Simon Currigan

Executive function is now being named more explicitly in the government's draft SEND reforms, but did you know? It can also drive student frustration, overloads of stress, and dysregulation in class.

My name's Simon Currigan, and my team and I support over 150 schools with behaviour, SEND, and SEMH, and this is a pattern we see all the time.

In this episode, I'll help you spot when executive function may be contributing to dysregulation in your students and share practical strategies that can make a real difference to the children in your classroom.

Hi there, welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and I'm constantly amazed at how many people don't understand how average speed cameras work. They pass the first camera, yeah, at exactly the speed limit, and then they accelerate away like they've somehow cracked the code on avoiding speeding fines and points on their licence. And I'm sat there thinking, don't you get it? It's an average speed camera. It takes the average over a distance, not just your speed at the first camera, the clues in the title, average speed camera. I just give up. This is a damning indictment of how we teach averages in the maths curriculum. That's all I can say.

Anyway, School Behaviour Secrets is nothing to do with that. It's here to help school leaders, teachers, and SENCOs make sense of behaviour in the classroom and build calmer, more supportive schools for our students. In today's episode, we're looking at executive function and how it can contribute to stress, frustration, and dysregulation in the classroom. This is a really useful way of understanding why some people seem disengaged from work, why they get overwhelmed so quickly, and why what looks like poor attitude or lack of effort can sometimes be something very different under the bonnet.

This is also a really timely topic because executive function is being talked about more explicitly in the current SEND reform conversation from the Department for Education. But I don't want this episode to become some dry policy discussion because that's not the bit that matters most to you in your day-to-day work in the classroom. What matters is this: can understanding executive function help us make better sense of the children that we work with? Can it help us respond earlier, more effectively, more accurately when a child seems disengaged, avoidant, oppositional, or overwhelmed by work in the classroom? And I think it can.

But before we go any further into that, if you're finding this podcast useful, remember to hit subscribe. And if you've got just 30 seconds, leave me a review as well. It really helps spread the word, and it makes it more likely the podcast pops up in other people's feeds, which means more school staff get to access these practical ideas and strategies and advice on how to drive through average speed cameras that a lot of people need to listen to. That message needs to be spread as well. It's all important stuff. It's an average, people. It's an average. It's simple.

Now, one really important caveat before we get too much further into this topic. What I'm about to talk about is, by necessity, a simplification in real life. Dysregulation is rarely about one factor by itself. If you use the PAIN framework, you already know that. And if you haven't come across the PAIN framework before, we've talked about it previously in the podcast. It's a way of breaking down students' behaviour and needs into a set of key categories I call the IMPACTS, because there are usually multiple factors interacting and driving student behaviour.

IMPACTS stands for integration and belonging, mental processing, physical needs, anxiety, emotions, contribution and care, transitions, and SEND specific needs. So anxiety may be part of the picture for a student's dysregulation, or past experiences may be part of the picture. Sensory needs may be part of the picture. Language processing might also be part of the picture. Relationships might be part of the picture.

So today what I'm not saying is that executive function is always the answer by itself. It isn't. What I'm saying is that it can be a really important sort of hidden contributor and one that adults often miss because the behaviour they see in class is so obvious and so attention-grabbing. And by the way, if you're interested in learning more about the PAIN framework and the IMPACTS categories, this is a key plank of the book I'm writing for Routledge about why students get dysregulated and how we can support them. It's still a work in progress. It's still a way off, but I'll let you know more about that as we approach publication. And if you're interested, when we think about executive function and the IMPACTS framework, it fits into the category of mental processing.

So let's make all this talk about executive function more concrete with a pupil portrait that you will probably recognise, a child that you've probably met before. Picture a child sitting in class during an independent written exercise. Let's call him Tom. The teacher explains the task to the whole class. There are several instructions about what they need to do: write the date and the title, read the text, answer the questions, use full sentences. Maybe there's a diagram on the board for a moment, maybe not.

Most of the class then kind of get on with the work, but Tom doesn't. He sits staring at the page, doing nothing. He looks around at everyone else. He fiddles. He hesitates. You see a bit of task avoidance, maybe sharpening his pencil for 20 minutes. He's definitely not starting the task throwing himself into his work like the other kids. And from the outside, as we watch Tom, it can look like he's just not engaging, like he's daydreaming or avoiding or just not trying, all labels that we slap on kids when they're not doing what we think they should be doing. And no judgment, I've been there.

The teacher notices and says something like, "Come on, Tom. We've already gone through this. You need to get started." And then Tom, kind of under his breath, says, "I don't get it." The teacher then understandably says, "I've literally just explained it." Now, Tom starts to get more tense. Maybe he puts on a show of working for a minute and then stops and puts his pencil down. Maybe he scrunches up the worksheet. Maybe he mutters under his breath. Maybe he closes his book. Maybe he argues back. Maybe he puts his head down. Maybe he gives a suboptimal review to the class of your teaching performance. Definitely a low number of stars on ratemyteacher.com.

Maybe he shoves the chair back, lashes out verbally, and walks out. We've all taught a Tom at some point in our careers. In that situation, which is stressful for both the student and for you teaching them, in that moment, it's very easy to read Tom's behaviour through the prism of behaviour alone. This child is being defiant. They're refusing. They're choosing not to engage. They're attention-seeking.

But if we pause and apply the PAIN framework, we can start to ask better questions. Instead of just asking, "What did the child do?" we start to ask, "What might be driving what they did? What demand are they struggling with? What kind of hidden barrier might be sitting underneath the surface?" And in this case, one of the things we might notice is that the task places quite a heavy executive load on the child, a heavy demand in terms of executive function.

If you're coming to it for the first time, executive function is basically the brain's management system. It helps us organise ourselves, to plan, to direct our attention, to hold information in mind, and use our working memory to start tasks. It monitors what we're doing. It helps us switch between different aspects of a task and to manage our impulses and other stuff as well. In other words, it's the stuff that helps us cope with classroom life. And the term executive comes from the government is the executive, and it's organising the work and demands of the country instead of doing that work itself. Or think of a chief executive officer in a company, the boss. He sets the direction of the company and says what should be done, doesn't actually get involved in the nitty-gritty himself.

When a child has difficulties with executive function, these organising functions, school can feel much harder than it looks from the outside and when you compare that pupil to the other pupils in class. For this episode, I want to zoom in on just two parts of executive function because if I try to cover everything, the episode will just go everywhere because there are quite a few executive functions, and I'll end up just being vague or throwing too much information at you. So the first area I'm going to focus on is holding information in mind, and the second is inhibiting impulses.

So let's start with holding information in mind. In simple terms, this is a child's ability to keep key information active in their head while they use it. In the classroom, that might mean remembering a sequence of instructions, keeping the goal of the task in mind, remembering what to do first and then what comes next, or holding onto the teacher's explanation long enough to actually begin the work. Now, let's think back to our child in that lesson that I described a moment ago. The teacher may have explained the task perfectly clearly, but the child may not have been able to hold onto all of the details. They hear step one, maybe step two, but by the time they've written the date, they've forgotten the next bit, or they have to remember the answer to certain questions, but they've forgotten where the information is meant to come from, or they know they need to do something in step three, but they can't hold the full sequence together in their mind well enough to get moving confidently with the task.

And that matters because now the student is not just slow to start. They're already beginning to feel lost. They can see everyone else getting on with the work, and they know they're behind. And how would that feel? Well, they might start to feel embarrassed. And that embarrassment compounds every single lesson because their difficulties with executive function have led them to experience failure or mess up their work in the past, which leads to feelings of shame, maybe a lack of confidence, meaning that in this situation, they may not want to ask for help, especially if asking for help in the past has felt like it's exposed them or made them feel uncomfortable, so their stress starts to rise.

And lesson structure can make this better, or it can make it worse. Long verbal explanations, which are the mainstay of the way we explain a task to children in the classroom, can be difficult for some students to hold onto, like Tom. Giving lots of instructions at once is difficult for them. Explaining something once and expecting everyone to retain it might not be realistic. Putting a busy worksheet in front of a child and assuming they'll know where to begin can also be unrealistic. From the adult's point of view, the task they've given may look straightforward, but from Tom's point of view, that cognitive load might be too high for them to access the task successfully, or at least they may perceive that it's too high for them to access the task successfully. So then you get this kind of refusal and avoidance.

I get this overload when I go to the airport, right? And I might be about to overshare here. My executive functions are absolutely fine, but I don't go to the airport often. And when you get to the bit where they scan your hand luggage, they start barking off loads of commands at you, like electric devices in the bag except for e-readers, belts off, some trainers off, wallets separate, jewellery in the tray. And I'm like, "What did you say about e-readers?" And they just bark the same thing at you again, like you're stupid, like you're an idiot. And that confusion's resulted in one cavity search too many, I can tell you. And no, they did not find an e-reader up there. I'm going to move off that topic belatedly. I'm going to look at inhibiting impulses, but it will explain why if you sat next to me on an airplane, I am uncomfortable.

This is the ability. Inhibiting impulses is the ability to pause before acting or reacting. It's what helps us stop ourselves from blurting out, answering back, throwing a pencil, pushing the worksheet away, standing up suddenly, or saying the first thing that comes into our head when we feel threatened or frustrated. So we get this impulse to react or do something. And then there's a gap where our brain analyses whether we should go forward with that or we shouldn't, whether that's a positive reaction or a negative one. And our brain can override that initial impulse in that kind of analysis gap before we actually carry out the action.

So what's happening in our example with Tom? Well, Tom's already overloaded. Maybe he's confused. He feels like he's falling behind. So we go across and correct him, maybe quite reasonably. But that correction adds pressure to Tom's executive functioning system when it's already under pressure. So now Tom doesn't just feel confused or lost. He feels pressured as well. And if inhibiting impulses is an area of difficulty for him, that then also makes it much harder for him to hold back his reaction. So he blurts something out or he refuses or he walks off or does something else that on the surface looks like poor behaviour or bad choices or whatever.

But underneath, what may have happened to Tom is this: the executive demands of the task exceeded his current capacity to manage them. And I say current because that capacity can change depending on the situation and the environment. So his stress started to rise. Shame or panic or frustration kicked in. And then his ability to inhibit his reactions dropped. And what we saw, the result of all that was dysregulation. And that's the bit I really want to emphasise here. Sometimes the behaviour we are reacting to is the external result, the outcome, the result of what we can see of what's happening internally to the child.

The behaviour is real, yes, and it needs responding to. And Tom's behaviour is not okay. Boundaries do still matter. But if we misread the root of it, what causes it, we're much more likely to respond in ways that escalate their behaviour rather than help the student. And just to underline that point again, this won't be the whole picture for every child. It's not just executive functioning. There may well be other things in the PAIN framework interacting with this. So anxiety, home life, sensory overload, a history of negative experiences around learning, all those things can amplify it. But executive function can be one really important part of the story, which is probably why it's been included as a key category in the government's SEND reforms.

So what would actually help in the case we've just described? Well, let me give you three practical strategies. The first for pupils like Tom is to reduce the working memory load where possible. In other words, stop expecting Tom to hold so much in mind, in his head at the same time. So give fewer instructions at once. Break tasks into clear, visible steps. Maybe keep those steps on the board or give Tom access to the PowerPoint if you're using a PowerPoint so he can flip back over the slides and refresh his memory, or leave the diagram in view, or print off a copy of a diagram or a picture that he needs that he can refer to at his desk, or use a worked example with Tom, or let Tom work through the example on the board again interactively with something like AI. Not that he can use AI to complete the independent task, obviously, but to help him embed the information, to set him up so he can complete the task independently. Ask the child to act on one instruction before giving him the next. You're not lowering expectations here. You're making the task more accessible by removing unnecessary executive work.

The second is to build in scaffolding before Tom's stress starts to escalate. Now, this is important. We don't wait for Tom to start visibly escalating, looking on edge. If we know a child often gets stuck at the start of a task, then we focus our support at the start. We quietly check in before the independent part of the task begins. And a great way of doing this just straight off the bat is privately, not publicly. When the children go to their work, you just walk across and you quietly ask, "Tom, what are the first two things you need to do?" Because if he can't tell you that, then the task is going nowhere and his behaviour is going to escalate. And then we can pre-correct. The likely sticking points will give him a reminder. We need to make our opening routines predictable. Maybe every time Tom settles down to independent work, the first step is always the same. Maybe he underlines the keywords in a text. Maybe it always begins with a sentence starter. Maybe he uses a checklist to help him get started with the task each time. The point is that consistent routine reduces uncertainty, and it bakes in success for Tom from the start of the task. And when you reduce uncertainty, you also decrease Tom's stress and resistance and fear, which increases his confidence.

The third strategy is to respond differently to early signs of distress. And this is where adults can make a huge difference because when children start to show those early signs, so you see things like freezing, fiddling, muttering, scanning around the room, getting agitated, our instinct is often to add more words, more reminders, more pressure on Tom. And do you know what, right? For many kids who don't have problems with executive functioning, that kind of pressure works. It kind of makes them batten down the hatches and get on with the task. It focuses them. But if executive overload is a significant barrier to Tom engaging with the work, if it's a significant part of what's driving his kind of more emotional behaviour, adding more language and adding more pressure can actually make the problem worse. So instead, we need to actively reduce the verbal complexity of what we're saying, keep our language calm and simple and brief and specific. We lower the emotional temperature. We help Tom restart the task in a manageable way because once Tom tips over into dysregulation or frustration, he's far less likely to be able to process instructions or what we're saying or make good choices. So we adapt to Tom in a proactive way to help him get back on track, reducing pressure and reducing complexity of our instructions.

Now, there is a leadership piece to this across the school as well because this is where behaviour versus SEND conversations can become really unhelpful if we frame them badly. If as a school, we view every presentation like Tom's purely as a behaviour issue addressed by rewards and punishments through the behaviour policy, there's a real risk that staff end up sanctioning what is effectively unmet needs. But if a school swings too far the other way and acts as if having a need means expectations no longer matter, that also creates another set of problems. So we need to sort of find the Goldilocks zone here. For me, this is not about behaviour or SEND. It's about professionals making better judgments, better interpretations, which requires better staff training, how we improve early identification, think deeply about sustained patterns of behaviour, not one-off incidents, sustained patterns of behaviour, and make reasonable adjustments to make our high expectations fair for all.

That means staff need help recognising when executive function may be part of the picture. Behaviour leads and SEN needs lead a shared approach and language to understanding those needs, something like the PAIN framework and the IMPACTS. Whole school systems need to be consistent, yes, but also thoughtful enough to allow for adaptation based on people being curious in the classroom and asking why their students are behaving the way they do. Again, not for one or two one-off incidents of behaviour, but for long-term patterns of behaviour. Because if we only focus on compliance, then we miss children who may need our help. And if we miss children, we miss opportunities to support them before the volume dial on their stress gets turned up from a three up to ten, and then we're trying to manage a crisis.

If you want a practical resource to support that kind of thinking, do download the SEND Behaviour Handbook from our website. It's designed to help school staff think more clearly about behaviour in a needs-led way. And I think it would sit really nicely along today's episode. It's a free download. It gives you a behaviour analysis grid linking common classroom behaviours to underlying conditions. Not so teachers can start making diagnoses because we're not qualified to do that, but to prompt early thinking about the why behind the behaviours we're seeing in our classrooms. And so we can get early intervention moving and get the right professionals involved ASAP. And it comes with fact sheets on conditions like PDA, ODD, ADHD, trauma, and more. It's completely free. I'll put a direct link in the show notes. All you have to do is open the episode description and you can tap right through. Or you can visit beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. So

let me leave you with one final thought, a bit like Jerry Springer in the day. I want you to think of one child in your class who struggles to focus on work or gets overwhelmed by tasks or becomes dysregulated when learning demands go up. And ask yourself this: could executive function be part of this picture? Is there a building block here around holding information in mind or inhibiting impulses or planning how to complete a task or organising the resources for a task, shifting attention from one part of the task to the next or getting started or sustaining effort or self-monitoring or managing time that is making classroom demands harder for that specific child to cope with?

Now, that may not explain everything about their behaviour, but it may help you ask better questions about how to support them. It may help you interpret their behaviour more accurately, and it may help to identify the strategies that are going to support them best with their work so they can stay focused and engaged. And it may help you put better packages of support in place because sometimes what we see in the classroom is the behaviour is the final domino, not the first one to fall. There are dominos behind it causing the behaviour that we see.

If you found this episode helpful, please subscribe so you don't miss future episodes and do share it with colleagues or your staff team in school as well. I know many school leaders and SEN coaches are now using these episodes as the basis of mini training sessions, taking a clip from the show and use it to prompt discussion in staff meetings. And you are more than welcome to do that because if this episode helps more adults think a bit more clearly about what might be sitting underneath their students' behaviour, then it's definitely worth passing on.

Thanks for listening today. I hope you have a brilliant week. I can't wait to see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.