Assistant head teacher at Henry Fawcett Primary in Lambeth explains why they decided to take a more relational approach to behaviour, starting from point that every person in the school – including the staff – are human beings.
Lots of schools have behaviour policies that are very prescriptive. If a child does ‘this’, they get a half a day’s detention, but if they do ‘that’ then it’s a full day of detention, and so on.
But as a teacher, even as you’re implementing these punishments, you know it’s not helpful because you’re not moving towards the solution that you want.
The school has historically had quite a firm disciplinary stance, but that changed after COVID, which gave us an opportunity to reflect on our behaviour policy.
We decided to scrap it altogether and start again from a relational approach, one which considered everyone as human beings, including the staff.
So we wrote the policy starting from the point that, in general, children want to do the right thing, and if they don’t then we have to figure out why.
And it’s a bit of a cliché, but we see their behaviour as a response to their environment, or to the way they’re feeling, and our job is therefore to work out how we give that child an environment that helps them to be successful.
How did it work?
When you first remove a very tight regime and give people a bit more freedom to make choices, initially, they felt discombobulated and didn’t really know what to do with it. There was a lot of, ‘This thing has happened, what are you going to do about it?,’ from both kids and parents.
But it’s embedded into our practice now and we’re in the maintenance phase where we can predict issues before they happen and the children are able to articulate themselves before the point where it becomes a problem.
So by no means have we made children less angry or less upset, but we work on helping them to notice when it might happen, and help them to notice what the most productive thing to do with their anger/frustration/disappointment is. In other words, what you do with that emotion is your choice, and you live with the consequences. Whereas a hard-line approach means that when children come up against it, the school has nowhere to go apart from suspending or excluding them.
We set very clear boundaries but we deal with each child on a case-by-case basis. For instance, if a child tips a piece of furniture over but then comes back after 20 minutes and says, ‘I’m really sorry I did that,’ and tidies up, that is actually a massive win if three months ago they’d have been running around the corridors for two hours.
But our approach also gives us the flexibility to hold children to account in what might seem like more minor circumstances. In these kind of circumstances we’ll get the people involved, talk about what’s happened, and try to make everyone consider things from another person’s point of view. If a child is just punished without any kind of engagement, they have no opportunity to take ownership of their actions, so the chances are they’ll be back doing it again every few weeks.
And the staff is given flexibility too and we’re think of this as a constant problem-solving exercise: ‘Ok, that didn’t work so we’ll tweak this, or try that and look again at what the problems might be.’
Ultimately the rationale is – we’re investing at the earliest stage so as to have less problems down the line. And financially that’s the case too – we spend a lot of funding and resource on things like getting education and health care plans (EHCP) in place [30% of children at Henry Fawcett have SEND] as well as hiring full-time learning mentors, whose role it is to support those who need extra help with their emotions and behaviour, as well as to advocate for the children and understand their experiences at school.
And although it feels like a lot up front, the alternative is paying for it at the other end – hiring a detention monitor whose job it is to sit in a room with kids in isolation for days.