Simon Currigan

 Ever worked with a pupil who's clearly struggling emotionally or academically, but every time you try and help them, they just shut you down? They say they're fine, they avoid support, they push you away, and you're left thinking, "Why won't you just let me help you?"

In today's episode, I want to show you why that reaction often isn't defiance or attitude or lack of motivation. It's actually a protective strategy that makes complete sense once you know what you're looking at.

My name's Simon Currigan, and for the last two decades I've worked with hundreds of schools supporting children whose behaviour doesn't respond to the usual approaches, especially the ones who look independent on the surface but who are struggling emotionally underneath. The ones who have an unhealthy independence that works against them.

 And by the end of this episode, you'll understand why some children reject support even when they desperately need it, how well-meaning relationship-building strategies can accidentally make things worse, and what actually helps those pupils feel safe enough to engage with the adults.

 Hi there, welcome to School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and while other educational podcasts might be the equivalent of a fine symphony or sonata written by a classical composer, maybe the rich, intricate, interwoven genius of Mozart's Symphony No. 4 in G minor, this podcast, it's closer to the Wurzels' "I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester." We may be rough and ready, but do you know what, listener? I'd give you the key.

 Today we're talking about something that confuses a lot of adults in school, and it's not just the introduction to these podcasts. Or maybe it frustrates them in equal measure. It certainly did when I started working with kids with more complex social, emotional, mental health needs. What we're going to be talking about is working with kids who clearly need help but won't accept it from you.

 The pupil who's struggling could be academically or emotionally or socially or all three. You can see it, other staff can see it, sometimes even the child themselves can see it. But every time you offer them support, they shut it down or they blow up or they storm off. Or worse, they just give you a shrug and say, "I'm fine," when they're clearly not.

 And all right, in some sense that reflects a classic British value. If you're listening to this abroad and you're working with a Brit who looks off or stressed, and you check in with them to see how they are and they tell you they're fine, let me tell you, I will interpret that for you. They are very much not fine. There's a big problem bubbling under the surface there. It's not the time to take those words at face value. "I'm fine" means I'm angry, and if they say, "I'm okay," that means they're hurt or rejected. It's a whole thing.

 All of which is completely irrelevant to this episode. So, bringing it back to your student who rejects your help. When you see that they need it and they tell you, "There's nothing to see here." If you've ever walked away from one of those interactions and you've thought to yourself, "Why won't you just let me help you?" This episode, it's for you.

 Before we get into it, I've got a quick ask. If you find this episode useful, please follow or subscribe to the podcast, whatever app you're using to listen. And if this topic has come up in your professional work, maybe in real life or in a group or on Facebook or on WhatsApp or wherever you talk about this kind of stuff, share it on social media with a colleague who's currently facing these issues with a hard-to-reach pupil.

 Right, enough jibber-jabber. Let's unpick this. Here's the thing. In most schools, we're very good at spotting need. We notice the child who's falling behind with their work or socially. We see the kids whose behaviours are starting to escalate or a pupil who's kind of emotionally flat or withdrawn or, you know, the kind of hyper-vigilant ones who are permanently on edge.

 And because we care, we respond to that and offer support. So we might check in more often in class or ask the Senco to put an intervention in place or add mentoring or pastoral time or implement safe spaces or offer them a key adult. And all of that stuff, super sensible, super well-intentioned, and it often works.

 But for some pupils, the more help we offer, something weird happens. We start to get more resistance from them. They don't engage more. They engage less. They stop opening up completely. They reject the support. They become an island kind of in class. They exclude themselves from the support and the adults. And often they exclude themselves from the other kids too, which ironically is the opposite effect of the one we intended.

 We're trying to build bridges to them, and they're already at the shore, burning it down before we're finished. And that's where a lot of adults get stuck. And that included me for a long time. Because we're left trying to reconcile two opposing ideas at the same time in our head. On the one hand, we can see a child in front of us who clearly needs support. And on the other hand, they cannot or will not ask for it or accept it. And that leaves them stuck. And when we step in, it makes things worse, not better.

 So it's like there's this tension between those two ideas building. They need help. They can't accept it. And we're left with two options then. We either push that help onto them harder or we pull that help away. And neither feels right and neither helps. So what do we do? Let's start as ever by thinking about what's actually going on underneath the surface. What's driving their behaviour?

 And while it sounds counterintuitive, for some pupils, this pattern of rejecting help makes perfect sense once you understand one thing. And that's because accepting help itself for that student feels unsafe. Not because the adult is unsafe in school. Not because the school's doing anything wrong. But because at some point, needing help from an adult came with a cost for this child or a perceived cost. They sought help, and there were negative consequences. Not just once, but repeatedly over time.

 And this is where something called an avoidant attachment pattern comes in. And I want to be clear here. This isn't a label that we should be sticking on children, not least because it kind of pigeonholes them into a dead end, if that's not a mixed metaphor. It puts them into a box, into one way of reacting, and it kind of implies that they'll always behave that way, that there's no way out.

 I want to use that label because it gives us a way of understanding their behaviour and might show us a way forward. Children with avoidant attachment patterns have often learned very early on that relying on others should be avoided because in the past, maybe adults weren't consistently available. So you can't trust them. You can't rely on them in the first place. Maybe their emotions when they were younger were dismissed or minimised or ridiculed or punished or worse.

 Maybe when they shared a vulnerability with an adult, that led to them being rejected or seeing the adult disappointed in them or a loss of control in some sense. So they adapted. They learned to cope on their own without the adult in an unhealthy, "having to be independent before I have the skills to be independent" kind of way. They learned to keep their needs quiet and hidden away from the adults so they didn't get hurt. And they learned that closeness with adults equals risk.

 Now, sometimes this can happen just developmentally. I'm not saying that the parents were always abusive or nasty to the child. Sometimes that's just the way the child develops. But often this can be evident in children that have a background of trauma or abuse in the home. And because of that history, that strategy worked for them. It kept them safe, whether that's emotionally safe or physically safe, until they arrived at school where suddenly they met a whole group of adults who started asking them to accept help, putting them slap bang in their kind of emotional danger zone, the place they fear to be.

 In schools, this can look on the outside like independence, a bit like resilience, a bit like they're putting on this façade of "they're fine." And that works until the pressure builds. And then you start to see the cracks. And it turns out that resilience was a shield that was paper-thin, so not a very good shield at all, if you know what I mean. And then you get the refusal, the shutdown, the sudden explosion when they can't hold it together anymore.

 So when these pupils reject support, it's not because they don't need it or they believe they don't need it. It's because they've learned that needing people isn't safe. But they don't have the skills to cope in the situation in which they find themselves. And this is where schools often accidentally make things harder because we're trained to form connections and check in and talk things through and build relationships explicitly. But for your avoidant pupils, emotionally focused face-to-face interactions can feel intense.

 They can feel scary. They can feel anxiety-provoking. Exactly the sort of things that they've learnt to avoid. Things like being asked to talk about how they feel, being singled out for support in the group, being pulled into a caring one-to-one conversation about how they're doing in school. All of those kind of conversations can trigger their defence mechanisms very quickly. Not because the adult is wrong, but because they've tried connecting with an adult in the past multiple times, and it ended up with negative consequences for them, making a close relationship or a reliance or dependence or trust in an adult itself feel threatening.

 So the pupil does what's always worked for them. They avoid, they push back, they hide, they try and minimise that relationship. And if you are the adult trying to reach one of these students, it can feel like they're rejecting you or you're failing at building that relationship somehow. So if you're in that situation, definitely don't take it personally, but do think about it professionally. It just means the strategy you're using up to today hasn't matched what the child's experiences have taught them about adults in the real world. It's triggering their nervous system, not calming it.

 And in that situation, what professionals do is they adapt. So what do we do differently? How do we adapt? For those pupils who go into defensive mode around adults, the answer usually actually isn't more direct relationship building. They do need a relationship, but we're going to do it differently. Direct relationship building is actually going to compound the problem, not provide a cure. What we have to do is change how we develop that relationship and how we do that in a much more subtle, oblique, less obvious way.

 One of the most effective shifts you can make is approaching it like this. What we do is we make the task the focus of our interaction. So what we do is we sit alongside the pupil and work on something concrete together. Something like a worksheet or a shared problem or a practical job. Nothing related to SEMH. Nothing related to feelings. Nothing related to emotions. Just a neutral piece of academic work.

 Why? Because in that environment, the child then thinks that your focus is on the task. And while they believe that, you can build the relationship with them in the background at the same time as working with them on the task. And your aim is to build that relationship without them ever noticing. The task is a distraction, a diversion. Because when we work on something side by side, it feels safer than talking about something face-to-face.

 Now, as a parent, you might have seen this in your home. Perhaps your child didn't want to tell you about something that's been worrying them at school. And if you try and sit them down for a face-to-face conversation, that's intense, that's heavy, and they back off. Go on a drive with some music on, have a conversation. Both of you have got your attention on the journey. Gradually shift into what's worrying them. And with their focus elsewhere, what happens? They let you in a bit. And it's the same sort of thing here.

 Focusing on the task or making that the primary focus doesn't mean that you're avoiding building that connection. You're connecting in a way that doesn't trigger their defences. And yes, that approach will be slower. And yes, you'll have to start at a much more surface level, but you will get there over time. Another change that often helps is watering down the situation socially. So by that, I mean we tend to assume one-to-one support for high-needs pupils is always best. For these pupils, that usually isn't the case because one-to-one can feel dangerous, exposing, like you're in the adult's spotlight, which raises the stakes of the interaction.

 It doesn't feel safe for them. So what we do is we work with them in pairs or small groups, and that dilutes that intensity, the intensity of that social interaction. And when it's diluted, it means it's more accessible. The presence of the other children acts as a buffer. The adult is nearby who's available, but they're not threatening or overwhelming. And again, we can get the support in kind of sideways without them noticing.

 And there's one more small change that's worth implementing that makes a big difference. Let pupils know that they're being thought about without demanding any kind of closeness in return. So that might look like picking up on something they've mentioned in a previous conversation. So let's imagine you go and sit down in a group task to support academically with a child in the group, and you might just quietly say to them, "Oh, remember you were worried about the maths test last week? How did it go?"

 You're showing them that they told you something that was important to them, and you did not forget. Now, psychologically, this is called being held in mind. And that's not the result of a high-pressure conversation. You don't then need a deep emotional moment with them. What you're doing is you're making explicit, kind of bringing to the surface with your words that the student was important enough for you to remember them. Your conversation with them wasn't just transactional, and you didn't just forget it the moment you walked away.

 Now, why are we making that explicit? Because it should be obvious even to young children that if you tell them something, you're going to remember it, right? Well, for some children who have a background of trauma or attachment difficulties or avoidant attachment patterns, they never learned that at an early age. They never learned that an adult can be thinking about them when they're gone, when they're not physically present. And being remembered matters because it helps them regulate, and it helps them build trust. 

 Now, none of this by itself is dramatic, and none of it, to be honest, is hard. And using these techniques, what you won't get is this kind of like breakthrough moment, this epiphany where suddenly everything slots into place in the child's head, and their lack of trust in adults is magically resolved. But over time, you're showing them, helping them build evidence for a new world view that support from some adults can come without a cost. Not all adults are the same. And that's often the first step to real engagement. So you can then give them further support down the line, and they are willing to accept it.

 So if you are a leader in school or a SENCO, this now prompts an interesting question. Do our SEND policies and systems work for pupils who survive by rejecting adults? And how does that change the way we plan our support for them? And thinking through that question will have a deep impact on how you offer support to all of the students in your school that need it.

 And by the way, if you want a practical resource that helps staff understand why pupils respond so differently to adult support, we've put together a free download called the SEND Behaviour Handbook. It's designed to explain what's really driving classroom behaviour, helping you link behaviours you see in the classroom to different underlying conditions like trauma and ADHD and autism. Its purpose isn't to help you make a diagnosis because as an educator or as a teacher, we are not qualified to do that. But what it is aimed at doing is helping you connect the dots between classroom behaviour and possible underlying needs so we can get the right professionals involved, and we can kick off early intervention strategies.

 If you haven't got your copy yet, look, what have you been doing? You're behind the curve. It's been downloaded over 100,000 times. Grab yours today for free from beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. And you'll see it at the top of our resources page. Or I'll put a link in the show notes, a direct link to the download page so you can tap through from the episode description in your app.

 So to wrap this up, if a child pushes you away, it does not mean you've failed. Often it's a sign that their experiences have shown them, have proven to them, that trusting adults is just too risky. And they may well know that they are stuck and that they need help, but they don't feel safe enough to ask for it or to accept it. And the way we help them shift away from that world view is by reducing the intensity of one-to-one support and approaching relationship building obliquely and subtly rather than overtly from the side. This takes more time, but it can be done. Or at the very least, their trust can be increased to a workable level so they can make some progress.

 Found this episode useful? Then I've got one last ask before I go. If you work in a school as a SENCO or a school leader, why not use this episode in a staff meeting or a briefing? Not as a training, but as a conversation starter with your team to help them think more deeply about why they're seeing pupils reject support in class, what's behind that behaviour, and what it means for their day-to-day practice.

 And of course, remember to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss future episodes just like this. Thank you for listening today. I hope you have a brilliant week, and I can't wait to see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.