Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
Bishop Perowne is an 11-16 school with 1118 students on roll from a predominantly White British intake, situated in Worcester.
The number of children in public care is 7. Number of children on a Child Protection plan is 1. Number of Children in Need is 11. The number of children in receipt of early help is 12. (CPOMS data, 2023)
The gender split is roughly 50:50. The total number of students with SEN (codes E, S and K) = 221 and ECHPs belong to 38 students with more currently on the pathway. (SEN Register, March 2023).
We have 36% Pupil Premium with 32.5% of students also being in receipt of Free School Meals. Our growing EAL cohort stands currently at nearly 17%.
This academic year we have received 50 CA1 mid-term transfers, with 14 students going electively home educated, 24 leaving to go to aa different school and we have made 6 permanent expulsions.
Destinations for Y11 students is now good and have been improving over the last three years. The most recent leavers (22-23) are 94% in education, employment, or training. This met the national average. For the previous academic years, we stood at 91% and 90% respectively.
Staffing
The school has seen stability with staffing compared to previous years. Two promotions to Deputy Headteachers in the Leadership Team to Curriculum and Behaviour and Attitudes in the Summer Term of 22-23 has created more opportunities at the Assistant Headteacher level. New posts in September 2023 were created for Assistant Headteachers responsible for Character Education and Transition as well as Teaching and Learning.
The largest majority of subjects are taught by effective subject specialists. There has been a staffing shortage in maths which has required a post of long-term cover from a specialist but also a teacher gap which he have had to be creative with. Coupled with additional maternity leaves in the department this has been a staffing challenge. However, for September 2024, we are now fully staffed with specialist maths teachers.
Turnover within the last two years has been much lower than previous years. Morale within the staff team is high, making a positive impact on the lives of our students and families. We are a growing school with an increasing PAN due to local demographics. The year of 2024-23 has given us our first year of over 200 first choices of parents in next year’s year 7 that wanted and were allocated Bishop Perowne Church of England College.
Locality
Bishop Perowne faces a number of social and economic challenges. Bishop Perowne catchment areas have been labelled the “grimmest suburb in the UK” (The Metro) and national crime statistics show our catchment areas have the highest level of reported crime in Worcester with the majority being Violent Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour. (CrimeRate.co.uk)
Evidence shows that significant numbers of pupils are from families whose income puts them just above the level of eligibility for FSM, reflecting a low-wage economy and preponderance of unskilled jobs for those in work. Changes to the benefits system and the impact of COVID 19 has exacerbated problems.
We are aware from Worcestershire Children’s’ First that the average reading age for adults in Worcester City is age 9. Therefore, we have evaluated our communications with home. Due to low engagement with formal letters and written newsletters previously, we have now changed to a high social media presence and video messages about our key policies and initiatives in school. This has not only improved the information sharing that we do with our families but is also breaking down barriers to making our school our warm and approachable place to be. Barriers from talking to some of our families of challenging students are that they had poor experiences at school themselves which was resulting in a reluctance to support our ethos.
As a school we also aim to combat the challenges of our local area by providing a fully inclusive curriculum, highly effective pastoral systems with emotionally available adults with PACE training and trauma training and safeguarding procedures where engagement with parents is key. Furthermore, we are developing the Personal Development areas of our school to reach out to the community so that we can get the positive messages that we teach and share out in to the families of our students.
Behaviour challenges and goals
Our first goal was to reduce disruption to learning. This appeared as high in our behaviour data and would ultimately have a long-term impact on student outcomes and staff morale. Previously, we used a C system and gave C1s and C2s out for detentions. Following training from Mark Emerson via an online module with Behaviour Hubs, we decided to implement a change in September 2023 to more empowering and descriptive language. C1s and C2s then changed to “reminder” “warning” and “consequence.”
We already used STAR behaviour school wide when discussing our expectations for behaviour for learning, but our goal was to make sure we had consistency with this as there were gaps between individual teachers and departments using the language of STAR. Following on from networking events and online training modules through Behaviour Hubs as well as direct support from my first colleague, Collette, at my link school, it was apparent that universal language was needed to ensure our systems were strong and that we were holding expectations high.
Our first surveys from staff and students showed that there was a concern about disruption to learning -particularly, talking out of turn – tooting. Our goal was to address this through the consistency and insistence of STAR, language change and directly educating about and calling out tooting when it was happening to give live feedback.
Our ultimate goal from these three focus points was the outcome of calm, purposeful classrooms with little disruption to learning so that outcomes and experiences by were positive.
We also formulated a goal that focussed on our school culture and ethos. From the Tom Bennett initial presentation when we attended the onboarding conference led by Tom Bennett in Birmingham, we learnt that focussing on our culture had to be focussed on to enable us to achieve what we wanted to be our social norms. To further this, we researched independently the culture of the Michaela School and specifically discussed culture with our lead school to find out what our priorities needed to be to change ours. We decided that we needed to teach what our expectations were in a wider sense – not just behaviour for learning but behaviour in the corridors, the social areas, how to show our character values not just in school but in all aspects of life.
Overall, we wanted a culture where students are safe to learn, want to learn and to be able to get on and learn, meaning teachers can teach. A school with excellent behaviour culture enables a focus to shift on great pedagogy and lesson content, which enables great progress for all students. And a school with a wider curriculum of not just academic and behaviour makes a school a place where students want to be and can thrive.
- Cultural Changes Take Time
Cultural changes take time to embed, which is not available on the time of this program. Therefore, the main aims are an extended projection of where we want to be. This was particularly so with the parents / carers of our young people and the opinions of the wider community (for example, a member of our community and an ex-student from 6 years ago was sent to prison for racially abusing Marcus Rashford over Twitter). We know we have a lot of work to do and receive challenges from parents who question why we “celebrate diversity” of all so overtly within our wider curriculum. However, we can all see this is changing.
- Parents and Families supporting school
Other challenges have been engaging with parents and getting our messages across into the community especially with some significant reluctance of parents to engage with school in addition to low reading ages of many of our families.
- Small cohort of students
We still have a small cohort of students that are not buying into our culture change. They are a risk of having a detrimental effect on the efforts of our changes, but we have been creative with support and have recruited more staff to support with the behaviour of these students.
- Getting staff and students on board and training
Another barrier was informing staff of the changes and why we needed to make these changes. Buy in was achieved by sharing survey results that they had answered showing there was a collective want for the changes identified and by constantly revisiting the “why” in weekly behaviour briefings. This was adopted following training from the online modules of the course. A challenge would also be how we would be informing our students and families of the changes to our policy and what tooting is.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
Cultural Changes Take Time
To overcome this challenge, we have held firm to our belief that this will happen and that despite daily challenges and small setbacks, we are doing the right thing. Tom Bennett discussed in his onboarding conference that culture is something that needs to be maintained once it is designed and built and this is done by constant re-visiting and practising of routines. We have overcome the challenge of changing our culture by adopting this approach. Through careful analysis of the data, we look for patterns in the school where systems may not be being held strong – for example, if there is a spike in sanctions given for poor arrival to lessons, we have whole school practice of our routine of threshold management and do now tasks to revisit and embed the habits for both staff and students.
We also keep our staff up to date with behaviour patterns school wide to ensure that we have constant whole staff empowerment with the changes we are seeking and the systems we are maintaining. This includes both positive and negative behaviour data.
Parents and Families supporting school
To overcome this challenge, we have taken advice from marketing agencies and have switched to a heavy social media approach to our communication with families – primarily through Facebook as that is the most popular social media app for the age of our parents. On our social media page, we use many photographs to showcase our culture, activities, and social norms in school. In addition, we use newsletter videos and have had the leadership team create videos for their areas which are on our website and explain our school routines and wider behaviour and character curriculum online, so they are easier to engage with. This has resulted in our school being a more approachable and open place for students of hard-to-reach families as a a result, our engagement with parents evening has increased by 10% this year compared to last year.
Small cohort of students
As this small group of students present complex challenges, we have employed specialist staff to support with their behaviour in school. They are separated in to two groups, those without cognitive barriers to learning but significant trauma resulting in challenging behaviour and those that may have undiagnosed SEN and are showing challenging behaviour. We have increased our SEN staffing for the latter and this academic year opened “R&R” – which stands for Reflect and Recover – and staffed by 1.5 pastoral staff. R&R is a safe hub for students in school who previously had poor attendance or were at risk of suspensions and permanent expulsion for failing to follow our systems.
Getting staff and students on board and training
A large part of the initial TED for the current academic year in September was dedicated to our Behaviour Hubs work. We shared survey results, how we need to embed consistent systems and all staff showing consistency with applying our behaviour policy to reach our culture change. Staff were given scripts and were able to practice the new language of our policy as well as seeing it being role modelled by lead practitioners. Furthermore, to get student buy-in, on their first day back, special assemblies were delivered that discussed our focus area, language staff would use and what the disruption to learning would like and how it would be sanctioned.
Impact on behaviour
Behaviour data in school showed:
- Incidents of disruption to learning have decreased by 29% compared to the same point in the previous academic year.
- Our positive achievement points now beat the EEF target of 5 positives to every 1 negative with our data showing our ratio is 13:1 of positive to negative. This is contributing to our culture change.
- Our suspension levels have held broadly in line because we continue to hold the line with our expectations and ensure that students meet them. We see this as vital as part of our culture change, but we always ensure we deploy all support necessary before we take this decision.
A reduction in referrals of pupils out the classroom was seen over the Autumn and Spring Term by 10%. We noted that spikes occur after holidays and therefore have now implemented reset practices in the first few days after a holiday as well as having all pastoral staff clear their diaries to be supporting the students that we know are the most often in breach of our policy.
Refusing to go to lesson has reduced by 5%. It should be noted that the general feel of the school is calmer with less internal truancy and anecdotally this percentage feels low. What we do not have is distinction in data between internal truancy of lesson and not going to form time which is where we know we see the highest amount of internal truancy.
The students who do refuse to go to lesson remain unchanged and is about 3% of our entire cohort. This suggests work needs to be done specifically with these pupils to educate them on how to conduct themselves in school with robust follow up consequences if needed.
An Autumn Term mid-point survey specifically on Tooting demonstrated that 94% of respondents felt that tooting had reduced compared to the last academic year.
The staff survey from Behaviour Hubs demonstrates that overall progress has been made. In our baseline survey from the Summer Term of 22-23, 31.25% of respondents said behaviour in school was good or better. By the final survey this has increased significantly with 87.5% saying good or better.
Finally, in the baseline survey, 39% of respondents said that “most” or “all lessons” had disruption to learning within. By the end point, 78% of respondents said they felt disruption to learning had decreased
Next steps on your behaviour journey
Keep maintaining our systems by practising routines around behaviour that are in response to data to drive down incidents of disruption to learning further and reduce call outs from lessons.
Keep the focus high on tooting to ensure that staff are using this term to challenge disruptive behaviour that is calling out.
Create a “hot” map of the school at key points with key students that truant certain lessons and tutor time so that pastoral staff can be more accurately deployed to support students with making positive decisions regarding their behaviour.
Continue our focus on becoming more open and approachable to our community so that families continue to increase their positive working relationships with us and support our messages and culture.
To embed a tracking system for repair and rebuild conversations in detention that focusses on tooting and disruption.