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Rationale
Aims - To ensure all staff
Staff Guidelines
It is much better for a member of staff to avoid incidents where students display challenging behaviour, than to have to deal with them. Therefore, we have adopted a PACE approach to have conversation and avoiding challenging behaviour:
Playfulness - Acceptance – Curiosity - Empathy
PACE is a way of thinking, feeling, communicating and behaving that aims to make the child feel safe. It is based upon how parents connect with their very young infants. As with young toddlers, with safety the child can begin to explore. With PACE, the troubled child can start to look at himself and let others start to see them, or get closer emotionally. They can start to trust.
This is about creating an atmosphere of lightness and interest when you communicate. It means learning how to use a light tone with your voice, like you might use when storytelling, rather than an irritated or lecturing tone. It’s about having fun, and expressing a sense of joy.
It is similar to parent-infant interactions when both parent and infant are delighting in being with each other and getting to know each other. Both are feeling safe and relaxed. Neither feels judged nor criticised. Playful moments reassure both that their conflicts and separations are temporary and will never harm the strength of their relationship.
Having a playful stance isn’t about being funny all the time or making jokes when a child is sad. It’s about helping children be more open to and experience what is positive in their life, one step at a time.
Sometimes a troubled child has given up on the idea of having good times and doesn’t want to experience and share fun or enjoyment. Some children don’t like affection or reject hugs. A playful stance can allow closeness but without the scary parts.
When children find it hard to regulate their feelings, anger can become rage, fear, terror, and sadness, despair. If this is the case, then children may also find it hard to regulate feelings of excitement, joy and love. Feeling these emotions can sometimes turns to anxiety.
Playfulness allows children to cope with positive feelings. It also gives hope. If you can help the child discover his own emerging sense of humour, this can help him wonder a little more about his life and how come he behaves in the ways that he does. When children laugh and giggle, they become less defensive or withdrawn and more reflective.
A playful stance adds elements of fun and enjoyment in day-to-day life and can also diffuse a difficult or tense situation. The child is less likely to respond with anger and defensiveness when the parent has a touch of playfulness in his or her discipline. While such a response would not be appropriate at the time of major misbehaviour, when applied to minor behaviours, playfulness can help keep it all in perspective.
Acceptance
Unconditional acceptance is at the core of the child’s sense of safety. Acceptance is about actively communicating to the child that you accept the wishes, feelings, thoughts, urges, motives, and perceptions that are underneath the outward behaviour. It is about accepting, without judgment or evaluation, her inner life. The child’s inner life simply is; it is not right or wrong.
Accepting the child’s intentions does not imply accepting behaviour, which may be hurtful or harmful to another person or to self. The parent may be very firm in limiting behaviour while at the same time accepting the motives for the behaviour.
One hopes that the child learns that while behaviour may be criticised and limited, this is not the same as criticising the child’s self. The child then becomes more confident that conflict and discipline involves behaviour, not the relationship with parents nor her self-worth.
Curiosity is the foundation of acceptance of whatever underlies the behaviour. Making sense of how the child has learnt to behave in certain ways can help with acceptance.
Curiosity
Curiosity, without judgment, is how we help children become aware of their inner life, reflect upon the reasons for their behaviour, and then communicate it to their parents or therapist. Curiosity is wondering about the meaning behind the behaviour for the child. Curiosity lets the child know that the adults understand.
Children often know that their behaviour was not appropriate. They often do not know why they did it or are reluctant to tell adults why.
With curiosity the adults are conveying their intention to simply understand why and to help the child with understanding. The adult’s intentions are to truly understand and help the child, not to lecture or convey that the child’s inner life is wrong in some way.
Curiosity involves a quiet, accepting tone that conveys a simple desire to understand the child: “What do you think was going on? What do you think that was about?” or “I wonder what…?” You say this without anticipating an answer or response from a child. This is different from asking the child, “Why did you do that?” with the expectation of a reply. It is not interpretation or fact gathering. It’s just about getting to know the child and letting them know that.
Curiosity must be communicated without annoyance about the behaviour. Being curious can, for example, include an attitude of being sad rather than angry when the child makes a mistake. A light curious tone and stance can get through to a child in a way that anger cannot.
You might make guesses about what a child may be thinking and feeling, saying this aloud, and keeping it connected to the present. It can be about having a conversation, almost with yourself, with the child in the room, without anticipating a response.
If an adult can stay curious about why their child is behaving as they are, the child and adult are less likely to feel cross or frustrated. As curiosity is non-judGEMental, this can help the child to be open to how she, and other people, are thinking and feeling. Curiosity lets the child stay open and engaged in conversations.
Children then start to reflect upon their own inner life with their parent and therapist and start to understand themselves. As the understanding deepens, the child can discover that their behaviour does not reflect something bad inside them, but rather a thought, feeling, perception, or motive that was stressful, frightening, or confusing and could only be expressed through their behaviour. As the child communicates this to the adults, the need for the behaviour may reduce, and with that the behaviour itself. The child’s feelings about the behaviour may change, with less defensiveness and shame but more guilt, leading to less of the behaviour.
Empathy
Empathy lets the child feel the adult’s compassion for them. Being empathic means the adult actively showing the child that the child’s inner life is important to the adult and he or she wants to be with the child in their hard times. With empathy, when the child is sad or in distress the adult is feeling the sadness and distress with them and lets the child know that.
The adult is demonstrating that he or she knows how difficult an experience is for the child. The adult is telling the child that they will not have to deal with the distress alone. The adult will stay with the child emotionally, providing comfort and support, and will not abandon them when they needs the adult the most. The adult is also communicating strength, love and commitment, with confidence that sharing the child’s distress will not be too much. Together they will get through it.
The Impact of Communication Using the Principles of PACE
PACE focuses on the whole child, not simply the behaviour. It helps children be more secure with the adults and reflect upon themselves, their thoughts, feelings and behaviour, building the skills that are so necessary for maintaining a successful and satisfying life. The child discovers that they are doing the best that they can and are not bad or lazy or selfish. Problems diminish as the need for them reduces.
Through PACE and feeling safer, children discover that they can now do better. They learn to rely on adults, particularly their parents, and trust them to truly know them. They learn that their parents can look after them in a way that they could never do on their own.
When children experience the adults doing the best they can to understand them and trying to work out together more effective ways for the child to understand, make sense of and manage their emotions, thoughts and behaviour they start to believe that the adults really will keep on trying until things get better for all of them.
For adults, using PACE most of the time, they can reduce the level of conflict, defensiveness and withdrawal that tends to be ever present in the lives of troubled children. Using PACE enables the adult to see the strengths and positive features that lie underneath more negative and challenging behaviour.
Positive Behaviour ManaGEMent
Create quiet calm ethos in the classroom and around the school where confrontation is less likely.
Is the incident worth the confrontation?
It is not always possible to avoid conflict. When it happens, there are a variety of approaches for dealing with conflict and these will vary from staff to staff. Staff may feel anger or believe that their authority is threatened, BUT they must remain calm and in control of both themselves and the situation at all times. Before dealing with an incident staff should:
It is essential that staff understand the student’s:
Nevertheless, all staff must be flexible in thought and action when dealing with challenging incidents from students.
Techniques to diffuse and/or avoid confrontation include the following:
Non-verbal signals could include:
Diffusing
Sometimes it is impossible to avoid displays of challenging behaviour. There are many reasons for this — anger, anxiety, fear, low self-esteem, frustration, depression, and staff behaviour amongst others. Members of staff should develop strategies to avoid the incident in the first place. However, if it does happen, they should have the necessary skills to diffuse it and be prepared to use those skills.
Each confrontation usually develops through the following stages:
The build-up may be the responsibility of the student but from thereafter, the escalation is dependent upon two parties. Winning and losing becomes very important to both parties. From the staff member’s point of view the student must do as they are told. From the student’s viewpoint, they must not obey the staff member otherwise they have lost.
Staff should:
Whilst it is important to maintain high expectations of the children’s behaviour. It is also important to strike a balance. Expectations which are too high can be damaging when they consistently result in failure and negative feedback for an individual.
Rights and Responsibilities
As a way of framing these expectations we have as a school developed agreed rights for all students and staff in school. Following on from these rights come responsibilities that we all have to ensure those rights for ourselves and everyone else. These have been put into tables and are part of the display in each Classroom and other areas of the school. Student’s attention should be drawn to them, and they should be used as reference when discussing behaviour with the class or an individual.
GEM School Learning Rewards
It is much more effective to focus on, recognise and reward positive behaviour than to focus on and give sanctions for negative behaviour. By focusing our attention on positive behaviours, we can greatly reduce attention seeking negative behaviour and encourage more positive behaviour. However, at GEM we do not believe in BIG rewards. There are no Macdonald’s or bowling trips. There are no big winners and losers. Here rewards are small and genuine, a reward here may be a trusted adult telling a child that they really enjoyed doing an activity with them.
The rationale behind this is any external rewards simply don’t work, any reward will eventually lose its lustre. The effect of the reward will be temporary and any change will be lost with their child’s interest in that reward. We are trying to achieve lasting change and growth. Even if that change comes in tiny steps. The change we are looking for comes from within and springs from a sense of pride and achievement when a child feels that they have done well or been successful. In matter of fact there is no greater reward for a child than the pride in their success and achievement from an adult who is important to the child.
In this school that recognition is given to the child in the form of a leaf. In each class in the school is a ‘Tree’ (It represents ‘Change and Growth’). At the start of each year, it is stripped of leaves. Leaves can be given to children for any behaviour we would like to recognise and reward. The Leaves are linked (and colour coded) to the different aspects of the “Character Curriculum”. Any member of staff can give a leaf at any time during the day to reward any example of positive behaviour (from showing ‘resilience’ by sticking with their maths when they were finding it hard to showing ‘kindness’ to another student who was upset). There is no limit to the number of leaves a member of staff can give in a day, no limit to the number of leaves a child can receive in a day. No limit to the amount of positive behaviour we celebrate. All children have an individual Character Curriculum target. Special attention should be given to identifying positive behaviour towards a child’s individual character target.
In addition to the whole school system, teachers may develop age-appropriate reward systems for individuals or groups. (Marbles and stickers may work well in Primary but they are less likely to be effective further up the school). Where possible this should be done through discussion and agreement with the students in the group. Student involvement in developing the system will result in greater engaGEMent with the system. This ‘buy in’ is essential or it will not have the desired impact. Whatever rewards are used they will at some point lose their impact. These class-based systems will be regularly reviewed and changed to achieve different goals or to ensure they are still having the desired impact. Whatever systems are developed could/should also include breaks and lunch times if needed. Whilst these are shorter periods of the day the unstructured time is often the time some students need the most support.
“Good, Better, Best …”
Whatever system is developed within class a simple … “Good, Better, Best …”, is recorded and submitted to the head teacher each week for the purpose of whole school performance tracking.
At the end of each week teachers record which children have been “Good”, which students have done “Better” (This could mean better than the students who have been ‘Good’ or better than 
an individual did in the previous week) and which students have done “Best”. It can be their ‘personal best’ or it can be ‘best’ in the group. Someone always has to be best. BUT if more than one student has tried their best and done really well that week. It is OK to have more than one student get “Best” (as long as it is not everyone in the group! They can’t all be best … it becomes meaningless.)
Much like we do not have the typical rewards we do not use the typical sanctions either. Sanctions do not really work with children who have experienced significant attachment and trauma. As a result, we do not really use sanctions in the way other schools might. However, we do believe that you should not ignore negative behaviour and that unacceptable behaviour should always be followed up.
We also believe that there are ‘Natural consequences’ for some behaviours … often based on a risk assessment. (If a child puts everyone at risk in a car. A risk assessment might say they ca not go out in a car, or only travel in the back seat with a member of staff. A ‘natural consequence’ and sensible response of their dangerous behaviour previously).
Negative Behaviour
PACE approach
Staff may give “friendly warnings”. If a behaviour persists, staff will try to talk to the child to understand why they are behaving the way they are and offer reassurance, coaching or distraction to get them back on task. Eventually, if a student’s behaviour is clearly upsetting other children, putting children at risk or simply stopping the rest of the class from learning staff may have no other option than to give a child a clear instruction and a reminder of the rights and responsibilities and that staff will have to intervene if they continue. Any intervention will be the minimum required to maintain a safe environment without escalating any situation further. Behaviours may result in ‘natural consequences’ and/or be followed up at another time. Behaviour slips will be written, and the behaviour will be reported in the end of day handover and recorded and tracked.
More Serious Behaviour
More serious incidents may need to be followed up with more serious intervention. The behaviour slip and tracker will identify the behaviour as more serious and this will result with intervention form a senior member of staff, it may require some intervention work done or longer conversations about the negative behaviour and what is causing it. It may require the involvement of outside agencies. It may result in a risk manaGEMent meeting and require agreed actions to be taken to ensure everyone’s safety.
A significant occurrence report will always be written following any of these behaviours and will be reported in the end of day handover. There will always be a debrief following a significant incident when all staff involved will try to understand what prompted the incident and what might be done to avoid similar incidents in the future. In addition to the intervention described above for serious incidents any of the above may result in reflection time away from school. Reflection time is never seen as a sanction but rather ensures we have the time to take whatever actions are required to keep the children safe. Reflection time away from the school will be followed by a re-integration meeting between the Headteacher and Parent/Carer to work together to avoid similar incidents in the future.
As a school we keep an excellent record of all significant occurrences (including, but not limited, to physical intervention). Further a record of more minor incidents is also kept.
Class charts will be used to record all behaviour (positive and negative) simply say who was involved, what triggered the behaviour, what the behaviour was, what helped, how the incident was followed up, as well as any further consequences or follow up required from SLT.
Staff should always use best their judGEMent as to whether they think further ‘intervention’ is required (in consultation with others as appropriate). But bullying, racism or homophobic incidents must always be followed up.
Physical intervention should be a last resort and avoided if at all possible. Where it does need to be used this should only be to:
Physical intervention should only be carried out by trained staff and only used approved techniques. All staff, dealing directly with the students are required to attend training. Only staff who have completed the training are allowed to use physical intervention techniques should the need arise.
Physical intervention should NEVER be used purely as a way of enforcing compliance. It is better to spend the time convincing an individual to make good choices, the right choice so that eventually you can praise them for doing that than force them to comply. It will have a far greater likelihood of encouraging the right choices in the future. It is better to spend the time making every effort to defuse the situation and distraction the student, rather than get drawn into a physical restraint. This can have a huge impact on the student’s day.
It is the responsibility of all staff to ensure they fully understand and adhere to the School’s Behaviour ManaGEMent Policy and approach.
Monitoring and Review
The effectiveness of this policy will be monitored continually by the headteacher and the governing board and the board of directors of GEM Hereford. Any necessary amendments will be made immediately.
The next scheduled review date for this policy is stated on the version control rubric found of the front cover of this policy.
The school will establish a monitoring system that is backed up by performance measures and this will be reviewed following an incident.
