Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
The London Nautical School is an inner London secondary all boys school situated in Lambeth with 564 pupils across years 7-13. LNS has 47% FSM (Years 7-11), 50% EAL across the school and 24% SEN Status.
The school has a naval ethos which dates back to its inception following the sinking of the Titanic. Pupils still have the opportunity to take part in maritime activities across all key stages and the uniform reflects the naval tradition. LNS is a Pan-London school and takes pupils from numerous different London Boroughs.
Behaviour challenges and goals
Goals
- Improve Behaviour culture across the school
- Support teachers to be able to deliver lessons without disruption
- Ensure calm corridors and consistent transition between lessons.
Challenges
- Implementing change where established norms for pupils and staff were in place
- Nature of our building (very low on space and lots of corridors and small spaces)
- Ensuring staff buy in to change of systems and routines.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
Our initial focus was around the training and ensuring that the right staff were able to attend and take part in the training sessions to ensure that there was a shared understanding of what it was that we would be undertaking. The training sessions were very helpful and helped to ‘front load’ key information and also to embed the required mindset and approach into the key staff who would be implementing the changes.
The audit and survey processes were beneficial as they gave a clear framework on what to focus on in order to identify our specific areas for improvement. We conducted the audit as a senior team and scored each area and came up with evidence to support this from school data, survey results and our observations of the different elements of the school. For the surveys we ensured that pupils undertook them in school to maximise responses and for the staff survey we reminded staff why we were asking them to complete and gave regular reminders again to maximise responses.
Myself and the Headteacher visited our Behaviour Hubs Lead School and this was a very powerful exercise, as it gave us an insight into what could be achieved with a fairly similar demographic (a vital point for me) and also some very quick takeaway actions for how we could see quick improvements. Our initial visit also included going over our action plan and this was a helpful exercise for our Lead School partner to probe what it was that we needed to put in place to achieve our goals. The advice was very supportive and also gave realistic suggestions.
I personally honed in on the idea that trying to do too much would be ill advised and that to put some small changes in place and build confidence and momentum amongst staff was really important. This also linked to a piece of advice from our Lead School which was to constantly be reviewing and making small changes where necessary. Once completed, the Action Plan gave us a constant frame of reference and was there to remind us of our long term goals when things didn’t always work out as we desired.
Once we began the programme, we always tried to achieve our goals by ensuring that communication was strong, devoting a large amount of inset, student and staff time to explaining what and why we were changing. A staff inset we held in June to review the changes we had made to that point and develop new ideas was a particularly important point in our journey, as it allowed staff with different roles, responsibilities, and commitments to discuss the positive impact the changes had on them whilst also giving them the opportunity to share new ideas and prioritise the most important aspects. When we came back in September, we were able to demonstrate that the further changes we had made were for the majority aligned with their own priorities and suggestions, and this fed into the collaborative approach that we continue to have amongst staff.
“Recent focus on improving corridor behaviour during transition times. New routines mean there is calm and orderly movement around the school.”
Impact on behaviour
The outcomes of our work with the Behaviour Hubs programme have been that the behaviour culture around the school has improved, this can be evidenced by the following:
- Results from follow up staff and student surveys (See below)
- Analysis of Pastoral Data (See below)
- Anecdotal feedback from staff/visitors
- Observations from leaders.
New routines were specifically referenced in our June 2023 Ofsted report (Behaviour and Attitudes were rated as ‘Good’).
Summary of Staff Survey Improvements:
- 58% reduction in staff classing behaviour as ‘Below Acceptable’
- 5% increase in number of staff classing ‘the behaviour rules and procedures help make the school a safe and happy place’
- 23% increase in staff agreeing or strongly agreeing that fellow staff members ‘build positive, respectful and supportive relationships with all pupils.’
- 5% increase in staff agreeing/strongly agreeing that ‘relationships between pupils are positive, respectful and supportive’
- 5% increase in staff agreeing/strongly agreeing that ‘school leaders are visible and remind pupils about the behaviour rules.’
Summary of Pupil Survey Improvements:
- 12% reduction in pupils stating some/most/all lessons for the question ‘in the last full day of lessons you attended, how often did other pupils behave in a way that interrupted or stopped the teaching of the lesson?’
- 8% increase in pupil’s Agree/Strongly agree responses to ‘our headteacher and other school leaders are visible and remind pupils about the behaviour rules. Increases also in the clarity of school rules, the rules contributing to making the school a safe and happy place and a reduction in classroom contexts of calling out and disruption of lessons.
Pastoral Data:
- Reduction in removals from lesson and repeat removals from lesson (same pupil being removed from the same lesson more than once)
- Reduction in pupils late to school and significant reduction in pupils arriving late after 9am
- Significant reduction in pupils late to lessons.
Quote from Ofsted June 2023: Leaders have high expectations of pupils’ behaviour and conduct. They have recently focused on improving corridor behaviour during transition times. New routines mean there is calm and orderly movement around the school. Overall, pupils spoke positively about the marked improvement in behaviour. In lessons, low level disruption is not common.
Next steps on your behaviour journey
The next steps for us as a school are to continue to utilise the approach we have developed through the Behaviour Hubs programme to continue to improve our behaviour culture. We have made changes and improvements, and this is positive but there are still a lot of areas to focus on. We are currently having a very strong focus on in class behaviours and tackling some of the passivity that we see in some lessons.