered in the remainder of this book includes: tips for classroom professionals; the use of whole-school strategies on a range of issues, including well-being, respect and relationships policies, nurture groups, and the management of challenging behaviour and serious incidents; implementing the 5-Step Behaviour Programme and effective whole-school and classroom management skills; dealing with specific classroom difficulties and behaviour; managing positive behaviour in the playground; forming effective partnerships with parents; the Family Values Scheme (Ellis et al., 2012); and managing school attendance and bullying.

The Handbook has been divided into two convenient sections. Part I provides essential background information on managing behaviour in the primary school. The content of the rest of this chapter covers:

• the role of the head teacher and senior management team (SMT);
• values-based education;
• social and emotional learning;
• defining social, emotional and behavioural difficulties;
• responding to pupils with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties;
• SEAL, Webster-Stratton and the Solihull Approach;
• the challenge of bad behaviour;
• SEBDA;
• the Children Act, 2004, and the Every Child Matters agenda;
• related interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches;
• pupils’ rights;
• research into pupils’ views;
• how to elicit pupils’ views;
• inclusivity, equal opportunities, diversity;
• the school council;
• how to use the school council effectively;
• the role of governors;
• the use of nurture groups.

In Chapter 2, we will consider the five levels at which to address behaviour management, from the national to the individual level. Then in Chapter 3 we will discuss the following:

• respect and relationships policies;
• a well-being policy document;
• the various categories for classifying pupils’ behaviour;
• the role of the primary behaviour support team.

Finally, in the introductory section for this book, we will present and discuss the following related issues by way of bringing our essential background information to a close:

• school-based case conferences and the use of case studies and case histories;
• making home visits;
• monitoring and follow-up;
• links with secondary schools;
• sharing good practice;
• the use of websites;
• leading aspect awards;
• TES Schools awards;
• training in behavioural management;
• the role of inspectors;
• the role of classroom assistants, learning school mentors and home–school liaison officers;
• the role of playground assistants;
• time management, decision-making and record keeping;
• restorative justice;
• the role of parents and carers.

The role of the head teacher and the SMT

All good primary schools have a senior management team (SMT) unless they are a very small one- or two-teacher school, and these are often found in extremely rural areas. SMTs vary in their meeting arrangements. Some meet weekly; others fortnightly. These meetings are normally augmented by full staff meetings, which usually take place before the start of each new term/year, at the end of sessions and as and when necessary (e.g. before or after half-terms). Sometimes they occur more frequently, as when, for example, there are major changes to the National Curriculum (NC), or in the period leading up to a school inspection or when a school is suffering from an outbreak of disaffection amongst its pupils.

Partly because the management of pupils’ behaviour has become so important, many schools now have a separate behaviour management team (BMT). Whereas the composition of the senior management team is fairly obvious (normally head teacher, designated deputy and one or two senior members of staff), the make-up of the BMT appears to vary much more, often from school to school, partly because the composition might be dependent upon location, a school’s history and ethos, its record on attendance, behaviour, bullying, exclusions (both fixed and permanent), and parental–school interaction and out-of-school and community links.

Take these two examples. School A has 550 pupils and is based in the heartlands of the South Wales Valleys. It has an overall attendance rate of 88 per cent and has excluded thirty-seven pupils for fifty-three separate major incidents over the course of the previous year. Over 95 per cent of the parents emanate from two deprived neighbouring estates which are riddled with poverty, vandalism and serious cases of familial breakdown. Its BMT consists of the head teacher (chair), two deputies, a senior member of staff, the special educational needs co-ordinator (SENCO), an external consultant and a senior member of the LA’s Behaviour Support Team. It has a lot of regular business to attend to and meets at least fortnightly. Writing referrals on pupils’ attendance or behaviour is a routine daily event. Bullying incidents within school, within the community and on the way to and from school are regular events. So is maintaining interview notes with pupils and/or parents or carers and a wide range of external bodies such as the police, social services, health, voluntary agencies, health visitors and relevant LA staff, such as the education welfare service and educational psychology service. The BMT currently feels unable to incorporate pupils because of the serious and confidential nature of its work/tasks.

School B is located in Leicestershire. It has eighty pupils drawn mainly from middle-class and reasonably educated backgrounds. It is located on the edge of a small rural town not too far from Rutland Water. Its overall attendance rate is 98.5 per cent. In the previous twelve months there were no recorded incidents of bullying, truancy or the need for any exclusions. The BMT is composed of the head, deputy and a pupil representative.

Clearly, the length of the BMT agenda and the amount of time devoted to the issues differ significantly between the two schools. So do the teachers’ stress and tolerance levels, their time management needs, the extent of the form filling and their overall in-school duties and responsibilities.

In fact, some might argue that School B hardly requires a BMT, apart from its Children Act responsibilities. This is why in so many primaries the SMT actually doubles up as the BMT and, in some schools, holds alternative management meetings or complete separate agendas in the same meeting.

The truth is that being a teacher, classroom assistant, learning school mentor or SENCO in School A bears little resemblance to being one in School B, although, in theory at least, both perform the same tasks. Also, both schools require a school council, a behaviour, school attendance and anti-bullying policy, and, again, in theory, a well-being and respect and relationships policy. You can probably guess which school of the two needs and uses them most. Record keeping strategies and the updating of pupils’ records, agenda setting, pupils’ progress reports, school-based and externally held pupils’ case conferences are all part of thinking about, planning and carrying out daily activities and events within School A, and these tasks can test the patience and abilities of even the most competent head teacher on occasion.

It seems almost superfluous, then, to point out that the leadership sk...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Setting the scene
• Effective classroom management
• Further reading
• Index