Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
Felixstowe School is an 11-19 secondary school located on the edge of a medium sized town. There is 25% pupil premium and a roll of 1,283 which is growing with 40 in-year admissions so far this academic year. The school is based in an area of significant cultural deprivation, with high levels of well-paid albeit risky physical labour and few graduate jobs available.
The school was re-brokered to Unity Schools Partnership in Autumn 2019 and was removed from special measures in December 2021. The school has a focus within the development plan on changing the culture, increasing educational aspirations within the town and developing the whole student with a new seven-year personal development strategy.
Behaviour challenges and goals
- Change the culture of how students treated staff as well as each other, and make sure this was consistently modelled by staff.
- Reduce to the number of students that were not able to access lessons and, as a result, were showing significant secondary behaviours.
- Consistent application of the behaviour policy by staff.
- Embedding a new graduated response.
- Engaging the student and parental community.
- Engaging significant number of students displaying EBSA type behaviours.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
We began by engaging all staff and openly discussing the challenges we faced as a team, allowing staff to not only feed into the action plan but also the potential solutions. This model continued throughout the project with multiple Behaviour Hubs working group sessions taking place half-termly.
We also ran half-termly staff training, Head of Department training and student training sessions. We used these sessions to clarify and model our expectations and consequences. We moved to a certainty over severity model with clear graduated response and trained staff on its use and application.
We also implemented a behaviour curriculum and taught students key terminology, micro scripts, and appropriate responses. This included what to expect from every member of staff if they did not follow behaviour expectations.
We visited multiple schools within the programme and, after each visit, adapted our action plan where appropriate to consider the ways in which the good practice seen could be used in our school. This included visiting our Lead School (and vice versa), as well as working through our action plan together and discussing challenges. We also gained significant ideas from the Hub Networking sessions and the Open Days.
Expectations
- New Home School agreement
- Rules re: toilet use and consequences for groups in toilets
- Water bottle rules on filling up only in own time
- Mobile phone and AirPod usage rules
- Mobile phone collection and return process when confiscated
- Improved use of the planner
- Lunch time and break time (no students upstairs)
- Change in restoration length of time and informing parents
- New out of bounds line
- Splitting of student services into behaviour/ safeguarding and admin (TT, uniform,
- Standards gate, lunch passes, parental communication etc.)
Logistics
- Changes to the timings of the day
- Bells
- Keys for classrooms for security
- New signing in and out system to increase attendance
- Changes to movement around the building, especially at end of lessons and before breaks to move away from the central staircase.
Language
- Common language: “3 – stop what you are doing; 2 – look at me; 1 – show me you are listening, I need you to…”
- Microscripts for first and second warnings as well as training
Documentation
- ‘What if’ document for all staff
- FXS plan for outstanding behaviour document
- Lesson routines (Felixstowe Stance)
Toilets and passes
- Toilet Lanyards rotating each half-term; new colour and pass etc.
- Student passes rotating each half-term
Staffing
- Appointed Mobile Support Managers
- Appointed extra PDMs for each house and a response PDM
- PDM appointments system
- PDMs now have scheduled admin time
- Team SOS categories updated to streamline communication
“A change to the culture and atmosphere around the school bought about by explicitly teaching students the expectations, with an impact of a significant reduction in truancy and escalated behaviours.”
Impact on behaviour
- Significant reduction in lates to school at the start of the day from up to 100 per day to a new low of 12 per day in December 2023
- A reduction in suspensions from escalated behaviours from 25-36 per week to an average of 14 per week (the majority previously due to persistent disruptive behaviour caused by truancy)
- Detentions for low level disruption starting at 79 per day and reducing to 28 in the most recent week
- Parent satisfaction improves (Ofsted parent view) – 87% parents agree or strongly agree students are well behaved vs previous = 72% and 50%
- Amongs the highest 15 students who accounted for over 50% of all suspensions, 12 have not re-offended since the addition of supportive interventions/ AP
- Warning 1 vs Warning 2 – on 4 out of 5 occasions, warning 1 was sufficient as a de-escalation.
- Need for TRTT from 30 to currently 6.
Next steps on your behaviour journey
As a school we are going to continue working with the same Behaviour Hubs model:
- Action planning, reviewing, linking with multiple other schools to share and adapt good practice.
- Working with the trust behaviour and culture lead.
- Enabling the pastoral staff to run a greater number of positive interventions.
- Embed the sanctions and consequences.
- Focus on attendance improvement strategies.