Encouraging Positive Behaviour in the Early Years

A Practical Guide

Collette Drifte

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781446242537
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Includes CD-Rom

?The book successfully bridges the gap between theory and practice, presenting essential background information and knowledge in an easy to understand way? - Early Years Update

?The whole book would be useful as a refresher course to enable practitioners who do not come across significant behaviour problems on a regular basis in the course of their work. It is a well resourced book that will also assist newly qualified practitioners/Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators to undertake and understand the importance of IEP/Behaviour plans and issues? - Early Years Online

?As Early Years settings now include more children with difficult behaviour, this publication is to be welcomed. It will be invaluable in supporting professionals to manage all young children who display difficult behaivour and in particular, those with special educational needs. The author provides some really useful suggestions, practical strategies and case studies on encouraging positive behaviour in a clear, easy to follow format. The resources on the accompanying CD-Rom will be useful in supporting settings to develop policies and practice and in the training and development of staff? - Jan Morrison, Independent Consultant and Trainer

This exciting new edition of a much-loved book offers the reader the following new elements:

- a CD-Rom with lots of downloadable resources including self-audits for settings, letters to parents, Individual Education Plans (IEPs), Play Plans, quizzes and crosswords

- coverage of new legislation and initiatives, such as the Early Years Foundation Stage and Every Child Matters

- new case studies

- guidance on how to plan, write and review Play Plans, with examples provided

Covering the 3 to 8 age range, this book is full of practical strategies, good advice and clear and helpful suggestions. It will help you encourage good behaviour from every child in your setting, and is particularly strong on suggesting ways to support children with special educational needs.

Collette Drifte is a Freelance Writer and Educational Consultant based in Northumberland; she worked previously as a teacher and Deputy Head for many years.

1

How to make sure your setting is fully inclusive

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In this chapter we will explore the concept of inclusion by:

• discussing how it has evolved historically, legally and in practice;
• looking at an overview of legislative developments and government initiatives from 1978 to the present day;
• tracking the gradual move from ‘integration’ to ‘inclusion’;
• discussing ways to ensure exclusion does not occur;
• exploring ways of developing inclusive practices in the setting’s activities, in relation to children with behavioural difficulties.

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You may think that a section addressing the situation of children with special educational needs (SEN) is irrelevant to you. After all, you’re reading this book because you feel there are possibly children in your setting who ‘only’ present inappropriate behaviour and don’t have special needs as such. But it’s important to realise that no matter how temporary or how mild a behavioural problem is, while it’s ongoing, the child has specific needs, and these should be addressed.

Behavioural difficulties come under the umbrella of SEN, in terms of both the legislation and the support offered to a child. So it could be argued that all children, even those with temporary difficulties, have the right to access this support which is enshrined in the law.

You may also wonder what relevance the SEN education laws have to your setting and why you shouldn’t ignore them and, apart from making sure you have regard to the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice, just get on with the job of working with your children in an inclusive and welcoming way. But in order to make sure that your setting is indeed inclusive, you need to be aware of how the concept of inclusion developed and became the accepted way of working that it should be today.

While the legislation is in place to ensure inclusion, as professionals we need to be vigilant that we really are practising inclusion in our settings. This is not because the law requires it (although it does) but because, as argued above, every child, regardless of their difficulties, has the right to have their abilities and achievements celebrated and to be helped to fulfil their potential in a setting that sees them in a positive light. Only by having a truly inclusive setting will this happen.

The legislative developments since 1978 show how we have moved towards today’s position of having inclusive settings as the norm, and we need to have an understanding of those developments to ensure the best inclusive provision possible for the children in our care.

An overview of SEN legislation

Before 1978, children who had ‘problems’ were put into segregated schools, institutions or hospitals, usually according to a disability or difficulty as perceived by those in authority. Very often these children were labelled with names we would not tolerate today such as ‘mentally handicapped’, ‘crippled’, ‘spastic’ or, in the case of children with behavioural difficulties, ‘maladjusted’. The Warnock Report was published in 1978 and led to the 1981 Education Act, the first major legislation which recognised that a child’s difficulties are interactive and contextual, in other words not within the child or needing ‘treatment’. This Act made us rethink our way of working with children who have SEN, often needing a complete turnabout from established practices that we thought were tried and true. We realised that we had to take a long, hard look at ourselves, to see whether we were failing to meet a child’s needs, and if so, how. The term ‘integration’ was coined and the then local education authorities (LEAs) were keen to show their commitment to the idea. There were many schemes put into place, such as attaching special needs units to mainstream schools or having special needs classes within schools and integrating the children at certain times of the day or week.

In 1989 the Children Act was passed, requiring, among many other things relating to all children, the identification of and provision for disabled children, particularly those under 8 years of age. This Act was also very important because for the first time, disabled children were included in the wider framework of legal powers, duties and protections relating to all children.

Then the 1981 Act was repealed by the 1993 Education Act which maintained and strengthened the principles at the heart of the 1981 legislation. It continued the child’s entitlements and there was more focus on both the involvement and empowerment of the child’s parents, particularly through the establishment of an SEN tribunal to give them the right of appeal.

In 1994, the first SEN Code of Practice was put into place and provided guidelines for implementing the 1993 Act. The Code of Practice established a standardised framework for the provision of appropriate and individualised education for children with specific needs. This meant that wherever a child lived or moved to, the provision should be seamless and continuous. The reality was, of course, a little different. Depending on the LEA’s resources, children were given varying degrees of support and allocation of resources. For example, some authorities would give a Learning Support Assistant (LSA) to a specific child while others would say that the child should be taught in group or class situations with the LSA working alongside.

The Disability Discrimination Act was passed in 1995 and clarified the rights of employment, obtaining services and goods, buying or renting land or property, and transport of people with disabilities. Under this Act, somebody is deemed to be ‘disabled’ if they have a physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on their ability to carry out normal daily activities. Education, including most early years settings, was not covered under this Act, except as providers of goods and services, and was covered only when the 2001 Special Educational Needs and Disability Act was passed (see below). From 1996, the social (but not educational) care of children in private, voluntary and statutory early years settings that were not classed as schools was covered under this 1995 Act.

From 1996, the Nursery Education and Grant Maintained Schools Act required all early years providers to ‘have due regard’ to the SEN Code of Practice. Children who had special educational needs and who were in the care of nursery schools and other maintained settings were entitled to appropriate provision, and their parents were granted greater rights. The duties of schools were made more specific and the regulations for assessing children and issuing Statements of Special Educational Needs were tightened up, for example by setting time limits for the process to be completed.

The 1997 Green Paper Excellence for All Children was followed by the 1998 SEN Action Plan with its strong emphasis on inclusion, parent partnership and multi-agency collaboration. By this time, the term ‘integration’ was still regularly used, but the idea of ‘inclusion’ was becoming more common. The SEN Action Plan emphasised the importance of the holistic approach, acknowledging that positive working practices meant working in partnership with parents and other agencies.

The 2001 Special Educational Needs and Disability Act amended the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act by covering the educational provision that had been excluded. This Act updated and strengthened the SEN Code of Practice and strongly emphasised inclusion. For the first time all early years providers, including playgroups, registered child-minding networks, pre-school groups, out-of-school clubs and so on, had a duty not to discriminate against a disabled child in their provision of education and day care or other services on the grounds of the child’s disability, and this included behavioural difficulties. They had an obligation to implement the SEN Code of Practice, and make sure their setting was fully inclusive.

The 2005 Special Educational Needs and Disability Act ensured the final ‘tightening up’ of the 2001 Act, encompassing all areas of work, education, recreation and leisure, etc. so that any form of discrimination, or attempt to offer a lower standard of service on the grounds of a person’s, or in our case a child’s, disability, is illegal.

The 2006 Childcare Act, taking effect in 2008, required local authorities (LAs) to improve the five Every Child Matters outcomes for all pre-school children and reduce inequalities in these outcomes. They should also secure sufficient childcare for working parents and provide a better parental information service. Early years regulation and inspection arrangements were reformed and simplified, providing a new integrated education and care quality framework for pre-school children and the new Ofsted Childcare Register.

The definitions of special educational needs in the SEN Code of Practice include children with emotional or behavioural difficulties, so it is clear that these children have as equal an entitlement to positive, inclusive provision as any other. But it is extremely important to remember that we shouldn’t be offering inclusive provision because it’s a legal requirement, but because we care enough about all the children we work with to want the best for them. Part of ‘the best’ is making sure they have the same chances as everybody else in their group to fulfil their potential in a positive and warm environment. So, in the context of an early years setting, you have to make reasonable adjustments to ensure you aren’t discriminating against children with behavioural difficulties. In practical terms, this means that you must not:

• refuse a service,
• offer a worse standard of service, or
• offer a service on worse terms

unless you can give a ‘justification’ for doing so. ‘Justification’ for offering different (‘worse’) circumstances for working with the child means that you can take into consideration:

• health and safety issues;
• the needs of the child;
• resources;
• practicality and the interests of the other people in the setting.

The language of the SEN Code of Practice is couched in educational terms, referring to ‘schools’ and ‘pupils’, but this doesn’t mean that other early years settings are not included. The Code makes the point that, despite this, its provisions are for all early years settings, including for the first time those we have already discussed above.

Finally, we can mention here the SureStart initiative implemented by the Labour government at the end of the 1990s as part of its long-term strategy for providing holistic services for young children. From the Birth to Three Matters framework to the Childcare Act 2006, the initiative is, at the time of writing, well-established across England. (The devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are implementing their own strategies. However, because the fundamentals of best practice are enshrined in all the initiatives, this book is also relevant to and appropriate for practitioners in these other administrative areas.) At its core is the philosophy of a ‘seamless’ service being delivered to children and their families, with the interdisciplinary cooperation and active working together of the health, education and social service professions. We will look at this philosophy in more detail in Chapter 3.

Inclusion or integration – are they the same thing?

The simple answer to our question is ‘no’. Even now, the two terms tend to be used interchangeably, but they mean very different things and practitioners need to understand the differences, and use each term in the correct context.

Integration

This concept was at the heart of the early provision for children with special educational needs, following the 1981 Education Act. It was based on the medical model of the child and their difficulties, which were perceived as coming from within the child and needing remediation or treatment. (Do you remember the ‘remedial reading teacher’ in your own school as a child?) When the child with special needs was integrated, they were placed in a mainstream setting and expected to change and adapt in order to ‘fit in’. The idea didn’t encourage or make possible any changes in attitude that may have been necessary within the setting, whether of its practices or its personnel, for the child to participate as fully as possible. In other words, the onus was on the child to change.

Inclusion

This concept has been at the heart of working practices since about 1996 and is based on the social model of the child where their difficulties are viewed holistically and ways of supporting them are found by exploring every aspect of the child’s situation. When the child is placed in a mainstream setting, it’s the setting that has to change and adapt in order to make sure the child is able to participate as fully as possible. If necessary, th...