Research School Network: Coming out of lockdown and getting back into school Kate Fallan and Julian Grenier reflect on the importance of the Improving Behaviour Guidance Report

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Coming out of lockdown and getting back into school

Kate Fallan and Julian Grenier reflect on the importance of the Improving Behaviour Guidance Report

by East London Research School
on the

The Newham Learning programme starts with this assumption: as children and young people return to school, it’s going to be important for us to support their social and emotional development. It is also important to help them return to positive routines and behaviour. These are easy words to write, but much of the work itself will be incredibly complex, delicate and tricky.

Schools in Newham have lots of expertise to build on. We know our local communities well.

All the same, this is an important moment to pause and consider what the research and evidence tell us about behaviour. That way, we can make sure that in this very busy time, we focus on the best bets’ – the approaches which are mostly likely to work, and most likely to build expertise and professionalism across our whole teams. This blog is a quick read. We suggest you follow through by taking time to read the full Improving Behaviour Guidance Report. The Guidance Report is brief, summarises a lot of important evidence, and it’s practical.

Finding out more


One theme which is very striking in the report, is the importance of finding out more. Recommendation 1 in the report isn’t first by accident. It’s first because it’s the key to everything else in the guidance:

IB 1

As children and young people return in greater numbers, the process of getting to know and understand them better is vital. Some won’t be with their usual teacher or class team. Others will have experienced significant events at home that may have changed how they feel and behave. 

Early Years

It’s also important to think ahead to September, especially to children who will be arriving new to nursery and reception classes. It’s unlikely that the usual range of options to get to know those children will be possible.

Will we be visiting children at home, or encouraging large numbers of parents to spend a period of time settling their children in and talking with key people? Activity in this area is going to be significantly reduced. Yet the research strongly suggests how important it is to get to know young children. We need to understand their interests and their social/​emotional needs. Young children deserve the best possible start to the early years in school.

They need to be understood as individuals. The 2012 literature review which informed the current Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (Evangelou and others, 2009) refers to the importance of contingent responding to children’s actions that is attuned to the individuality of the child’.

A contingent’ response is one which is individual to the child. So, if a child is upset, a general response might be come on, where is your smiley face today?’ A contingent’ response might be, I know some days it’s hard, but do you remember yesterday how you enjoyed playing with Fahim? Let’s see if we can find him?‘

Alongside this individual responsiveness, the literature review also summarises the evidence that young children in the EYFS will benefit from supportive caregiver feedback and the establishment of routines’.

In other words, we need to value children as individuals, but we also need to help them learn about and manage the requirements of being in a group with others.

Children need us to establish safe and secure routines for them. In our video discussion with researcher Peter Elfer, there is a strong focus on how young children need a key’ relationship. That’s a relationship with someone who knows them really well, and can help them to manage their emotions and face difficult feelings. The EYFS Literature Review comments that talking about feelings’ has beneficial effects. Although this has been a truism for decades, new research on Social and emotional aspects of learning’ for children shows how it benefits learners of all ages, even children under four.‘Peter Elfer also argues that young children need lots of encouragement from their key person, a sense of you can do it’.

Key Stages 1& 2

Older children have more experience of schooling to draw on, but many are going to find the return difficult after so long away. We think that the Spiral of Enquiry’ model is a good one to summarise what we need to do, in order to get to know and understand pupils afresh in these strange and difficult times.

Spiral picture

To help us reflect on the evidence in the light of our practice, we suggest a closer look at the case studies on page 17 of the Improving Behaviour Guidance Report. The examples are about dealing with setbacks’ and suggest some possible teacher responses.

  • How would you use your school’s existing behaviour policy and approaches to support the individual pupils?
  • Can you identify any barriers – where might your school systems benefit from a changed approach?

The guidance report is very focused on the importance of having an evidence-based and clear approach to improving behaviour. This needs to be understood and put into practice in a consistent way by the whole team.

That approach is also supported by an analysis by Ofsted of the areas for improvement relating to behaviour in 95 inspection reports:

Ofsted behaviour

But the guidance report also argues that universal behaviour systems are unlikely to meet the needs of all your students’

IB rec 5

So, nearly all of the focus of the guidance report in on taking positive steps to improve behaviour: it’s largely proactive.

Where the report suggests we might need to be reactive to individual pupils, that reactive approach should be strategic. In other words, schools need to think ahead about how they will plan to meet the needs of specific pupils rather than respond to crises in the moment’.

Our final suggestion for reflection is: consider where you are now? The arrow diagram below is a useful way to structure your thinking. Sometimes it’s good to do something like this with a colleague. Think about where you are on the arrow, and what would help you to move along? If you’re a leader – where is your team, and what would help them move onwards together and consistently?

Where are you

To help us move forward, as individuals, teams, and schools, we think it’s important to ask ourselves some specific questions about how we ensure our behaviour strategies support all our pupils. That’s especially important as we come out of lockdown. Additionally, what data sources can we find to offer us a picture that’s as detailed and complete as possible?

We need to be using that spiral of enquiry’ to get to know our pupils better, and also to understand our schools better too. It’s by developing a stronger understanding of where we are, together with a more secure knowledge of the evidence, that we can move forward confidently.

In the video below, report co-author Iggy Rhodes discusses some more of key messages from Improving Behaviour.

Improving behaviour in schools

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