Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
Christ Church Junior School is located in Downend within South Gloucestershire local authority. We are a maintained Church of England school and have 300 children from both South Gloucestershire and Bristol on roll. Our school serves a very mixed community, including an area that is within the lowest 10% of deprivation nationally. We currently have 14.1% children who receive pupil premium (12.5% FSM) and 7.5% who speak English as an additional language. There are 17 languages represented within our school. In 2023-24 the proportion of children with educational needs or disabilities was 14%, with 11 children (3.7%) with educational health care plans. We also have 3.4% who are young carers.
Our previous Ofsted inspection took place in November 2019, and we maintained our previous grade of ‘good’. Our previous SIAMS inspection was in October 2017, and we were graded ‘outstanding’. We generally have a very stable staff and there has been very little staff turnover in the last four years. We have two phase leaders responsible for co-ordinating learning across the Y3/4 (Lower Band) and Y5/6 (Upper Band) respectively.
We have a very strong, proactive staff team as well as supportive governing body who effectively challenge us and work with senior staff to inform the strategic direction of the school. We have very close links with our partner school, Christ Church Infant school as well as with our local namesake Church – Christ Church.
Our vision is ‘Learning to live life in all fullness’ by providing a broad and balanced curriculum and by supporting children to learn how to value themselves, engage with others, to be inspired by awe in life and to create the future.
Behaviour challenges and goals
We relaunched our behaviour policy in 2019, following work with a local authority project and based on Paul Dix’s book ‘When The Adults Change’. This embedded our restorative approach to behaviour and led to new systems being put into place. The embedding of systems was interrupted by COVID and we felt it was time to look again at the changes we had made in order to streamline systems and ensure that the policy was working well, applied consistently and understood by all stakeholders.
Learning behaviours across the school are generally good, however, we recognised that our three school rules, ‘be ready, be respectful and be safe’ were not fully understood by all children. We also recognised that while children generally made the right choices in their learning and behaviour, we wanted children to have more autonomy and desire to behave pro-socially rather than just conform to the school’s rules. The goal was to get from good to great!
Like many schools, we have also seen a rapid increase in social, emotional and mental health needs since COVID and have had a significant increase in the number of children with educational healthcare plans. A small number of children have been exhibiting increased dysregulated behaviour which staff are finding challenging to support effectively.
Our goals were therefore to:
- Streamline behaviour processes, ensuring all staff understood their role and responsibilities within this
- Ensure children knew what ‘success’ looks like in terms of following our school rules e.g. how do you show you are listening well?
- Support children to make prosocial behaviour choices autonomously
- Improve parents’ understanding of our approach and improve the quality of communication about both positive and negative behaviours
- Reflect all the changes in our behaviour policy that is understood and ratified by our full governing body.
Our staff voice showed that staff felt behaviour at the school was good, which therefore meant that we needed to be very clear about the rationale for further change and to show them explicitly how to achieve this.
All children could articulate how to ‘be safe’ and most could articulate how to ‘be respectful’ but very few could explain what it meant to ‘be ready’. A small number of children have displayed dysregulated behaviour and with a large team, achieving a consistent and impactful approach was challenging at times.
The first iteration of our behaviour policy included children talking to a member of SLT as well as their class teacher every time they were asked to reflect on their behaviour choices. We realised that this had the inadvertent effect of disempowering some members of staff as children began to view behaviour as something that was managed by SLT. This also meant there was little room for escalation if a child was repeatedly needing to complete reflection forms. Parents were informed by text message, which did not allow for context to be shared and was not personalised to the child and behaviour.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
In order to achieve this, we completed the following actions:
- Accessed training via the Behaviour Hubs programme and disseminated this to staff
- As a Senior Leadership team, we conducted a wide range of research, involving several visits to other schools. Viewing the work of Perryfields PRU was supportive in refining our approach to developing personalised behaviour plans for children with additional needs. The work we saw at Begbrook Primary Academy on learning gems helped guide our development of a taught behaviour curriculum that suited our setting
- We conducted a staff survey to find out what they felt about behaviour in school. This gave a reasonably positive response and highlighted the challenge of convincing staff that there was need for further change. We repeated this towards the end of our project to measure change
- We simplified the behaviour system in class, using dual coding, to be clearer to children and staff with three simple steps (make a choice, reminder, reflect). We outlined which behaviours would lead to children completing a behaviour reflection form without reminders
- We proposed a change to the behaviour system, which included the adult who asked the child to complete the reflection form talking through poor behaviours with the child with a restorative approach, and then communicating via phone or email with parents to let them know. SLT would analyse the number of incidents and then support the teacher and child if multiple reflection forms were being completed. This became a standing item on our SLT agenda
- We then carried out a consultation about proposed changes with staff, SLT, our Behaviour Hubs Lead School and the governing body. We made further changes based on feedback and discussion
- The policy was shared with staff during an INSET day and our central message of ‘behaviour is a team sport’ was emphasised and explored.
The policy was shared with parents at our new ‘Welcome to Year Group’ meetings in September and circulated via the newsletter. It is also on our website.
- We implemented a taught behaviour curriculum that explicitly teaches learning behaviours. Each week, there is a new focus that is shared in Monday’s assembly and then celebrated on recognition boards throughout the week. We chose to teach the skills that would enable children to develop our six areas of learning behaviours: focus, organisation, empathy, resilience, courtesy, and aspiration
- We implemented meetings with our whole teaching assistant team and lunch team to share updated personalised behaviour plans for children who regularly display dysregulated behaviour.
Impact on behaviour
The updated behaviour policy has had a wide range of positive outcomes:
- Pupils can better articulate how to be successful in following the 3 school rules (particularly ‘be ready’)
- There is a streamlined system for recording when a child has completed a reflection, including now logging these via our IMS so that incidents can be analysed more effectively and shared with governors/SLT
- There is a ‘learning behaviour’ focus of the week that is taught explicitly in a whole school assembly on Monday and is then the focus for recognition boards in classrooms for the rest of the week. This has enabled children to understand expectations and enact them autonomously
- The school timetable has changed to minimise the number of transitions, thereby increasing learning time
- Staff survey indicates that staff feel behaviour has improved on a whole school level as a result of the new policy.
The policy, rules and routines are easy to follow – 96% agree or strongly agree
Our school behaviour rules and procedures help make the school a safe and happy place – 91% agree or strongly agree
School leaders are visible and remind pupils about the behaviour rules – 86% agree or strongly agree
Staff are encouraged to ask senior leaders for support to deal with persistently disruptive pupils or classes – 100% agree or strongly agree
Appropriate training and development is available to ALL staff to support them with behaviour management – 86% agree or strongly agree
Parents are supportive of the behaviour rules and how they are implemented – 32% neutral, 64% agree or strongly agree
Pupil understanding of the rules and consequences changed in the past 12 months – 18% the same, 82% improved
Misbehaviour in and around school changed in the past 12 months – 27% the same, 68% improved
Teaching / learning time lost to misbehaviour changed in the past 12 months – 27% the same, 64% improved
Clarity of the behaviour rules and processes changed in the past 12 month – 14% the same, 86% improved
Consistency in how and when behaviour rules and processes are applied changed in the past 12 months – 18% the same, 82% improved
Confidence in how well behaviour is managed at our school changed in the past 12 months – 14% the same, 82% improved
- Parents now receive more personalised feedback about their child’s behaviour, from the adult who spoke to the child about their choices, increasing the home/school partnership
- Children displaying frequent dysregulated behaviour have personalised behaviour plans that are shared with all members of staff to ensure a consistent approach is used by all adults
- Training was provided to all staff on areas such as ASD, ADHD and positive handling. All of these have had a focus on de-escalation, calming, distraction, use of humour and clear, consistent expectations
- Positive behaviour is more consistently celebrated, including in the newsletter.
Next steps on your behaviour journey
We will continue to reflect on our lunchtime routines and support our lunchtime staff to be able to implement our approach within the busy lunchtime hour. We are also considering adopting some of the best practice seen about children as ‘family groups’ serving each other at Broadclyst Primary school.
We also need to let our changes embed fully and then review the taught behaviour curriculum to make sure that we are not overloading the children and that it remains effective.
Consider our induction of new staff to enable them to adopt our approaches and understand the rationale behind our restorative approach.