Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
The Link School is an alternative learning provider working with young learners and their families across the City of Sunderland, catering for up to 190 young people. We support a wide and diverse community that we feel proud to consider our ‘Link School Family’.
There are two schools; The Link School, Springwell Dene which works with learners across Key Stage 1, 2 and 3 and The Link School, Pallion, which provides education for learners at Key Stage 4. In addition, we also run two assessment hubs at Hudson Road Primary School and Oxclose Academy where we support schools across Sunderland to ensure that all children and young people have access to the right provision to meet their own individual needs.
Behaviour challenges and goals
- To diagnose needs in relation to behaviour and review the school culture around behaviour, with a focus on attendance
- To empower and support all staff to take responsibility for behaviour and attendance
- Creating an understanding with all school staff that they had a responsibility to engage all learners in the education process
- Ensuring that learners and their carers understood the impact of non-school attendance.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
We relaunched the whole school REACH vision to ensure that all learners, staff and stakeholders are able to articulate their role within the vision, particularly linked to attendance.
Attendance matters information was distributed to all stakeholders and remained evident across all school sites, being regularly (weekly) updated to reflect engagement in education.
The Behaviour Hubs programme enabled leaders to engage in positive conversations (via visits and webinars) about strategies to employ to enable targets to be met.
Impact on behaviour
Whole school attendance has increased, exceeding that of the previous 3 years. Learners’ engagement has increased, because of carefully considered curriculums, leading to a reduction in suspension rates and an improved overall attendance.
Next steps on your behaviour journey
Strategies continue to be refined and remodelled to meet the needs of our current cohort of learners. Due to the ever-changing nature of our clientele, it is important to keep evolving and reviewing our current model of practice.