Starting with a real positive… behaviour of children in school is generally fantastic. They are kind, polite and hard-working. Most display manners and social skills you will not routinely see elsewhere. Everyone who comes in for whatever reason notices and comments on it. Even supply teachers (a famously tough gig!) enjoy being here! Ofsted rated behaviour and attitudes as Outstanding and Personal Development the same. We’re very proud of this and so are the children. We are sure families are proud of the contribution they and their children make to such a positive scenario. It reflects well on our community.
Like all schools, we have to recognise that we are finding behaviour management a bit trickier in recent years. Covid certainly had an impact; for example our older children now missed large swathes of important time in school and pre-school, the early years when they would have been focussing very much on ‘learning-how-to-learn’, getting along together and self-regulating.
Every other school we speak to is finding a similar pattern and it is a well-recognised national concern. The word from our colleagues in secondary schools is that the current Years 7 and 8 in general are unlike anything they’ve ever experienced before!
Of course, the great majority of our children never get into any sort of trouble. A quick straw poll suggests over 90% have never, ever had a detention. The norm here would be to sail through 7 years without ever being in an SLT detention. Many would say they’ve never really even been told off! To date this year, we have had between us 16,800 school days. There have been 19 detentions (or reflection times as we prefer to call them). I personally (Mr Hillier writing), have taught in and been head of schools where there are more than 19 a day! Daily, a Hall full of children sitting around in detention.
However, we do feel we are seeing a bit of a spike or negative incidents in some pockets of the school – certainly, staff feel that they are dealing with more low level disruption to teaching and learning. They are also seeing more fall outs related to playtimes which then come back into class and impact everyone else’s learning, enjoyment of the day and wellbeing.. Many of the latter are impossible to unpick and resolve. To an extent, children have to learn to manage their relationships for themselves – something we really focus on teaching and modelling – and quite often the advice can only be to ignore something or to avoid a person who they find problematic.
To address this, staff have been directed to apply the behaviour procedures more rigorously. It’s not really been necessary before, but hopefully a bit of a ‘blast’ will get us back on track.
The bit of the procedure that we think has been applied lightly is the process by which 3 detentions in a half-term should lead to a formal behaviour review involving parents and consideration of the need to exclude for repeatedly breaking school rules and expectations. At this point, I as head should also be considering suspension or exclusion.
Thinking about this, harsh as it may seem, to get to this point a child must have displayed some disruptive or disrespectful behaviour that has had to be managed – in a supportive, age-appropriate way – no fewer than 30 times in a half term. They will have had 12 opportunities to reflect and discuss with either their teacher or a member of SLT and/or to have the supportive ear of the Pastoral Team. Going forward, we will more seriously consider whether at this point we have reached the end of the line as far as support and in-school sanctions have gone and need to consider suspension or exclusion.
This is not something we would anticipate having to do very often and it will have no impact on the great majority of children who always follow the rules and display our values. Naturally, we will continue to support children along the way and do what we can to help them make good choices. From Nursery to Year 6, our curriculum is built around this; values are central to all we do. Our PSHE, assemblies, topic themes, extended offer and some of the quirky ‘Parkdale’ things we do, such as Forest School, Enrichment Fridays, Active Schools etc are all intended to support these values and will continue to be central to what we do. However, we have to accept if these do not work for some children and we have to resort to more direct behaviour management.
We hope we will have the support of our fantastic community in keeping Parkdale right up there as one of the great schools, where children thrive, learn and enjoy themselves in a happy atmosphere.