Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
Joseph Turner Primary School has around 450 pupils at school, and we are located in the town of Tipton in Sandwell. The school is located in one of the most deprived areas of Sandwell. The children that attend Joseph Turner come from a wide range of economically diverse backgrounds. This includes a number of children who come from low-income families, generational unemployment, social services and Early Help involvement.
Our challenge is to ensure we provide equality of opportunity for all children by ensuring children from low starting points are provided with the best possible support and interventions to enable them to succeed whilst also providing an aspirational challenge for pupils who come to school more socially and academically ready.
In the Tipton area:
- 57% privately owned homes, 34% social rented and 9% private rented
- High rates of child obesity
- High rates of poor dental hygiene and tooth decay
- 57% of people claim benefits (19% nationally).
We put the children at the heart of everything that we do and try and give them as many experiences as possible to support them and ensure that they develop further. We have 46% of SEND children that have a SEMH need at Joseph Turner Primary.
There was a new Head Teacher in January 2023 and a new DHT and 2 AHT started in September 2023. It was identified that children did not feel safe at Joseph Turner and staffs wellbeing and mental health was affected because of the behaviour of the pupils. Joining the Behaviour Hubs programme was a proactive step from school leaders to implement positive behavioural culture change.
Behaviour challenges and goals
- Staff and children know, understand and are ready to contribute to the behaviour culture
- Leaders ensure that rules are explicit, consistent, and reinforce school values and routines
- Strengthen ‘parents as partners’ ethos regarding behaviour
- All pupils understand the rules, rewards and sanctions, and are able to demonstrate the required learning behaviours
- To develop a behaviour curriculum.
Our final outcome was that the school atmosphere was calm and purposeful – that SLT were not firefighting on a daily basis. Many of our children experience chaotic and dramatic home lives, therefore we wanted to teach them that a calm and purposeful approach is the norm.
General behaviour across the school was inadequate. However, times of transition after break and lunch were proving more difficult due to the reluctance of pupils to follow instructions, and our staff’s skills for overcoming this defiance.
Children did not feel the need to be in the classroom and believed engaging with their learning to be something they could opt out of. As a result, there were vast inconsistencies between classrooms with regards to behaviour management and the overall attitudes to learning. Ensuring that all adults in school understood why children show challenging behaviour was also difficult due to preconceived ideas. Some staff felt that children should “just behave” and that times of regulation could be perceived as reward for poor behaviour.
One of our other main challenges was outlining the need for change. Over the last 18 months the school has undergone rapid significant changes in all areas (staffing, curriculum, organisations etc.). It was important that this was not viewed as unnecessary change and that all stakeholders saw the clear benefits. We needed staff to buy-in to ensure that the culture around school would change.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
In order 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’. From this we created our own Joseph Turner behaviour curriculum and rolled this out to staff. Each week there is dedicated time to teach our behaviour curriculum, this ensured that our policy was followed
- We conducted a staff survey to find out what they felt about behaviour in school. This gave a mixed picture and highlighted a lack of consistency when dealing with behaviour. It also highlighted that the children’s behaviour was impacting on staff’s wellbeing and mental health
- We stripped our 12 school rules to 3 clear rules- Be ready, Be respectful, Be safe. These were linked to with everything we did in school, assemblies, reflective conversations, conversations in the corridors and parental conversations. We got all stakeholders to work together to come up with what these would look like at Joseph Turner
- As a senior Leadership team, we conducted a wide range of research, involving visits to other schools
- We used these findings to create our updated behaviour policy, which included a real focus on restorative conversations
- We looked at training for staff which would empower the them to deal with behaviour incidents. Every training day had a different behaviour focus which was delivered by the HT and DHT. We also listened to staff via termly questionnaires and focused on things that staff wanted. External training was also provided by Inclusion Support focused on Neuro-diversity
- We changed the steps for when dealing with children and made it really clear for the staff how to follow the steps
- We stopped parents accessing our playgrounds in the morning and we now operate a drop and go system at our school
- We have also changed our rewards approach, parents now access weekly celebration assemblies. At the end of each term, there is a HT award and the children who always make the right choices get a termly reward that is led by the pastoral team. Then each term the PTA donates a prize and we pick a child from each key stage to get this prize.
Impact on behaviour
The new behaviour policy has had a wide range of positive outcomes:
- All pupils in school can now articulate the 3 school’s rules (Be ready, respectful and safe)
- There is a now a systematic approach for the management of behaviour throughout school. Individual classes/teaches are not using their own approaches
- We had a good Ofsted judgement, where behaviour came out well.
“Recently there has been an increasing number of pupils with more complex special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). This means that staff have had to rethink how they support pupils. For example, the support for pupils with social, emotional and mental health is particularly strong. A school counsellor and learning mentors work with staff to provide interventions such as nurture groups, social use of language and drawing and talking therapy.”
“Relationships are calm, positive and often respectful. Pupils told inspectors that sometimes falling out or even bullying can happen. However, they rightly believe that staff will be there for them to sort it out. Behaviour is generally positive across all lessons and at informal times. Staff quickly help pupils who need help staying focused in lessons or regulating their emotions.”
- Staff survey indicates that staff claim behaviour has improved on a whole school level, as a result of the changes that we have made
- Pupils are very passionate about the new rewards, particularly the introduction of termly rewards. This reward has also been very well received by parents/carers and has provided a natural tool to discuss positive behaviour
Following engagement in the Behaviour Hubs programme:
- 98% of teachers now rate behaviour as good or better
- 98% of teachers agree that the senior leadership team helps them to manage and deal with behaviour
- There was a 44% increase in staff feeling fairly confident at dealing with misbehaviour in school. This now means that 100% of teachers are confident at dealing with behaviour
- 100% of teachers now think there is a culture of recognising and celebrating positive behaviour at our school. This improved by 32.1% over the duration of the programme
- The school is calmer and more settled; we have had numerous external visitors into school including Ofsted to assure this.
Next steps on your behaviour journey
- To continue the momentum we have built and drive staff consistency
- To continue to offer and deliver high quality, personalised CPD for staff
- To continue to look at relational behaviour next academic year and develop a JT approach to this
- To ensure that new staff that join Joseph Turner buy into our approach to behaviour
- To develop OPAL to support with behaviour at playtime and lunchtime