Daniel Sobel: 0:44

Hearing this point is this is that you know, what's our goal? What's our purpose? I would argue the goal is in the maximising the participation and engagement and feeling and the sense of belonging of a child in the classroom. I belong here, and I can participate here and I can engage here. I feel safe here and I can be me. That is something that doesn't get helped by a withdrawal programme.

Simon Currigan: 1:10

Welcome to the school behaviour secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan. My co host is Emma Shackleton and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents, and of course students. When classroom behaviour gets in the way of success. We're going to share the tried and tested secrets to classroom management, behavioural special needs, whole school strategy and more all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential. Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world. So you'll get to hear the latest evidence based strategies before anyone else. This is the school behaviour secrets podcast. Hi there and welcome to school behaviour secrets. My name is Simon Currigan. Whereas other educational podcasts are like fine wines tackling important issues with nuance and style. This podcast is more like an Alko pop. The bright colours draw you in, but six sugary caffeine laced bottles later. All you're left with is confusion, stomach rot and regret and the sense that you as an adult should know better. I'm joined by my favourite co host Emma Shackleton today. Hi, Emma.

Emma Shackleton: 2:16

Hi, Simon.

Simon Currigan: 2:17

Emma, before we jump in today's interview, I've got a quick question for you.

Emma Shackleton: 2:20

There can't be anything left to know about me can there?

Simon Currigan: 2:23

Oh, there is, I want to keep digging. Have you ever planned anything that didn't work out the way you thought it would?

Emma Shackleton: 2:29

Oh, yeah, there were probably actually loads of times where this has happened. But one example that springs to mind is this. A long time ago a friend and I planned a surprise party for our mutual friend Amy. Names have been changed to protect the innocent by the way. We were quite excited. And we went to the trouble of booking a venue and secretly inviting guests and we were really looking forward to seeing our friends delighted face when everybody shouted 'surprise!'. Anyway, things didn't quite turn out as planned. Because when Amy arrived at the surprise party, she was actually really annoyed and she hated that we'd sprung the party on her and she hadn't known anything about it. So there was a bit of a bad atmosphere and it was really quite an anticlimax and not what we'd planned at all. Anyway, why did you ask me that question? What's the relevance this week?

Simon Currigan: 3:19

Well this week I got to speak to inclusion expert Daniel Sobel. On the topic of how do we plan pupil interventions in school in a way that does get results? What do we need to do before the intervention to set ourselves up for success? How do we pick the right intervention? And how do we measure progress? So if you're a senco, or a school leader, and you have behaviour intervention programmes in place, or any other form of SEN intervention for that matter, this episode is going to be essential listening.

Emma Shackleton: 3:47

Before we play that interview Ive a quick favour to ask. Please can you share this episode with one or two colleagues that you know so that the kids in their classrooms can get the help that they need? All you've got to do is open your podcast app, hit the share button and send a direct link by email messenger or however you like to communicate with your friend. And now here's Simon's interview with Daniel Sobel.

Simon Currigan: 4:12

Today, I'd like to welcome Daniel Sobel to the podcast. Daniel is the founder of Inclusion Expert and is an internationally respected leader in the field of inclusive education. He has advised the Department for Education and governments abroad and is the author of several books including Narrowing the Attainment Gap. His latest book, The Inclusive Classroom is currently trending at number one in Amazon for education. He also writes regularly for The Guardian and works with schools across the UK to improve their inclusive practice. Welcome to the show, Daniel,

Daniel Sobel: 4:43

Thank you for having me.

Simon Currigan: 4:43

And in this episode, we're going to be looking at a different approach to running successful interventions in schools. But before we get to that, I do want to say that when I was reading your book, Narrowing the Attainment Gap, I was nodding and nodding all the way through because I love the way you talked about looking at the individual needs of schools and their specific settings and students and communities and building solutions from there rather than trying to drop a cookie cutter solution that may have worked in another school but aren't appropriate for that individual school and their needs at that time. So I'd like to start with our first question. When schools are presented with an issue often say by Ofsted, maybe on attendance, schools will take that general issue, look at how it's affecting cohorts of kids and then ask what's worked in other schools and then they take that solution and recruit individual pupils into the intervention. And you say this top down approach of starting with the big picture is flawed. Can you explain why?

Daniel Sobel: 5:39

Well data is an interesting thing and what you're hunting for is what you'll end up getting. There's different ways of using Data and Data is a great gift. It's something which we are very good at here in England, we are able to track and look at all different types of datasets across the country in great detail. And we do it better than most other countries. So nowadays, to be a senior leader in a school, you have to be quite data savvy, that still isn't necessarily true in a majority of countries. So we are a step ahead. And as a result, we're able to identify far off looking at trends, we can have an overview picture, and see lots of trends and see how things overlap, and so on and so forth. So I can tell you that my team and I've worked with about 10,000 schools. And in the mix, we can see where there's generally a trend that things we've seen, where you see the most vulnerable and challenging children tend to have an overlap background between Pupil Premium, and SEN, and sometimes other things as well, such as child protection, and so on and so forth. So then you get vulnerable cohorts, which have multiple layered issues. However, that picture isn't necessarily true in your school, it could be in your school, there's only a handful of Pupil Premium. And the issues are really to do with something else completely. And actually, this is where you take very different viewpoints, and they mean different things. So one is about identifying trends. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you understand what's going on for children. So I'll give you an example, which I have overstated and written about way too much. But there was a boy in Sheffield, who was behind in his maths, actually, when I got to the school, the school asked me to look at the different cohorts and see where the issues are. And you could see there was an issue in maths. There's a certain group of boys that were behind in math, and actually have to say that's quite across the country. In that particular circumstance. When I went and spoke to the boys, there was a number of different individual circumstances when I spoke to one particular boy who was late to school every day, and maths was period one. The reason why he was late to school is because he was missing the school bus. The reason why he's missing the school bus is because he had two siblings at home with severe physical and cognitive challenges. And he needed to help single parent mom get those two siblings ready for the school bus. And as a result, he missed his own bus. Now just anyone who's ever been to Sheffield knows it's quite hilly. And so you have to sort of go down one hill, walk along a bit, catch a bus up the next hill walk along a bit, and eventually he gets to school, rocking up to school, but half an hour late. So the two obvious reasons why you shouldn't give this boy extra maths, which is usually the sort of bog standard intervention is because taking away break time or lunchtime was really a big no no, for a child who's been adultified like that playing an adult role at home like that, really, they were equal a young carer, one of the sort of key rules for young carers is don't take away they're very hands on. And also, to be honest, he didn't have a maths problem, he had to get into school problem. Sowhat we decided to do was use a bit of the pupil premium money to buy him a bike so he can get to school on time. That's an example of the use of hard data to identify issues and soft data to understand the issue and to address the issue.

Simon Currigan: 8:40

Could you unpack a little bit there, then what is the difference for our listeners that haven't come across these terms before? What's the difference between hard data and soft data? And how do we use them differently?

Daniel Sobel: 8:50

Well, officially, the hard data is the data that we use for attainment and progress. So effectively grades, right, then the soft data would be the stuff that is the reason behind those grades. So if I give a parallel case, which is exactly the same story, but in this time in Blackpool, and it's relevant to say the story, you'll see the issue of this particular group of boys when I went and spoke to them, and I realised actually, they have a genuine hatred of maths, which is sort of based on their sort of fear of maths and I can relate I took me three times to pass GCSE maths get a basic pass, and I failed my schooling experience in general and didnt come up with any A levels, so I can kind of relate to it. But actually, when I spoke to the boys, I realised there isn't one math intervention programme that you would do that would want to ignite an interest in engaging more participating more in math, they genuinely hated it. So what we decided to do was to take the boys camping to Lake District, and they'd never left inner city Blackpool. They'd never been camping, and who was it that took them? well it was the maths teachers, meaning the idea was to repair the relationship, or to build relationship between math teachers and the children and in so doing, allow maths then to happen. That was the real barrier. So what I'm saying is that the hard data indicates where the problem is. But it doesn't actually tell you what the barrier is, what it's what it's made up of. So it's a bit like you can see on a map that there's a barrier there. But you don't know what the barriers made off. And only when you know what the barriers made of can you actually work out how to get through.

Simon Currigan: 10:18

So it sounds like the soft data helps us get it the why and the hard data identifies that there is a problem or there is an issue. But we need to dig into the underlying Whys before we can get a successful intervention in place

Daniel Sobel: 10:31

When I wrote my first book about Narrowing the Attainment Gap, but really in my head. This was more of a treatise on how to harness soft data, because this kind of thing that almost like fetish for hard data kind of gets lost in the mix. But anyone who's involved in SEMH, social, emotional, mental health stuff knows this. According to the hard data they're doing, they're performing particularly badly and X number of lessons. But you know, in some ways in these sort of micro ways, they're doing really well. They're putting in a lot of effort, and you think they've grown hugely, and you see it in things like engagement, participation, but that just doesn't necessarily really show up in the hard data. There are so many, many, many anomalies. The head teacher that said to me, there was a girl that had come into the school in year seven, her mother committed suicide, and the girl derailed, right, her expected grades, were going to be in the top bracket, so A's B's maybe. And what ended up happening is, in the end, she ended up getting C's, like five basic passes in GCSE in the old currency, right. And he made the point that, you know, according to the Ofsted view, they'd failed this girl. When actually in reality, what they've done is they put in such a huge amount of counselling and support and coaching and help and home visits and home support, and you name it, they literally saved this girl from completely derailing. And the fact that she got five passes was really amazing. There's an example of contradiction between the soft data and hard date, the hard data very often, it can be very useful. And I'm not in any way advocating against hard data, I'm merely saying it's only part of the picture.

Simon Currigan: 12:04

And that soft data of the individual children and the individual stories can get lost in numbers. And when we dig into the soft data we're finding about the children and their stories and their real barriers to learning. I'd like to share a quote from your book, actually, while we're talking about looking at data and starting to put together interventions, there's a quote in your book, Narrowing the Attainment Gap about interventions, and you say that one size fits all interventions and interventions that take the child out of the classroom for extended periods of time, can end up doing more harm than good. Can you tell us a little bit about those thoughts? Why you believe that is? And how should we be thinking about interventions if we want them to be more successful?

Daniel Sobel: 12:41

So let me just add a little piece to that because you know, the danger with quoting something that may be sort of taken out of context. So I will just add something to that quote, because I do wholeheartedly believe that, but only if there is a trend in schools, and understandably so this is without any judgement in my heart. And I have been involved in it myself, where we sometimes reach for off the shelf solutions to make up for a lack of something. And very often what that lack is, if we're totally and utterly honest, is a lack of, let's say, fully quality, first teaching, you know, with teachers who are fully capable of being able to meet the needs of those children in the classroom. So for example, behind in reading comprehension, but they feel like it'd be better if they had a booster. And actually, that's partly has nothing to do with the school or the teachers and more to do with the system of how we train teachers. I don't feel personally that we are training teachers to be skilled enough, I've just had the privilege of writing what's called the Global Inclusive Teaching Initiative. And I'm doing that with UNESCO when we launched it with 80 countries around the world. And the idea is that you know that it creates a basic standard that all teachers need in order to be able to teach all children. And actually most initial teacher training providers don't create that. They don't give you the enough of the skills. And actually, you'll find that people who focus on social, emotional, mental health are very often not always but very often scooping up problems which have emerged in classrooms by teachers who are just doing their best, but their best isn't being supported by the right level of training. So I do think that there is a trend then to sort of reach out to interventions to sort of fill the gaps. It's also unfortunately been made into a bit of an industry like I don't know, if anyone's ever been to the tests SEN show, which is all very glitzy and very colourful. For me, it's like sensorally, as someone with ADHD its sensory overwhelming. But ironically, and anyone with SEN, it's a bit awkward, but the environment is, you know, shows you hundreds of companies that have stepped in to sort of fill the gaps, but the gap there has to do with the skills gap, but also sometimes to do with the emotional intelligence gap. So, you know, probably the majority of people who I ended up speaking with, and probably the majority of people who listened to your podcast are the kind of people who have quite high level of emotional intelligence, they lean towards social emotion. But you know, we do not vet teachers on an emotional intelligence level. And so you may well have a teacher who is looking at a child, and they can see that the child is causing distress, whereas you and I might look at that child and see, well, that child is in distress. And the determining factor is likely to be more about a the skills, knowledge, whatever we may have developed over time through our practice, but also the emotional intelligence that we bring to the table. And again, this is on the one hand accusatory of teachers, but it's not a default. Our industry hasn't made this a unique aspect of teaching, social, emotional, mental health very much responses tends to be you know, finding easier and quicker responses to stuff which actually basically should have happened in the classroom. So that One type of intervention. And there's another type of intervention which are really supportive of children's emotional well being such as counselling, or nurturing, and so on. And I would suggest that as a general mix, we should, if possible maximise the amount of quality first teaching and supporting our teachers minimise the amount of withdrawal from the classrooms, because actually, the magic happens in the classroom. And also at the same time maximise social, emotional mental health support outside of the classroom where it's necessary. I have seen circumstances where social, emotional, mental health support interventions have become effectively a form of exclusion. At a primary school, I went to visit and they set up this wonderful they were so proud of this wonderful nurture group. And any children with you come from a sort of particular challenge background, they go to the nurture group, you know, from 11am, through to 3pm, every day for about four years. Oh, I see. It's like exclusion then. So you know, there are examples of this where it becomes a bit ridiculous. So just to get back to your question. Now, the soft data will tell you what the individual needs meaning basically, your level of knowledge and understanding of the individual will tell you what they really need. And just shoving them under the same umbrella is a bit ludicrous. I'll give you one very practical example of this, which I wrote about in my latest book, you can have three children with autism who all present very different, you have a child is very quiet sits in the corner doesn't really want to speak to him. And, please forgive my overly flippant description, I'm just trying to illustrate a point. You could have somebody who's really quite loud, reaching out, slightly inappropriate, constantly in people's faces. And we can have someone who appears to be what's quite a neurotypical student, you know, has a sort of much more sort of mild form of Asperger's, but they're all hovering under the label autism, right, autistic, but you know, as a practitioner, that just calling them autistic doesn't in any way articulate who they are, what they're about what they like and what they need. And it's the same with interventions, interventions do not necessarily easily fit into different individuals. And there is a major flaw with the education endowment fund view of interventions. And I'll give you one very specific example which I had a big argument with Professor Steve Jones, who oversees it now, in the end, we became quite pally, and he wrote an approbation of my book size in a very happy area. I like him, and he likes me. But the argument was as follows the intervention of let's say, Tas has been found by education down to and based on various other research by Blatchford. And so to be that, essentially, they're a waste of space and waste of time, space and money, right? Because they don't have the impact that they need. So my argument against it was, that's not true. TAs are only really as good as you train them, and then line manage them. And if you support them really, really well, then they can be absolute gold dustt to a school and endow them far more than anything else. At the end of the day, as people in semh know, that relationships is everything. And some of the best relationships and bonds that can be made in a school is between a TA and a student, but how we deploy them, how we support them, how they how we train them, and everything is everything so that the National view of certain data may well highlight a particular problem which partly I'd agree with, it doesn't give the whole picture. And so I'm really be careful about just having bog standard approaches to individuals.

Simon Currigan: 18:59

I just like to take a pause for a moment and say that if you're finding this podcast useful, then you're going to love what we've got waiting for you in our inner circle programme. The Inner Circle is your one stop shop for all things behaviour. It's a comprehensive platform filled with videos, resources and behaviour inspiration to get you unstuck with classroom behaviour. We've got training resources on de escalation, supporting kids with anxiety support strategies for conditions like autism, ADHD, and PDA. practical ways of helping pupils deal with strong emotions, assertive behaviour management techniques for managing the whole classroom setting out your classroom environment for success. Resetting behaviour with tricky classes, and more. Our online videos walk you through practical solutions step by step, just like Netflix, you can turn an Inner Circle subscription on or off whenever you need to, with no minimum contract Plus, you can now get your first seven days of Inner Circle for just one pound. Get the behaviour answers and you've been looking forward today with Inner Circle visit to www.beaconschoolsupport.co.uk and click on the Inner Circle picture near the top of the homepage for more information. So there's a push at the moment. It's very, very popular the EEF view of evidence based interventions using something that's been tried and tested in other schools or other settings. How do we square that circle then between getting bespoke interventions based on the individual children's needs but then also using best practice or practice that's been proven to support children with not the same needs but similar kinds of needs? What's your take on that?

Daniel Sobel: 20:46

I think it's again, on a national scale. I mean, it's actually quite useful to have this thing called Pupil Premium and indicate against free school meals. But you know, the data doesn't always square and I mentioned that before. And so it's interesting because we were working across a whole load of schools in a rural area. And actually the most impoverished children, were not children on the free school meals index. were actually the children who's come from parents who work in farms, and they're called farmhands, I think that's the role. And because they get paid the minimum wage, they literally are living on the poverty line. And so there's an example of how that national picture doesn't really make sense in the local region. That concept of mistranslation is true everywhere, and is also true within the EEF. So maybe there's some useful indications. Well, boosting like this helps more with that. But actually, for me, what I'm interested in, I'd ask your listeners to think about this, what's more interesting to you- an intervention that is boosting a particular reading age, that may be based on a sort of withdrawal programme sitting at a computer, but they're being taken out of lessons to do it? or we're supporting the child by giving them some pre learning and over learning inside the classroom, to be able to know have a heads up of what's coming up in this lesson, even to be able to give them an answer that they can contribute. So what we're trying to promote is things like engagement and participation and that confidence to belong in the classroom is not something as a factor that has been considered nationally. So the EEF for all its wisdom may well have been looking at. And by the way, don't get me wrong. I think EEF is doing wonderful things. And it's certainly making us all think. This discussion point wouldn't be around without EEF. So thank you very much. And I'm not saying don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. This point in this is that, you know, what's our goal, what's our purpose, I would argue the goal is in the maximising the participation and engagement and feeling and the sense of belonging of a child. In the classroom, I belong here, and I can participate here, and I can engage here, I feel safe here. And I can be me, that is something that doesn't get helped by a withdrawal programme. When I give talks, I give a sort of stark example of two schools that took this to an extreme. One school withdrew students in an English lesson in a secondary school three times a week to boost their reading comprehension. And computer based programme was quite expensive, youve probably all heard of it. And then there was another group where a TA sat with the identified group of students, and this pre learning piece, right. And this is where up to in the story. These are some of the keywords, you know, this is what's coming up. This is how you can contribute. This is a question that teachers gonna ask, this is an answer you can give. And there's a question that you can ask, and then over learning at the end of the lesson, and then I asked the audience, well, what do you get what's happened to these two groups. And most people, I have to say, the vast majority, 99% of people would say that what is preferable is the keeping children in the classroom and giving them a feeling of belonging, and a sense of that they can. And in the end, what actually happened was that there was a very sharp result in the reading age, but there was a very low result in terms of engagement in the curriculum, and that you see as a trend across the country, but again, take the trends with a pinch of salt. And so it could be that the E FF would look at this particular intervention and say, Well done intervention, that's great, do that. Whereas actually, what you may know of this particular child, they'd be better off if they stayed in the class, were encouraged to, for example, read in front of peers for the first. Now, you may well say, well, that's a generic intervention you could do everywhere, which kind of flows my point, but no, the point which I'm using to illustrate is that, you know, the EEF is only looking for a certain thing, and most of the barriers with children are personalised or individualised, you know, there to them. And a lot of them have to do with an underlying psychological issue around anxiety and not having enough basic term of self esteem, feeling like anyone's there rooting for them belonging or they don't like this particular teacher. There's lots and lots of factors like that, which just doing an intervention doesn't overcome.

Simon Currigan: 24:52

Could you tell us a little bit about your approach to sort of SEMH interventions and working with children for whom SEMH is a significant issue. You've written the book leading on pastoral care. Please talk us through some of the gold from that book, if you know, we've got teaching assistants and learning mentors and teachers trying to support those kind of kids. What's your approach to specific pastoral meetings and support programmes?

Daniel Sobel: 25:18

Well, obviously I don't wanna say too much because I want to give people plenty of opportunity to enjoy the book!. So as a general theme in that particular book, what I've tried to do is to cover in very practical terms, how all of the biggest challenges that seem to get overlooked, such as the heavy weight of paperwork that goes along very often with more challenging cases, especially EHCP's or SEN related cases, paperwork becomes a massive issue, and a lot of the paperwork is bloody pointless, more than that, it often gets in the way of doing good work with children and with family. And so what we look at is reinventing the ways of doing paper. And so that's a whole chapter that's never really been covered before. And there's another chapter, which is about how to engage with parents who are hard to reach. These are things which are quite common probably to most listeners, and certainly most senior leaders get stressed out by angry parents being overwhelmed by paperwork. And I had to draw on a lot of research from Social Work from the NHS, and I looked at a piece of research in South Africa. In my final chapter, I describe lots of different ways of building inclusive environments, and in non standard and non formal ways. But the idea of it was to try and promote thinking around what inclusion could mean, this particular concept I liked quite a lot. It comes from the African village style idea of like, either we all survive, or we all die, like we live and die together. Imagine you say to your class, we're going to give everyone here an A grade, or an F grade, either everyone here gets an A, or everyone here gets an F, and here's the task. Off you go. And what do you think would happen?

Simon Currigan: 26:52

Suddenly, we're a team?

Daniel Sobel: 26:53

Yeah, well, yeah, everyone has to help each other. But the idea being is that inclusion doesn't have to be, well, here's a standard for these top students. And then it's all about scooping up the bottom ones, the inclusion could be driven by the students themselves. And truth is, if you said that to teachers, as well, I mean, no teacher is going to like me saying, but you can say to teachers, we're getting rid of all interventions. But basically, we were spending 250,000 pounds on interventions in our school. And what we decided to do is to give you that money, if all of our students do really well in their exams, and if they don't, we're going to take away some of your pay package. Off you go. And the experiment is interesting as well, what would happen? you know, there was a local authority that asked me to lead on a narrowing the gap programme, we were looking at sort of the budget for it was about a million pounds. And they said, What do you think the best way of spending a million pounds is and I said, I don't know, rewards and bonuses for teachers. I said it as a, as a bit of a joke, but they kind of wrote it down. I mean, obviously, we don't have a culture of that, you know, we're public sector workers, right? This is possible to reshape the framework of inclusion, because inclusion looks like an a4 page that is in sort of in vertical, where you've got the students at the top, and most of the students in the middle and you got these ones at the bottom. Right. And I'm suggesting that we can flip the page. So as much more horizontal, we're just a bunch of students, you know, and that's a different way of thinking completely.

Simon Currigan: 28:19

Daniel, we've only scratched the surface of your work. So if you're a teacher, or a school leader, or a Senko, listening to this podcast, what's the first step you can take today, to find out more about your approach to well, not just putting in place interventions that make a real difference in school, but inclusion in general, if you want to make a real difference in your school?

Daniel Sobel: 28:39

Very simple things. Firstly, have a look at my books. Thank you very much. I recently started a global platform for inclusion practitioners representation from over 80 different countries. The idea is that sharing best practices and supporting each other and advocacy with governments and everything, we're doing it with UNESCO. So please have a look at that the the web address is www.ifip.group, the website still in its beta format, but I would appreciate if you do that, and but it's not just a place to learn. It's a place to contribute and support and lots of wonderful countries involved. Most countries beginning with the letter B, a wonderful like Bhutan, Benin, Burkina Faso, Bosnia, Belize, all these are interesting. So yeah, be really good if you have a look at my books and have a look at that. And I'll put direct links to those the books and the website in the show notes. So if you're listening, you can just open your podcast app and click directly through. Last of all, Daniel, and we asked this of all our guests, who's the key figure that's influenced you? Or what are the key books that you've read that have had the biggest impact on your approach to working with kids? There's three of which I only recommend two because after school when I failed school, eventually I went on my way into a master's in education psychology at the institute. And then I did a master's in psychotherapy, and I'm a senior doctor in psychotherapy. And I really focused on phenomenology and existentialism as it relates to psychology and so on. And that has informed my practice entirely through absolutely everything and my view of education and the most influential book there that really changed my life was and I don't recommend this to anybody, was Heidegger's Being in Time, mainly because it's the most ridiculously written book and it's awful to read, but some of the ideas in it were just so incredibly revolutionary for me and anyone who's read it kind of knows what I'm talking about, but you'll also probably equally not recommend it to anyone. It's a horrible book. Two which I do recommend very much is the works of Erich Fromm. And the reason why I think he was one of the greatest of psychologists and helping us understand the modern world, partly because he really brings together both humanistic psychology as well as psychoanalytic psychology. He brings together sociology with economics, and politics and everything also sort of together, he's not afraid of it being more of a sort of unified view. And so he's for sure influenced me an awful lot. And the other one, which is helpful both personally and professionally, I've been quite influenced by transactional analysis. So TA it's called. And there are some really good books on it. Actually one of the hardest books is the most common book, which I don't recommend, which is The Games That People Play. I do reference transaction analysis in my books quite a bit. I think it helps us give a language to what we bear witness to. And that's quite useful very often, when people who are outside of the world of psychology or psychotherapy think well, what is the real psychology? Well, actually, what they mean is transactional analysis, ways of looking at people behaving and how you describe it, and how you can find it's really useful.

Simon Currigan: 31:29

Daniel thankyou for being on the podcast.

Daniel Sobel: 31:31

Thank you so much for having me.

Simon Currigan: 31:33

I've really enjoyed it. Thankyou

Emma Shackleton: 31:35

What I really like about Daniel's work is it's based on a mixture of his practical experience of supporting schools, and using the data in a really smart way to get results for pupils. And of course, if you're working with kids with challenging behaviour, the first thing to do is identify the why behind that behaviour. And we've got a download that can help.

Simon Currigan: 31:59

It's called the SEN handbook, and it will help you link behaviours you've seen in the classroom with possible causes like autism and ADHD. The idea here isn't for teachers to make a diagnosis, we're not qualified, that's not our place. But if we can link classroom behaviours to possible causes quickly, it means we can get the right help and get early intervention strategies in place. It's a free download, go to our website, www.beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the Free Resources link near the top and you can download it from there. I'll also put a link in the episode description.

Emma Shackleton: 32:31

If you've got a friend or colleague who you think would find the information in today's interview useful, then don't keep it to yourself, be a good friend and share this podcast with them. You can do that by opening your podcast app, tapping the share button, and your app will send a direct link to any of your contacts by text messaging or email. It's easy, and it only takes 10 seconds, you'll be helping your friends and pupils in other schools benefit from this information as well.

Simon Currigan: 33:02

And finally, while you've got your podcast app open, make sure you don't miss a next week's episode by tapping the subscribe button or follow as it's now called in Apple podcasts. And then your podcast app will automatically grab each episode as it's released and store it safely for you in your phone so you never miss a thing that's going to give you the warm feeling inside you can normally only get from taking a custard cream, carefully removing the upper layer and scraping off that sweet butter cream inside. Now that may sound nice, but if you're listening in the UK, you know what I mean? I think I'm going to head to the kitchen and crack one of those babies open right now.

Emma Shackleton: 33:37

However you eat your biscuits. I hope you have a fantastic week and look forward to seeing you next time on school behaviour secrets. Bye for now.

Simon Currigan: 33:46

Bye now