Context for joining Behaviour Hubs
The Wren is an academy-maintained secondary school in Southeast England. It is growing in size, providing an education to 1003 students, from eleven- to eighteen-year-olds, with a broad demographic, including 12% of students who are considered to have Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and an above average cohort of students identified as EAL at 45%. 26% of students are eligible for Free School Meals, likely to be an under representation as the student catchment areas fall into the 4th quintile of deprivation.
The school opened in 2015 and joined Excalibur Academies Trust in 2019. Since its first Ofsted report, leadership challenges and the interruption that Covid caused to school growth and planning did not allow the development of a robust school culture and behaviour.
In its determination to create an exceptional education for all students, the leadership team took the proactive approach to joining the Behaviour Hubs programme in 2023.
Behaviour challenges and goals
Our goal was to create and implement a behaviour policy and behaviour procedures that:
- Allows for a calm and purposeful start to learning each day and each lesson
- Reflects our vision and values
- Is understood and shared with students, families and staff
- Recognises and rewards success
- Is explicit and clear allowing for fairness and consistency.
Our key challenge was to implement several changes to routines and actions for staff and students with the necessary pace and clarity to allow for change and progress.
There existed and still exists a culture of positive relationships with students and families. A challenge for us was to maintain these relationships but to create behaviour policies and procedures that set the highest standards, allowing adaptations only where linked to identified needs.
The changes needed were ambitious and impacted every member of our community. There was a challenge in creating bespoke communications around how and why change was happening.
Solutions to behaviour challenges
All members of the Senior Leadership Team attended networking, training and open day events via the programme, allowing us to develop a shared understanding of approaches to behaviour, collaborate with other school leadership teams and to see, first hand, the success and impact of the Behaviour Hubs programme.
Rebranding, with a new school uniform and logo, allowed us to refresh and relaunch our vision and values as part of our action plan. This has created a clear sense of pride and identity within the community.
The ‘Action Planning’ virtual module supported us in creating a plan that was well mapped and achievable, allowing us to implement multiple changes simultaneously. We introduced aspects of each change in Term 1, such as morning line ups for one year group at a time, allowing us time to rehearse and refine our actions ready for our September start.
Our Behaviour Hubs Lead School was exceptionally supportive and approachable, providing guidance, challenge and resources at all stages of the programme. Visiting our Lead School allowed us to develop a model of morning routines reflecting their processes. Utilising models for reactive spaces from our Lead School and other schools visited during Open Days has allowed us to create clear roles for staff in supporting behaviour as pastoral leaders and in our redesigned reactive spaces.
The baseline and subsequent surveys allowed us to triangulate our school data to identify specific actions for our action plan. Our regularly monitored action plan allowed us to ensure change was well timed, planned, clearly communicated and considerate of staff wellbeing.
Impact on behaviour
Our recent Ofsted report highlighted leader’s ‘significant impact on pupils’ behaviour’ and attendance, that ‘pupils recognise the steps leaders have taken in recent times to improve behaviour,’ that ‘behaviour has significantly improved’ and ‘the newly developed behaviour policy sets high expectations for conduct.’ Behaviour was ‘Good.’
Our internal staff survey consistently identifies ‘behaviour’ as an improved area in staff commentary alongside ‘clear expectations’ for staff.
Tom Wood, visiting from our Behaviour Hubs Lead School, Bedford Free School, commented on the calmer nature of the corridors and clear routines to support the start to the day.
Staff responses at the start of our programme indicated that student behaviour was considered to be good or very good by only 13% of respondents. At the end of the programme 63% of respondents indicated that behaviour was good or very good.
Many other areas indicated improvement and impact of the programme:
- 91% of staff believed that it was easy for students to follow the school rules, progress from 76% in our baseline survey
- 94% of staff recognised that teaching generic rules to manage behaviour has become part of our approach compared to our original baseline of just 34%
- There was a clear decrease in impact of behaviour on staff wellbeing.
Undoubtedly, the codified and systematic start to our day and lessons, our high expectations around readiness to learn and our support for students in reaching these expectations is driving our continuous improvement and improvement in student outcomes and destinations.
Next steps on your behaviour journey
The systematic and planned approach to developing approaches to behaviour is one that we will continue to use as we work towards our ongoing behaviour goals. Our ongoing school development plan includes further work on reward systems, as highlighted in our action plan. We are an outward looking organisation and have forged links with schools that we will continue to build upon, ultimately working towards becoming a Behaviour Hubs Lead School.