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What happens when two teachers in the same school respond completely differently to the same behaviour and they both believe that they're doing the right thing? After more than 19 years supporting schools with behaviour and SEMH, I've seen first hand how difficult it can be to get whole school consistency right, particularly when some pupils need a different approach.
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So in this episode, we're going to look at what schools should be doing around standardising practice when different responses are justified so we don't eliminate professional judgment, and spoiler alert, professional judgment is a good thing, and how leaders can stop flexibility turning into a free-for-all.
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Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan, my co-host is Emma Shackleton, and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents and of course students when classroom behaviour gets in the way of success.
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We're going to share the tried and tested secrets to classroom management, behavioural special needs, whole school strategy and more, all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential. Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world, so you'll get to hear the latest evidence-based strategies before anyone else.
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This is the School Behaviour Secrets podcast.
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Hi there, welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets.
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My name's Simon Currigan, and when people say my noonas are overrated, it's just not true.
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They're perfectly fine, not great, but fine. It's what the doctor told me.
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Putting my noonas aside, in today's episode we're going to look at a problem that I think almost every school leader and SENCO will recognise. You've got a behaviour policy that looks perfectly sensible on paper, but when you start to walk around the school, you discover that different members of staff are interpreting it in different ways, and the problem then is how do you create consistency across your classrooms while still allowing teachers to respond to the individual needs of the children they're working with, allowing them to use some professional judgment.
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But before we get to that, if you're finding this episode useful or this podcast, please take just one moment to subscribe to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast on your app so you don't miss future episodes, and perhaps share it with a colleague who's involved in leading behaviour or SEND in your school, helping this information spread and do good in the world, like my noonas. Okay, so let's imagine a situation. We've got a year five pupil, let's call him Josh, who's sitting in a classroom doing an independent piece of writing work, and by the way, the fact that I picked year five doesn't mean that what I'm about to say is only relevant to primary, it's relevant to secondary schools too, but I think taking a primary school example in this episode simplifies this slightly. So the teachers explain the task, the other pupils have started working, but Josh is sitting there with his arms folded refusing to pick up the pencil. Now, one teacher might respond by reminding Josh of the school's expectations and then give him a warning, and if he still refuses to do the work, follow the next step of the might sit beside Josh, talk him through the task, help him work out his first sentence, and then encourage him to continue independently. Same pupil, same behaviour, two completely different adult responses, and you can imagine then what happens when those two teachers have a conversation in the staff room. One of them might say, well, I don't understand why you're letting him get away with that behaviour, he knows perfectly well what he's supposed to be doing, and the other then might respond, but he's struggling, giving him a warning isn't going to help him write anything down.
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So in that situation, who's right? Well, the truth is actually we don't know, not yet, because we haven't got enough information about Josh. Let's imagine he's got significant difficulties with executive function. He's struggling to organise his thoughts, hold instructions in his working memory, and work out how to begin the task, and when he looks around, everyone else is already writing, which makes him feel even more overwhelmed. In that situation, giving Josh a warning doesn't address what's prevented him from getting started in the first place. The warning might actually increase the pressure he's feeling, and that makes it even harder for him to begin. But let's change the situation slightly, and imagine Josh understands the work perfectly well, he's demonstrated he can do it independently in the past, and he's learned that if he refuses for long enough, an adult will eventually come over and do most of the difficult thinking for him. Well, now we might need an entirely different response, and I think that's the first important point, because a lot of people talk about how there's one dogmatic way of doing behaviour and SEMH. You're either a behaviourist or you're needs-led, but we can't always work out what the best response to a behaviour is simply by looking at the behaviour itself. We need to understand what's behind it, and there's something else about these two versions of Josh. Let's call him Schrodinger's Josh. A little physics joke.
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That's worth thinking about too. In both situations, the expectation, our aim, is the same, right?
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We want Josh to engage with his learning and make progress with his writing. What changes in each case is the support he needs to meet the school's
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expectation, and that's where I think schools sometimes get confused about what consistency actually means from class to class. Because consistency doesn't necessarily mean treating every child identically. Imagine you've got two pupils who are expected to complete the same writing task. One can organise their ideas independently and get started straight away. The other has difficulties with working memory and needs the instructions broken into smaller steps. If we insist on giving both children exactly the same support, we might be treating them equally in one sense, but we're not necessarily giving them an equal opportunity to succeed, and that's an important distinction. So I'm going to unpack that a little bit. Fairness, having the same, and consistency are not the same things.
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Having the same is obvious. It means everyone in the class gets exactly the same approach. That's like giving every child in year one exactly the same reading, but regardless of their ability, because the expectation is they all work to a certain standard. Fairness is where everyone gets what they need. In this case, the kids in year one get a book that's matched to their reading ability roughly, allowing everyone to access the text. Consistency is about having a shared approach amongst the adults, a shared thinking process for working out and deciding what each child needs, and at the end of that thinking process, two different professionals might arrive at two different answers, both of which can be correct, because in something as complex as learning or SEMH or behaviour, sometimes there's more than one right answer to meeting their needs. More than one approach can work. So fairness and consistency are about maintaining the expectation, but adapting the route that the pupil takes to get to the expectation. Now that's not an argument for abandoning boundaries or lowering expectations whenever a child finds something difficult.
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Of course it is not. Sometimes pupils need encouragement to persevere. Sometimes consequences are appropriate, and not every refusal that you'll see from a child is caused by deep anxiety, dysregulation, or an unmet SEND need. The important thing is that our response should be informed by what we know about the pupil, tuned to what we know about the pupil, rather than automatically assuming that their outward behaviour must have the same underlying cause, or that the child is just choosing to be awkward. And if you're listening to this and thinking, well how do I actually work out what might be sitting underneath the pupil's behaviour, then don't panic because I've got a free resource that can help you to download from our website. It's called the SEND Behaviour Handbook, and it includes a behaviour analysis grid to help you explore possible underlying causes, and to start thinking deeply about what support a pupil might require to succeed. You can download it for free. I'll put a direct link in the episode description, so all you have to do is tap on your podcast app for this episode and it will open up the description for the podcast, and I'll put the link there. Or you can download it manually for free from beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. You go to our website, you click on the free resources section at the top, and you will find the SEND Handbook waiting for you. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the free resources section at the top of the home page, and you will find the SEND Handbook in the downloadable resources section. Now, there's another side to this argument, and I think that's just as important, because we can take this idea of individualizing our responses just a bit too far, and sometimes if we're not careful, the phrase, every child is different, or every child is an individual, can become an excuse for every teacher doing something different in every classroom. For example, imagine you've got a pupil who's repeatedly calling out in lessons. In one classroom, the teacher gives them a reminder.
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In the next, the teacher just ignores it because they don't want to disrupt the lesson.
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In the third classroom, the teacher immediately sends the pupil out of class.
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And when the head teacher asks why are they responding so differently, each teacher has a perfectly reasonable sounding explanation about the child's needs or what was causing the behaviour. One says they're following the behaviour policy, another says that they're choosing their battles, and the third says they're maintaining high But from the pupil's perspective, the rules seem to change depending on which classroom they're currently sitting in. And that is a problem because there's a difference between a deliberate adaptation made for a specific reason and inconsistency that happens because different adults have different beliefs and habits and levels of confidence.
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The first can be really helpful. The second can leave pupils confused, frustrate staff and undermine the school's behaviour policy.
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So how do school leaders deal with this effectively? Well that brings us back to what consistency is. It's a thinking process. And I think the answer is to be much more specific about what we want our staff to actually be consistent about. And I think there are three areas to focus on here. The first is expectations. What are the things we expect from pupils across the entire school? That might include behaving safely, treating other people respectfully and engaging with learning. Now the level of support needed to achieve those expectations might differ from pupil to pupil, but staff need to understand what they're working towards. So we've all got a good idea of what a good noonar should look like and that's our goal.
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The second area is to think about how adults should respond.
And I don't mean giving teachers a script they have to follow word for word regardless of the child that's standing in front of them. I mean agreeing the important principles that should underpin their response.
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So for example that adults respond respectfully, that consequences are proportionate and that we're trying to help the pupil return to participating successfully with their learning.
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Those principles shouldn't change simply because a pupil's walked into a different room.
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So if my noonars aren't in great shape, just to be clear, they're fine, they're all right. But if they weren't, then there's a shared process for approaching what's happening with my noonars.
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And the third area is how decisions about adaptations are made. Because if a pupil needs a different response, there should be a reason for that change that we can explain logically. Let's say we've got a pupil who's become overwhelmed in busy classrooms and has an agreed kind of arrangement to leave the room briefly so they can regulate.
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That's a thought through purposeful adaptation. But the arrangement needs to be understood by all the relevant adults. What does the pupil do when they leave? Where do they go?
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How do they support that child when they come back into class and need help to return to their learning? If one teacher understands the arrangement, another refuses to allow it, and a third lets the pupil wander around the school indefinitely, well we haven't got a consistent approach to meeting the pupil's needs. We've got three adults making separate decisions which, if I'm honest, as someone who's visited hundreds and hundreds of schools, when you have that happening, it just looks like people making stuff up. And the example here, the analogy is, I've been to see three consultants, they've checked my noonars, they've all recommended something different and contradictory, and now as someone visiting the consultant, I don't know what to do or what to think. And as a child in that situation where we're getting different responses from different adults, I don't know what to do and I don't know what to think. And this is where school leaders and SENCOs do have an important role because they can make sure that individual adaptations are understood and communicated and reviewed. That doesn't mean every little adjustment needs a meeting, a form, three signatures from school leaders before a teacher can offer people some help. Teachers need the professional judgment and the latitude and the freedom to respond to what's happening in front of them moment by moment. But there needs to be a shared understanding of where that freedom sits within the school's wider approach. And there has to be a golden thread from the school's approach to thinking consistently about SEND to what happens in class, the adaptations that are in place, and what appears in the pupil support plan, if that's necessary. And I think there's a practical way to start developing that understanding. At your next staff meeting, take a behaviour situation that tends to produce, in your experience, different responses from staff across your school. It could be a student refusing to work or calling out or people leaving class without permission. Pick something that's relevant to your school and present your staff that situation and ask them what they do. Now, don't immediately tell them the correct answer. Instead, explore why they've suggested those responses. What expectation are they trying to maintain?
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What information about the pupil might make them change their mind about the right approach? And are the differences between their responses based on the child's needs, or is it simply based on personal preference? Because that conversation might show you something interesting about the viewpoints of your staff. You might discover that staff disagree about what the behaviour policy actually expects them to do, or that some staff don't know about adaptations that have already been agreed for particular pupils, or that the policy itself doesn't give teachers enough guidance about when they should use their professional judgment or think about behaviour as having an SEMH or an SEND need. That's useful feedback for a leadership team because you can't solve those problems by telling staff to be more consistent if they're not sure what that means or how they implement it. So sometimes, based on that, you might need to improve communication.
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Sometimes you might need to model what an appropriate response looks like. And sometimes, actually, you need to review the policy itself. After all, if everyone's consistently doing something that isn't working and the staff are changing their approach because they're frustrated and the students are frustrated, that's not necessarily a successful base to work from.
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So let's bring this back to Josh, our pupil who was refusing to start his writing.
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The important question isn't whether every teacher should give him a warning or whether every teacher should sit beside him and help him out. It's whether staff understand the school's expectations, whether they have enough information about what's making the task difficult for Josh, and know how to make reasonable professional judgments about how best to support him in a consistent way across the school. So if you're a school leader or SENCO, there are three things I'd encourage you to think about this week. First, identify one behaviour where staff responses vary across your school. Is that variation deliberate and justified and part of a thought-through approach? Or is it happening because adults have different understandings of the expectations?
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Secondly, look at the adaptations you're making for individual pupils.
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Are they understood by the people who need to use them? Or do they only exist in one teacher's head or on a support plan on a piece of paper? And thirdly, give staff an opportunity to discuss a real behaviour issue together because developing consistency is more than about writing a policy and asking everyone to read it and sign it. It's about helping staff develop a shared understanding of how to apply that policy in real situations in real classrooms. And that's all I've got time for today. If you found this episode useful, please subscribe to School Behaviour Secrets and leave me a review on your podcast app. It helps other school leaders and teachers discover the show and find out more about my new nurse. That's enough about my new nurse for one episode, probably, you know, the podcast forever. I hope you have a brilliant week, that you've learned something useful that you can apply in school today, and I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets. Bye now.