Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
Woods Foundation is a school with an ambitious and successful culture based on a vibrant and stimulating curriculum that aims to ensure our children make good progress at the very least. www.woodsfoundation.notts.sch.uk
In 2022 there was a high turnover in the teaching & leadership staff. The school formed a collaboration with Holly Primary School www.holly.notts.sch.uk and a new leadership team was appointed (DHT, AHT, SENDCo, Literacy & Maths). A highly skilled Governing Body was re-established to drive improvement alongside the Executive Headteacher. The new team has the passion and ambition that has rapidly improved the school.
Our school has a dynamic and forward-thinking team in place who have renewed its vision for education. We are a school with an ambitious and successful culture based on a vibrant and stimulating curriculum that aims to ensure our children make good progress at the very least. Safeguarding firmly lies at the heart of what we do. We develop talented and motivated staff to deliver quality first teaching.
We have developed our curriculum and leadership capacity to ensure that the school has quickly addressed the improvements needed from the previous inspection. In 2022 Ofsted judged the school to Require Improvement across all areas, in May 2024 Ofsted judged the school to be ‘Good’ in all areas and Outstanding in Behaviour and Attitudes. The work alongside the Behaviour Hubs programme was instrumental in our journey of improvement.
This priority area focused us on reducing low level disruption to learning across the school. This was a key area of improvement which identified the schools 2022 Ofsted report.
Behaviour challenges and goals
We needed to revise our whole school behaviour to ensure it was simple and consistent across all school of all of our staff and children. We also wanted to focus strongly on the Good things in school and celebrate the successes of these with our school community.
Our aims were to make this
- Simple
- Consistent
- Positive
- Highly visual across the school
- Important to all stakeholders
We needed to refresh our behaviour policy and systems to reflect the needs of the children entering the school. This would also help us maintain our high expectations of children & Staff. The previous review of the school behaviour and rewards systems were out of date and not reflective of our new aims. Our refreshed school values needed to filter through our school drive for improvement.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
We prioritised the Behaviour Hub training as essential. Senior leaders attended these events and quality time was prioritised to disseminate findings and developments back to all staff. This information was a key part of the school improvement plan and was consistently discussed as staff meetings and morning briefings. We were very clear the mantra that our curriculum delivery and outcomes were intrinsic to our positive behaviour policy and systems. We consistently focused on this in our own school and across our collaboration.
The initial Staff survey data indicated that consistency of the implementation of the behaviour curriculum was key. We used this information as a focus in the Behaviour hub programme to visit other like-minded schools and formed a network of support schools to share ideas across. We also entered a formal collaboration with another Behaviour Hub Core School (Holly Primary School). This enabled two leaderships teams across two different schools to self-evaluate and critically challenge each other throughout the process.
Visiting other lead schools enabled our Senior leadership the opportunity to view best practice across different local authorities. This was extremely beneficial and enabled us to proactively be outward facing and open to new ideas.
For our Behaviour policy we firmly believed that an engaging and enriched curriculum enables excellent behaviour. The Behaviour Hub programme enabled to use to formulate our vision deeper (Encourage good behaviour and respect for others, secure an acceptable standard of behaviour for all pupils Promote self-discipline, prevent all forms of bullying, Ensure that pupils complete tasks reasonably assigned to them, Further develop positive learning behaviours). The materials from the Behaviour Hub Programme gave us excellent tools and information to work alongside our staff to achieve this. This included sharing our policy with all stakeholders, redrafting it and then implementing over a trial period.
At the initial stage of the project staff recorded the number of low-level incidents to help us collate data. At the beginning these percentages increased but over time normalised and then decreased as the project became more embedded across the school. Suspension data is at an all-time low.
The strong level of support and engagement and critical challenge from our lead school (Hardingstone Academy) enabled our journey to be one of focus around our identified issues. This was coupled alongside the high-quality Behaviour hub resources and training. The continued professional dialogue with our lead school was the springboard for truly reflecting on our school behaviour systems how we could implement these effectively, and consistently across the school.
Impact on behaviour
Being part of the Behaviour Hub programme has enabled us to refresh our behaviour vision and expectations.
In the most recent Ofsted Inspection report (June 2024) the following was written about the school.
Pupils’ behaviour and attitudes are exemplary. The school has high expectations of all pupils and all pupils have high expectations of themselves. Pupils are happy and safe. The school successfully encourages pupils to attend school. The school goes above and beyond to understand any barriers to pupils’ attending school. Families and pupils benefit from excellent support. Pupils’ behaviour is exceptional. They are polite and courteous. They are respectful and understanding of disabilities or different needs. They are very proud of how they ensure that all pupils have a friend at playtime. Pupils contribute significantly to the school culture.
We now have a much clearer, simplified behaviour system that has reduced low level disruption across the school. Behaviour management has risen as a priority to the heart of what we do daily. Children are highly motivated to achieve well, and we have strong positive feedback in parental and staff surveys.
Our weekly whole school assemblies are very popular amongst our parent group and children. The behaviour house point system is updated each week and shared across the community. This enables to the school to continue to form a positive parental relationship. These celebrations are mirrored within each classroom to create a common sense of pride, achievement and belonging.
Our whole school attendance has improved. The Behaviour hub programme has positively impacted on the community. Children want to be in school more and therefore their attendance has improved.
The school’s persistent non-attendee rate shows a 3 year improvement trend. We are currently at 9%. The National Average persistent no-attendee rate is 21%.
The admission numbers for the school have increased term by term. Because of the growing reputation of the school within our community we are becoming a true choice for pupil applications into Reception and across other year groups.
The initial staff questionnaire demonstrated a 30% confidence in the behaviour policy in the school, by the time the final staff survey was completed this had increased to 98%.
Leaders are empowered with a sense of pride surrounding the school. The profile of consistent positive praise has been improved/raised and the shared responsibility has followed.
Next steps on your behaviour journey
We will develop our behaviour curriculum so staff, children and all stakeholders can identify specifically when we teach key element of behaviour as part of our day to day high quality curriculum.
We would love to apply to the Behaviour Hubs as a Lead school. We feel that that our behaviour structures and systems are at a point where we are now able to lead others. Our model curriculum promotes success and we the next step is to proactively share this with other schools and showcase this on our school website.
Some of our staff are ready for the next level of their continued professional development. Alongside them, we will actively apply for the NPQ’s in Leading Behaviour & Culture.