Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
Overdale Junior School is a multicultural academy school in the Local Authority of Leicester, and is a friendly and welcoming place where we promote creativity and the enjoyment of learning.
Our most recent Ofsted report said, ‘This is an inclusive and caring school. Pupils are proud of their culturally diverse school. They appreciate their helpful teachers. Leaders are ambitious about what every pupil can achieve.” Ofsted 2022.
We are situated on the southern edge of the city of Leicester in a mainly residential area. Our school campus is shared with Overdale Infant School, with which there is increasingly close liaison. The school was opened in September 1956, with a new extension added in 2009.
We have 16 mixed ability classes across Years 3 to 6 totalling around 480 pupils. We have 15% PP, 15% EAL and 23% SEND. Our children develop strong relationships with the teachers and peers through their learning and extracurricular activities.
We are fortunate to have a great deal of outside space at the school, including all weather playgrounds, a sports field and a wooded area and we are an established Forest School to make even more use of the green space around the school for learning opportunities.
Behaviour at Overdale was generally good. Through good systems and the teaching of core 10, we had good behaviour in class. However, at break and lunch times and transitioning between lessons, assemblies and breaks, we struggled with increasing negative behaviour. After trying multiple interventions, consequences and rewards as well as increased SLT presence and not seeing the result we wanted, we approached the Behaviour Hubs programme.
Behaviour challenges and goals
Our school values of Respect, Resilience and Responsibility, had been important to us for a number of years, however we were not seeing these characters in all areas of school life. We wanted to make changes so that these values were demonstrated by everyone, everywhere.
The main goals were:
- To improve behaviour at lunch and break times
- To reduce the amount of time SLT were dealing with behaviour
- To improve staff confidence in dealing with negative behaviour
- To ensure children knew what was expected of them
- To have a consistent reward and consequence system across the school.
The behaviour during lessons was generally good, this meant that our initial challenge was to help staff understand why we needed to be a part of the Behaviour Hubs programme and make changes. Some staff recognised that there was a small number of children who needed extra support with behaviour.
Another challenge was deciding what changes need to be made first and what could wait or wasn’t necessary. We were keen to work with the Infant school so that transition from one school to the other was a seamless as possible but this brought additional challenges.
Lunch time was an hour long and we shared a lunch hall with the infants. This meant that in an hour we would feed nearly 1000 pupils, making the lunch hall extremely noisy. SLT would supervise those children who couldn’t manage the environment successfully.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
In order to achieve our aims, we completed the following actions:
- We conducted a staff survey to find out what they felt about behaviour in school
- We then carried out a rigorous quality assurance process in which a range of stakeholders took time to challenge the new policy. This included staff, SLT and the school improvement partner. These challenges and ideas were then considered, and amendments were made
- The policy was then shared with staff during a training day. This allowed for the philosophy behind the policy to be explained
- We encouraged staff to spend time in the lunch hall. This helped them understand some of the issues that we shared in training sessions
- We designed a new timetable with staggered lunch time and break time.- We designed a ‘Character Curriculum’ to teach desired behaviours. Each week we teach, model and celebrate a character from the curriculum which is based on our three Overdale Values
- We made a simple, one page behaviour policy guide that all staff could have easy access to and were trained in using. The consequence system was designed in line with the Infants
- We designed a simple reward system that was in line with the Infant school
- The Behaviour Hubs programme training gave us practical ways to improve behaviour as well as the theory behind why a system would work and why something might not work so well. As a leadership team we all visited a variety of schools, it gave us insights into what worked well for others
- It was during a networking meeting that another head teacher shared how they teach desired behaviours and the impact that this had had on their schools. Through discussions as a leadership team, we decided this would work well in our setting too. We heard from Tom Bennett in a training session the importance of modelling the behaviours that you want to see
- We already used recognition boards in class and so used this idea of teaching desired behaviours, modelling and practicing them in two classes using the recognition board to identify and celebrate children demonstrating the desired behaviours. This worked successfully so we chose to implement this practise in all classes.
Impact on behaviour
In a recent staff survey, 100% of staff said that they believe there is a clear vision of what is expected and meant by good behaviour. Additional feedback from the survey included:
- 100% of staff agreed with or said neutral to pupils being provided with information to ensure they know how they are expected to behave when they join the school, and are then regularly reminded/updated. In our pupil survey, students recognised that the Character Curriculum assemblies showed them how to behave and helped them make the right choices
- 96% of staff said neutral or agreed that pupils understand the behaviour rules and the consequences of not adhering to the policy. Our Overdale Values help all pupils know what behaviour we expect to see at school
- 96% of staff agreed with or said neutral to there being a culture of recognising and celebrating positive behaviour at our school. 81% of students said that adults recognise and celebrate good behaviour
- 96% of staff agreed with or said neutral to staff building positive, respectful and supportive relationships with all pupils and 96% of pupils said that the school behaviour rules help make the school a safe and happy space
- 92% of staff members said that the policy, rules and routines are easy to follow compared to 82% at the beginning of the project
- 92% of staff member said they felt encouraged to ask senior leaders for support to deal with persistently disruptive pupils or classes
- Only 4% of staff said that they didn’t feel that appropriate training and development is available to ALL staff to support them with behaviour management, compared to 32% of staff at the beginning of the project. We have spent time training staff on restorative conversations and encouraging staff to educate children on desired behaviours. In the student survey, a child wrote “Because when you do something bad you reflect on it and not make that mistake again”
- 81% of staff said that clarity of the behaviour rules and processes have improved or stayed the same in the past 12 months (8% were new staff and so couldn’t comment)
- 88% of staff said that pupils understanding of the rules and consequences and of not following them has stayed the same or improved over the last 12 months (60% said improved).
Next steps on your behaviour journey
Based on the survey, one of our areas to focus on is consistency. 56% of staff disagreed that all staff apply the behaviour rules and procedures as set out in our vison and policy. We are still at the beginning of our behaviour journey and monitoring and accountability will have a greater focus moving forward.