Northumberland Designated Teacher Hub - Supporting CPD for Designated Teachers

1. Northumberland Designated Teacher HubSeptember 2018 • Facilitated by     • Achievement for All

2. Our charity Our vision A world in which all children and young people can achieve regardless of their background, challenge or need Our mission Transforming lives through improved educational opportunities and outcomes for children and young people vulnerable to underachievement

3. Aim and purpose of the Northumberland DT hub To support the Virtual School in their commitment to invest in CPD for Designated Teachers: • Series of training sessions, agenda driven by you • Opportunity for you to network and share practice examples or challenging issues you'd like the group to help with • Let us know what you want – online survey and feedback/evaluation form at end of each session • All upcoming meetings and presentations available at www. afaeducation.org/our-projects/lift-learning-in-family-teams/northumberlanddt/ • FREE Toolkit for Designated Teachers

4. Looked after Children – The Importance of a Whole School Approach • Whole School Ethos • Inclusive Curriculum • Good Behaviour Policy

5. Creating a Whole School Ethos • For each of the suggestions on the next slides, consider: • what you do or have done • could do or do better • Implications for training/ awareness raising (who and what?)

6. A critical step is to develop the climate and culture of the classroom based around mutual understanding, tolerance​ and respect: value every child (even the hardest to reach), and encourage children to value each other.

7. Another simple tool is to celebrate diversity and difference: it makes a significant impact on young people who feel, for one reason or another, that they are on the social margins of the class (or school) community

8. A teacher can develop their pedagogy so that their "universal offer" (in terms of minute-by-minute interactions) with children and young people support a wide range of needs. Quality First Teaching.

9. The climate and culture of the classroom can be transformed so that every young person feels free from the impact of bullying behaviours

10. Reduce off-task and disruptive behaviour without the need to threaten punishment or deploy inflexible sanctions, using positive behaviour management techniques.

11. Choose a child or young person that considered by staff to be "difficult", either in terms of social behaviours, or in terms of making adequate progress, or due to difficulties in building constructive relationships with parents...or perhaps all three. • On a large piece of A3 paper or a flipchart, write their name in the centre, and then around the outside the names/roles of school professionals who could have a relationship with the pupil. • Colour-code for the quality of the relationship (positive, neutral, negative, none), and draw in a connecting line (for positive and negative relationships, the thickness of the line denoting the strength of the relationship.

12. Here’s a secondary school example

13. Now repeat the exercise for a child or young person who has identified special education needs (either SEN Support or on an EHCP), with parents who are supportive of the school and who is making progress despite the learning difficulties. Discuss the differences.What more could the school community do to build a more powerful and positive sense of belonging with the first child/young person? What could be done immediately? What could be nurtured and grown?

14. How inclusive is your school? • Use the Inclusive Classroom Community survey tool to explore and discuss how far you create an all-pervasive sense of belonging and emotional wellbeing within a classroom... within a school community?

15. Schools are familiar with this concept for children with SEND (particularly physical disability)How does this apply to children who are or have been in care?What “crates” might they need?How can you ensure all your staff (including governors) share an understanding?

16. PAC UK have identify the following 8 important aims for a curriculum and provision to meet the needs of children who have been in care. • Feel safe at school • Build trusting relationships with adults • Manage their strong feelings • Learn and make progress • Develop their peer relationships • Cope with unstructured parts of the day • Cope with change and transitions • Develop their thinking brains How well does your school’s offer achieve these? Are there negative drivers that you need to overcome?

17. Adverse Curriculum Triggers An Adverse Curriculum Trigger is when an inappropriate comment, activity or event creates or 'triggers' an adverse response. This might cause a CLA to revisit previous abuse or neglect and relive their experiences.  It is therefore crucial to understand how adverse curriculum triggers can affect CLA and how to personalise your curriculum through staff training and understanding of being a CLA.

18. Adverse triggers can be of the result of a whole class activity creating cards for 'Father's Day, asking children to look at their personal history by creating a 'family tree', looking at genetic similarities (like hair or eye colour) or even calling the end of the school day 'Mummy time'; these are all triggers for upset in a child living with a host family. 

19. 'Difficult' topics, which can be identified, particularly in Humanities curriculum, can be hugely traumatic for a child who has already experienced more than most. Examples of this include English or History lessons when being tasked with writing exercises about immigrants, or refugees being away from their families. Or it might be a Biology or PHSE / sex education lesson for children who have lived with abuse. It might even be a charity day for the school to celebrate their distance from 'less advantaged', albeit a 'Children in Need' day and watching short films about children in similar situations. It might be the presence of the emergency services in school or raising money for a local refuge or hospital that reminds them of what they have experienced. All can all be huge emotional triggers for children who identify with these as real - and not so distanced - events in their past. 

20. Look at the ideas and statements on the handout. Reflect on what you know happens at your school and any training needs you will now provide to ensure you avoid ACTs in your setting. Kate’s Letter

21. Consider what information is needed by the setting before discussions around the needs of the child in relation to ACTs. • Who should lead initial discussions - social workers, parents / carers or students - with the school? • How frequent do you feel discussions should be around the child - to coincide just with PEPs or more frequently?  • How will you approach this if the child doesn't want to be publically recognised as a CLA? • How can you and your team ensure they are 'getting it right'?

22. A Good Behaviour Policy...or a Bad Behaviour Policy? All too often the word "behaviour" in school settings is misappropriated, associated with negativity, bad things, punishment, sanctions and exclusion. Policy tends to concentrate on what to do when things go wrong. This is understandable to an extent, as the national backdrop is one of rising exclusion rates for "persistent bad behaviour" and the sometimes pernicious practice of "off-rolling" "naughty children" by one route or another.

24. Time to wake up? • The evidence we have seen suggests that the rise in so called ‘zero-tolerance’ behaviour policies is creating school environments where pupils are punished and ultimately excluded for incidents that could and should be managed within the mainstream school environment. • Recommendations • The Government should issue guidance to all schools reminding them of their responsibilities to children under treaty obligations and ensure that their behaviour policies are in line with these responsibilities. • The Government and Ofsted should introduce an inclusion measure or criteria that sits within schools to incentivise schools to be more inclusive.

25. Behaviour Policies and the Equalities Act • In both their school behaviour policies, and in their management of individual students, schools do need to pay regard to the Equality Act 2010 (the Act). • In essence, the Act places a duty on schools to take into account the circumstances and the needs of each student when managing behaviour issues. Thus, for a student with a known disability, treatment must be proportionate, in the light of the student’s disabilities. The same treatment cannot simply be given to everyone in the same situation.

26. At all times, leaders must consider if the consequences administered to the student are purely as sanctions (to deter others and influence future behaviour), or form part of a supportive response (where the student needs help which can only be given outside of the mainstream classroom), or a combination of both. • Behaviour is influenced by many complex factors, and it is important not to sanction where help is the appropriate response. • A good school will acknowledge both the need to act in a civil manner, as well as the student’s need to address their need. Failure to do so would be to simply punish a student without scaffolding a way into better behaviour. • At all times, the school should scaffold ways towards better behaviour for students as far as they are capable. It is unacceptable to accept misbehaviour from any student who is capable of modifying their actions, and the best schools look for ways to equip students with better skills, habits and qualities no matter their circumstances. Compassion, high expectations and wisdom must be carefully blended to decide where this point lies for students with SEND.

27. The impact of trauma • You’ll be well aware that some children who have experienced complex trauma can really struggle to behave safely and well during the school day. It is also clear that adults supporting these students can often struggle with managing these presenting behaviours. • Students can experience quite significant behavioural outbursts that can be difficult to predict and can be equally as difficult to remedy. Educators can invest significant amounts of their time and effort into building relationships to support these students, only to have them sabotage this in ways that can leave educators feeling hurt, ineffective, and confused. Behaviour management systems and strategies that work with most students tend to fall flat with these students, leading to increased frustration and, let’s be honest, an increased workload as further solutions are sought. • School leaders can get to the stage where they feel that they have no other option but to resort to suspension and exclusion, due to the complexity of the concerns and also the often unsafe and resource-intensive nature of the behaviours. It’s such a difficult predicament for people who have spent their careers focussing on meeting the educational needs of young people – to feel that the only response left to them is to implement punitive and excluding responses to those who have been harmed so unfairly.

29. The Bad? Reasonable Adjustments A reasonable adjustment never means that we lower our expectations. It means that some students need additional support to ensure that they meet the high expectations that we have for all of our students. Northern Education Trust Academies may, in line with the requirements of Equality Act 2010, make reasonable adjustments for students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities in relation to this policy where it is deemed appropriate. In order to ensure that the duties under the Act are met, Northern Education Trust Academies will: • Consider the SEND Code of Practice and the NET Policy for SEND; • Monitor C4/C5/C6/FTE for SEND students with EHCP, EHCP pending or other disability, at inclusion team meetings; • Call an emergency/annual review for SEND students with EHCP, EHCP pending or other disability in cases where the Inclusion Coordinator/Head of Deep Support has identified that these students may have difficulties meeting the Academy’s high expectations; • the decision as to whether to make any adjustment will be made only at an emergency/annual review meeting and convening such meeting does not automatically mean that an adjustment will be made; • the Academy Principal will attend this review; • the final decision to make adjustments and whether they are considered reasonable rests with the Academy Principal, who will take advice at the emergency/annual review meeting.

30. The Good? “Teachers should seek to identify the underlying cause of the behaviour (for example an unmet SEN or emotional need) and put in place measures to address the cause, to prevent the behaviour re-occurring”. https://pivotaleducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How-to-Write-an-Outstanding-Behaviour-Policy-2016.pdf

31. Consistent cultures of excellent behaviour management When people talk about behaviour they obsessively search for the instant solution. Some peddle magic dust or ‘behaviour systems’ that glisten yet quickly fade. Others relentlessly scream for a bigger stick to beat learners down with. Both extremes harbour an irresistible idea that there is a short cut to changing behaviour. They sell the lie that you can provoke sustained behavioural change in others without doing much hard work yourself. The truth is that there is no alternative to the hard work: building relationships with those who would rather not, resetting expectations with those who trample them, being relentlessly positive and sustaining a calm face when confronted with challenging behaviour.

32. Good examples of opening statements… Policy statement XXXXXXXXXX is committed to creating an environment where exemplary behaviour is at the heart of productive learning. Everyone is expected to maintain the highest standards of personal conduct, to accept responsibility for their behaviour and encourage others to do the same. Our behaviour policy guides staff to teach self-discipline not blind compliance. It echoes our core values with a heavy emphasis on respectful behaviour, a partnership approach to managing poor conduct and dynamic interventions that support staff and learners.

33. Aims of the policy • To create a culture of exceptionally good behaviour: for learning, for community for life • To ensure that all learners are treated fairly, shown respect and to promote good relationships. • To refuse to give learners attention and importance for poor conduct • To help learners take control over their behaviour and be responsible for the consequences of it. • To build a community which values kindness, care, good humour, good temper, obedience and empathy for others. • To promote community cohesion through improved relationships. • To ensure that excellent behaviour is a minimum expectation for all.

34. Purpose of the policy To provide simple, practical procedures for staff and learners that: • Recognise behavioural norms • Positively reinforces behavioural norms • Promote self esteem and self discipline • Teach appropriate behaviour through positive interventions

35. Three is the magic number • Support beyond the classroom • Alternatives to exclusion • How will staff behave ? • 3 Rules • All staff, every day • Middle leaders • Senior leaders • 3 key ways to recognise conduct that is ‘over and above’

36. Consistency Consistency lies in the behaviour of adults and not simply in the application of procedure. A truly sustainable consistent approach does not come in a toolkit of strategies but in the determination of every member of staff to hold firm. It is hard fought and easily lost. The key is to develop a consistency that ripples through every interaction on behaviour. Where learners feel treated as valued individuals they respect adults and accept their authority

37. Consistency in practice • Consistent language; consistent response: Referring to the agreement made between staff and learners, simple and clear expectations reflected in all conversations about behaviour. • Consistent follow up: Ensuring ‘certainty’ at the classroom, faculty and senior management level. Never passing problems up the line, teachers taking responsibility for behaviour interventions, seeking support but never delegating. • Consistent positive reinforcement: Routine procedures for reinforcing, encouraging and celebrating appropriate behaviour. • Consistent consequences: Defined, agreed and applied at the classroom level as well as established structures for more serious behaviours. • Consistent, simple rules/agreements/expectations referencing promoting appropriate behaviour, icons, symbols and visual cues, interesting and creative signage • Consistent respect from the adults: Even in the face of disrespectful learners! • Consistent models of emotional control: Emotional restraint that is modelled and not just taught, teachers as role models for learning, teachers learning alongside learners • Consistently reinforced rituals and routines for behaviour around the site: In classrooms, around the site, at reception. • Consistent environment: Display the quality of a good primary school, consistent visual messages and echoes of core values.

38. Recognition and rewards for effort • We recognise and reward learners who go ‘over and above’ our standards. Although there are tiered awards, our staff understand that a quiet word of personal praise can be as effective as a larger, more public, reward. • ‘It is not what you give but the way that you give it that counts.’ • The use of praise in developing a positive atmosphere in the classroom cannot be underestimated. It is the key to developing positive relationships, including with those learnersare hardest to reach.. School Level Classroom Level

40. Towards a Good Behaviour Policy • The following checklists can be used to help evaluate current practice. • The checklists are challenging, designed to provoke discussion and debate. Ultimately, they frame the first step​s in creating a school community that creates an inclusive sense of belonging, the bedrock on which emotional wellbeing can thrive. • Reflecting from the results of the checklist, • Where are policy and practice, culture and behaviours best aligned to support emotional wellbeing? • Where are the largest discrepancies? • If governors were to go through the checklist, would they agree with the ratings? • If staff were to go through the checklist, would they agree with the ratings? • What small steps could be taken to have the biggest impact on behaviour, culture and climate and staff morale?