Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
Badgemore Primary School is a small school of around 130 pupils, we are located in the market town of Henley-on-Thames, South Oxfordshire. Despite Henley-on-Thames being an affluent area, the school is located in a relatively deprived area and the children that attend come from a wide range of economically diverse backgrounds.
This includes a number of children who come from low-income families, and receive social services and Early Help involvement. The school has a large SEND register above the national, including significantly higher than average EHCPs with a large amount of SEMH needs and complex needs.
Behaviour is generally good, but there are hot spots within the school where behaviour is particularly disruptive and pupils are disrespectful to staff. In classes, some children
are disengaged and demonstrate disruptive behaviour whilst on the playground, there have been regular aggressive incidents.
The school has always taken a ‘nurturing’ approach to behaviour incidents, but this has meant that responses were inconsistent which in turn produced inconsistent behaviour from pupils. The school needed to review the behaviour expectations, the school values and the behaviour policy.
We are a small school with a big, nurturing heart and our pupils, staff and families are important parts of our ‘Badgemore family.’
Behaviour challenges and goals
We needed to revise our values and motto to:
- Ensure that they are relevant to our school;
- Ensure that they support our behaviour expectations.
We needed to create a new behaviour policy that:
- Is simple to understand for all stakeholders;
- Gives staff the required structures/training to teach positive behaviour;
- Empowers staff to take responsibility for behaviour management;
- Raises expectations;
- Supports pupils and staff to develop a code of conduct;
- Ensures consistency of language, reporting.
The behaviour of some children at Badgemore has been a concern for some time. The school has always welcomed pupils who have struggled both academically and behaviourally at other local schools and this has presented significant challenges.
Whilst the school has been known as a ‘nurturing’ school, this approach, and a lack of clarity over the previous behaviour policy, has meant that the responses to inappropriate behaviours has always been inconsistent. This inconsistency in turn impacted pupils’ behaviours and raised questions about the accuracy of reporting of behaviour incidents. Only serious inappropriate behaviours were being reported by staff and this ignored the persistent low-level disruptive behaviours.
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 the importance of ‘teaching behaviour’ and ‘consistent systems’.
- We conducted a staff and pupil survey to find out what they felt about behaviour in school. This gave a mixed picture, some pupils reported concerning behaviour in class and on the playground. This highlighted a lack of consistency and a lack of confidence by staff to respond to inappropriate behaviours.
- A whole-staff meeting was held to discuss behaviour, expectations and effective consequences. This was the key event in the whole process and ensured staff felt listened to and subsequently took ownership of the challenge. One clear, consistent set of messages was agreed and taken forward.
- Staff, parents and pupils were surveyed on the proposed school values and motto as recommended by Behaviour Hubs. The mistake that the leadership made at this point was that we had tried to adopt another school’s approach and had not personalised the theme to Badgemore.
Whilst parents generally agreed to the new proposed values, they questioned the choice of values. The teachers took a stronger line, and a number of new values were proposed that fitted with the school’s ethos. Selecting the most appropriate values for Badgemore had an immediate and long-lasting impact. Staff now use the values on a daily basis and these form the foundations for our behaviour expectations.
- As a senior Leadership team, we conducted a wide range of research, involving visits to other schools. This raised our expectations and provided a clear route forward.
- We used these findings to create our new behaviour policy, which included value-based scripts on how to respond to inappropriate behaviours. We then worked with the SLT and staff to quality assure the process. These challenges and ideas were then considered, and amendments were made.
- The policy was then launched in school. The Head teacher led a whole school assembly in which the policy was explained in an age-appropriate fashion.
- Nurture Play was introduced for those who struggle with the noise and numbers on the main playground.
- All staff have been retrained with CPOMs and now have access to CPOMs at breaktimes. CPOMs criteria have been aligned to the behaviour policy.
- Both the behaviour policy and values have been the focus of ‘Big Questions’ (our termly pupil voice system) to ensure that it is being embedded and applied throughout the school
“100% pupils report feeling safer and happier at school”
Impact on behaviour
The new behaviour policy has had a wide range of positive outcomes:
- 100% pupils and staff can now readily articulate the 3 values and pupils can talk about how their behaviour reflects these. The pupils can also reflect on inappropriate behaviours and reflect on how these actions do not meet the value-based expectations. This includes new staff who have all received training on the new system. 84% of parents stated that they knew the new values and the remaining 16% stated that they knew new values were in place and had seen them on the website.
- There is a now a systematic approach for the management of behaviour throughout school. Individual classes/teachers are not using their own approaches.
- 100% of the pupils stated that they understood the behaviour ladder that forms part of the new behaviour policy and 100% of staff could explain the reward and consequences system.
- Staff survey indicates that 100% of staff claim behaviour has improved on a whole school level, as a result of the new policy. There is a significant increase in reporting of incidents (up by 40%) and a noticeable increase by teaching assistants (up by 98%). While the number of incidents reported has increased, most incidents are now medium or low level.
- There has been 80% drop in high level behavioural incidents.
| Level of Behaviour | Term 1 2022 | Term 1 2023 |
| Total number of incidents | 30 | 42 |
| Low | 0 | 6 |
| Medium | 0 | 23 |
| High | 30 | 6 |
- Due to reduced playground incidents, SLT now have more time to focus on school development rather than resolve disputes and implement consequences. Behaviour incidents have dropped from 17 incidents (100% high-level) to 1 high-level incident (and 4 yellow and 2 amber).
- 100% of pupils reported that they have a greater understanding of rewards, school expectations and consequences. A recent OCC SIP visit reported that ‘pupil behaviour and engagement was good’.
- 100% pupils report feeling safer and happier at school and 87% report feeling very safe.
- The rewards has also been well received by parents/carers and has provided a natural tool to discuss positive behaviour.
We have seen a significant improvement with attendance data between this year and last year.
| 2022-23 | 2023-24 | Change
|
|
| Attendance | 93.65% | 95.18% | +1.53% |
Next steps on your behaviour journey
Our next steps are to ensure consistency with the new policy over the year. We will need to conduct a second round of consultations to ensure that it is fit for purpose and serving our pupils and staff. We believe our behaviour policy should never be static but should rather flex to the needs of the children currently in our care.
We also plan to work with our Trust SEND Leader to consider how the policy can be adapted for some children with particular needs.
Review the communication system with parents and consider if a more formal method is required.
Learning walks will also focus upon behaviour culture with a particular focus on whether the values and behaviour ladder are referred to.
NGA governor template for governor visits and lesson – governor visit to comment on behaviour culture (and safeguarding)