Behaviour Management

At Headstart School our Behaviour management is graded Outstanding with Ofsted.

Our Headstart Model of behaviour management uses a variety of behaviour based therapies.

At Headstart our vision is to provide positive learning for life.

This means we place an emphasis on nurturing relationships & building rapport, setting the stage for trust, connection and communication to thrive. We then look to personalise each learners educational journey- building those key skills and breaking down barriers to enable, empower and encourage each students learning. This requires individualised assessment, careful measurement of performance and adaptations that reflect a sensitivity to the students experience.

We employ a PBS model of support that places emphasis on a values-led, evidenced-based and ethical framework which combines to ensure each students provision is person-centred. This includes co-ordinating direct support from qualified teachers, speech & language therapists, occupational therapists, clinical psychologists and behaviour analysts under a common vision of effective educational tactics and strategies.

The specific goals for each student may vary based on their age, stage and immediate concerns, but the the overall emphasis of our system is to develop a clear understanding of what a student needs to learn, why this will help replace any challenging behaviour they currently engage in and how we will motivate them to develop these skills. We take a functional, contextual and circumstantial view of our students conduct. We don’t seek to blame, shame, label or punish them. Instead we seek to understand why, when and how they behave and then place an emphasis on teaching replacement skills, motivating and shaping, prompting and teaching new skills.

Behaviour Analysis is a pragmatic, empirical and humane approach that sees everyone as unique. We all have utterly specific genetic and environmental learning histories- these provide us all with certain capacities or repertoires. At Headstart we are keen to construct a time, place and space which enables students to experience success, support and shaping of critical skills. Those that last beyond the initial teaching-skills that generalise to other places and faces.

At Headstart, the behaviour analysis is essentially a case by case environmental analysis; For any given student we will look at all the aspects that contribute to the increasing or decreasing likelihood of problem behaviour, we look at what meaningful changes we can make as a staff team, what we can teach as alternatives, how we can prompt, shape and design behaviour change and how we can do so with the student (rather than to the student). We employ proactive and positive means to effect lasting change.

Our Behaviour team meet weekly to analyse the data and highlight behaviour that needs discussing further.

Understanding what the child is trying to communicate by their behaviour and with the input of our specialist behaviour analyst and trained staff we put together strategies and how best to support staff and students.

Each strategy is individualised, and forms part of the students IBSP.

Students have weekly targets set and these are monitored closely by the tutor and the Behaviour team.