Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
The Heys school is a small secondary school of 600 students, located in Prestwich. Despite Prestwich being an affluent area, the students that attend come from a wide range of economically diverse backgrounds. This includes several students who come from low-income families, generational unemployment, social services, and Early Help involvement.
The schools defining values of respect, kindness, and determination are at the heart of everything we do. At The Heys School, we are passionate about developing the whole child and nurturing a love for learning and maximising potential to be best we can be, every day.
We are a small school with a big heart and our pupils, staff and families are important parts of our Heys community.
Behaviour challenges and goals
We needed to create new behaviour systems that:
- Simple to understand for all stakeholders.
- Staff challenge poor behaviour consistently
- Placed a greater focus on positive praise rather than overly complicated sanctions
- Gave staff the required structures/training to teach behaviour.
The behaviour of students at The Heys has been a concern.
- Last year the school had over 600 suspensions, including 10 permanent exclusions
- There were high numbers of internal truancy with students wandering the school site during lesson time
- Students did not attend detentions and there was a lack of certainty that when sanctions would be issued these would be completed
- Detentions were held during lunchtimes and the monitoring and tracking was poor
- Staff did not view teaching behaviour as their responsibility which led to a lack of staff consistently challenging poor behaviour both in lessons and outside of lessons
- Uniform standards and expectations were low and often unchallenged by staff
- New detention system became unmanageable and ineffective.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
To achieve this, we completed the following actions:
- Accessed high quality training via the Behaviour Hubs programme and disseminated this to staff. We particularly focussed on the research of Tom Bennett in which he emphasised of the importance of ‘teaching behaviour’
- We conducted a staff survey to find out what they felt about behaviour in school. This gave mixed pictures and highlighted a lack of typicality
- We created our new behaviour systems, which we simplified to help with consistency of delivery and ease to understand
- We then carried out a rigorous quality assurance process in which a range of stakeholders took time to challenge the new systems. This included, staff, SLT and the school improvement partner. These challenges and ideas were then considered, and amendments were made
- The policy was then shared with staff during a CPD session. This allowed for the philosophy behind the policy to be explained
- The policy was then launched in school. The assistant headteacher led school assemblies in which the policy was explained
- We accessed training from our partner school, where they led a CPD session on de-escalation strategies and restorative practice
- Each week the school focussed on basic expectations (start to lesson routine, gaining whole class attention, exit from lesson routine, uniform expectations) This allowed the pupils to be taught the new behavioural skill. It also allowed the behaviour system to remain high profile throughout school
- Behaviour working party was implemented to allow staff buy-in. Along with the working party a new detention system was designed to address the issues school were having with lack of attendance to detentions
- Behaviour working party presented the new detention system to staff during CPD session.
Impact on behaviour
The new behaviour policy has had a wide range of positive outcomes:
- There has been a significant drop in suspensions compared to last year
- Internal truancy has reduced
- There is a now a systematic approach for the management of behaviour throughout school
- Student voice indicates that behaviour has improved compared to last year
- Uniform expectations and standards have improved, and staff challenge these expectations consistently
- Staff quote: “Hi Paul, just wanted to thank you and the SLT for the relatively recent changes around the school that have improved pupil behaviour and reduced the rate of disruptions in lessons.”.
Next steps on your behaviour journey
Our next steps are to continue using the new behaviour systems and, alongside the behaviour working party, improve the consistency of delivery of our in-lesson steps of intervention.
We plan to design and implement a behaviour curriculum to teach the students the behaviours and conduct we want to see in school. This will be delivered through form time sessions throughout the year.