Simon Currigan

Why do so many sensible school strategies fall apart after launch, even when staff are trying their best? And why does consistency so often break down from one classroom to the next?

My name's Simon Currigan, and I've worked directly with school leaders on SEMH behaviour and implementation for years, and I've seen first hand that the problem usually is not the idea or the strategy itself; it's what happens after the staff meeting ends when you've been discussing the change, or after a training ends and then you go into the classrooms and implementation just kind of fizzles out.

In this episode, I'm going to show you a simple framework that you can use to avoid that problem, so strategies do get implemented across the entire school. You help build a stronger, more effective team and see more consistent practice across your classrooms as a result.

Hi there, Simon Currigan here, and welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets and confession time - I'm the kind of man who keeps forgetting just how much work's involved in making a shepherd's pie, because in my head, shepherd's pie is one of those, you know, cozy, simple meals you just sort of throw together in the evening. But every single time I make it, I get stung. I get halfway through and realise that I've somehow committed myself to peeling potatoes, boiling potatoes, mashing potatoes, frying minced chopping onions, chopping carrots, making a stock, and then assembling the whole thing like on some kind of low-budget episode of MasterChef, with one of the presenters watching me. And I'm not saying which one or what they're wearing, but it's putting a sweat on my brow. I can tell you that. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations, but shepherd's pie, it's just never the quick and easy dinner that I think it's going to be. It just lies to me. It's evil.

Okay, so here's the most heavy-handed segue you will hear in podcasting this year, so get your groans at the ready, right? And actually, shepherd's pie is not a bad way to think about school improvement either. And I hate myself for saying this already, right? But stay with me, because there are lots of strategies in schools that seem straightforward when you first talk about implementing them across all your classrooms in a meeting, and everyone in the room nods. Everyone agrees it sounds sensible. Everyone can see the logic of what you're saying. But then the reality of actually implementing it across school kicks in, and then everything gets messier. It's a lot harder, a lot more time consuming than anyone expected.

So in today's episode, we're going to look at why so many sensible school strategies fail at the implementation level when it's about the rubber hitting the road and getting strategies used in classrooms, even when staff are trying their best. So you see how many other educational podcasts pull in shepherd's pie metaphors to talk about whole school strategy? And for the haters, get this: in our house, we usually use beef, so I'm actually talking about cottage pie. Do with that what you will.

So in the next 20 minutes, I'm going to unpack why consistency breaks down in schools between classrooms and between teachers, and share with you a practical framework you can use to help staff understand your vision for a strategy, help them to apply it in the classroom, and embed it over time. And to make this really concrete, I'm going to walk you through it using the example of introducing restorative conversations into a school, because this is one of those approaches that lots of schools believe in, but far few manage to implement consistently.

Before we wade into that, if you find the School Behaviour Secrets podcast helpful, make sure you subscribe so you never miss another episode or another dodgy cottage pie metaphor. And if you've got 30 seconds spare, I'd really appreciate it if you could leave a review, too, because that helps more school leaders, teachers, and SENCOs find the show.

Okay, that said, let's twitch that muscle that I like to call behaviour. And that was a little call back there for longtime listeners, and I haven't done one of those in a while, and maybe I should bring that back. So let me know what you think.

So let's start with the big problem. Most school strategies do not fail because they are bad ideas. They fail because they get launched, then they get interpreted differently by different adults in different ways. And the result of that is they get applied inconsistently over time. And that inconsistency matters. It matters for staff because it creates uncertainty about what the current policy in school is and what adults should be doing in class. It matters for leaders because it weakens implementation and it stops you reaching your goals for the school. And it matters for pupils because they end up having a very different experience depending on which adult they get. And for some children, especially those with SEMH needs, attachment needs, anxiety, backgrounds of trauma, difficulties with emotional regulation, that inconsistency can make school feel unpredictable. And when school feels unpredictable, that feels less safe to them, which can sort of lead to dysregulation and behaviour issues.

So if you're a school leader listening to this and you've ever thought to yourself, I had a good plan, I did the training, I ran the staff meeting, I made my expectations clear, so why does this still look so different from one classroom to the next? The answer often isn't that staff are unwilling, it's that the implementation hasn't been aligned across your staff strongly enough. And this is a big part of the book I'm writing about helping dysregulated pupils in schools, actually, because what I've seen is a lot of books talk about the science of what happens around students' emotions, and a lot of books talk about behaviour strategies, but they miss out this one big piece of the puzzle, which is how do we change practice across the whole school, driving that at a leadership level? So what the book will do is it's going to combine those three circles on the Venn diagram, the science behind dysregulation, what to do to actually help kids in the classroom, and then what does whole school implementation actually look like in the real world?

Anyway, that won't be out for a while, so let me introduce you to the ALIGN framework. And this applies really to any leader who wants to implement a practical change in practice in schools, not just limited to SEMH. The A stands for Articulate the Vision, L stands for Link to Practice, I is for Involve Staff, G is for Guide Implementation, and N is Nail Consistency. And I want to show you how this works through a practical example of restorative conversations, and I'm going to talk you through each of those stages in detail. So let's imagine a school decides to introduce restorative conversations after incidents involving conflict or dysregulation or relationship breakdowns are increasing. Now, the thinking there is good, right? It's sound. Instead of just sanctioning behaviour and moving on, adults help pupils using restorative conversations to reflect on their behaviour, take responsibility for what happened, repair relationships with their classmates, and introduce natural consequences as boundaries. The school wants fewer repeated incidents, better relationships, and a more emotionally intelligent culture. Great sensible, right? But six weeks later, after all those discussions and all the training, what's happening in school? Well, one teacher's doing beautiful, calm, reflective conversations that genuinely help pupils take responsibility for their actions, another's trying to do restorative work while they're still frustrated themselves, so it comes out as a lecture with a couple of reflective questions bolted on at the end, so you don't see much progress there. Another member of staff is skipping it altogether because they're not really sure how to do it still. They're not sure what to say or how long it's supposed to take. Same strategy, same school, same staff training sessions, all good people, all doing their best, completely different implementation from classroom to classroom. So let's talk about how to use the ALIGN framework to stop that happening.

Well, A stood for Articulate the Vision, and this is where we begin. In other words, we don't just tell people what the strategy is. We tell them why it matters, the why behind our decision to implement a strategy across the school. We tell them what problem it solves. We tell them what success will look like in this school. Because if staff don't understand the purpose and the reasoning behind a strategy, they are going to fill in the blanks themselves or lose interest. And when everyone fills in the blanks differently, consistency disappears. It just melts away. So if you're launching restorative conversations, don't just say, "From now on, we're going to use restorative conversations after incidents." That, in explanation terms, is a bit too thin because it tells them what to do, but not the reasoning behind it.

Instead, explain the pain point that your decision is trying to resolve. So you might say something like, At the moment, we're seeing lots of difficult incidents involving arguments and conflict between our students, and what we're doing isn't reducing those incidents right now. Pupils are getting sanctioned, but not in a way that helps them reflect or learn the skills to prevent those situations in the future. So those sanctions aren't being effective. Relationships between staff and pupils are being eroded, but then they're not always being rebuilt again. And that means the same issues can repeat over and over, which leaves us, the staff, feeling worn down and some children in school kind of stuck in that same repeating pattern. And we want to change that. We want pupils to feel understood and listened to, to take responsibility for their actions, and to return to learning, being able to restore relationships so incidents are less likely in the future. Now, that is much stronger. And when you do that, people can see the why. They can see the destination. They can see the benefits for pupils and staff.

And then - and no one likes this part - because the truth is you have to not just say it once. You have to keep repeating that message over and over and over until you are sick to the back teeth of it. Because as leaders, we often say something once and think, "Okay, we've communicated that," but that's not how human beings work. We need to repeat that vision in staff meetings and in staff briefings and in conversations in the corridor and in emails and in informal dialogue. Repetition is not a sign that you are overdoing it. It's often the first sign that you are just getting there in terms of how often you have to repeat that message.

So the next part of the framework is L, which was Link to Practice. This is the point where lots of strategies begin to get into trouble. Because on paper, a strategy can look great, but if your staff can't picture what that strategy looks like in real life, if the picture of what you've painted for them, of what you want them to do, is too vague, then that's going to get implemented vaguely. The clue's in the adjective, right? There's not enough clarity. So you have to connect the approach to their everyday practice, make it built into their day, not a bolt-on. It's not a nice-to-have. It's core to the way we're going to work with kids.

So that means explaining or asking, "What does a restorative conversation actually look and sound like in our school?" Forget what it says in the textbook with our kids in our classrooms. When do we have those conversations? Immediately after an incident, later that day, the next morning? What do we do if the child's still dysregulated? What language might the adult use? How long should a restorative conversation take? When is a three-minute conversation enough? And when does it need to be handed on to someone else? What do they look like in Key Stage One compared to Year Six, compared to Year Nine? What does it look like for a pupil with speech and language needs or for a child who needs more processing time? These are the practical questions that your teachers and teaching assistants will have that determine whether a strategy lives or dies.

So leaders need to model good practice. They need to share examples, share the flow of a restorative conversation done well and done simply. I would personally avoid role play, but sometimes videos can be helpful. Walking people through the structure, using case studies. So you give an example of something that's happened, and then you would say, "Okay, in this situation, we're going to say what happened? What were you feeling at the time? Who's been affected? What needs to happen now to put this right?" Keep it short enough to be remembered, but long enough to be useful. And I'm moving away from the ALIGN framework here for a moment, but in terms of restorative conversations, sort of a tip that I've seen, there's a general rule: if you have so many questions that you need to print them out so people can remember them, that's too long, and it just won't get incorporated into everyday practice.

The key thing is that your staff should be able to imagine themselves using the approach in the messy reality, the messy day-to-day of teaching in a real classroom. Because when a strategy feels like an extra thing on top of the day and they aren't quite sure how to do it or do it well, some people won't engage with it. Some people will end up doing it badly. Some people will do their best and do it okay. You get poor consistency from classroom to classroom to classroom. But when it's linked tightly to real routines and real interactions, you've painted a clear picture of what good practice looks like. Your strategy has a fighting chance when it hits the real world.

I is for Involve Staff. Now, this doesn't mean handing over leadership and asking staff to vote on whether the school should do restorative conversations. It does mean creating genuine opportunities for staff to talk about what implementation looks like so the strategy becomes workable, realistic, and shared. This is important because people are much more likely to commit to something when their experience has had some impact on it. So before, during, and after launch, ask your staff questions. What barriers are your staff seeing or talking about? Which parts of the strategy are realistic, and which parts are they finding genuinely difficult?

When in the school day, is this hardest to do well? What support from me, the leader, or the leadership team is needed to help my staff overcome those barriers in a sustainable way? Which colleagues are already doing something like this effectively? Because very often, the problem isn't just resistance. The problem is your staff have worries or concerns, and sometimes they can be reluctant to bring those up, especially in a meeting. A teacher might be thinking, "This sounds fine, but what happens when I've got 30 kids in front of me and no time to have a restorative conversation straight away?" A lunchtime supervisor might be thinking, "Okay, I can see the value in that, but I'm personally not confident in using the language around this."

A teaching assistant might be wondering, "Am I expected to lead this conversation, or should I be handing it on to another member of staff?" These questions matter, whatever they are, for your staff and your initiative. If leaders don't actively look for them and kind of bring them to the surface and address them, they won't disappear by themselves. They'll just undermine how the strategy is implemented in classrooms over time in the background. So involve staff early. Let them test ideas. Give them talking time.

Give them time to think things through. Highlight examples of strong practice that you see happening across school as well. And that way, this becomes something staff feel part of, not something that's just been dropped on them from above. G is Guide Implementation, and this is the bit where, as leaders, we have to invest in high-quality professional development if we want to see practice changing. So that means modelling. It means walkthroughs. It means coaching.

It means giving people constructive feedback on their practice. It means allocating time and resources to making this a long-term success. So to go back to my example of introducing restorative conversations, don't just explain the theory and hope for the best. Demonstrate in the real world what a good conversation sounds like as you're walking around school or you're in classrooms. Show the difference between a child who is ready to reflect and a child who is still too dysregulated and what you do in that situation. Watch staff on learning walks. Tell them that this is what you're going to be looking for.

Let your staff practise. Let them observe. Let them observe each other. Let them debrief after they tried a restorative conversation and it didn't go well. Let them come back with questions after they've tried it. And this is where a lot of schools come and stuck. We launch an initiative and then jump straight to monitoring before we've really invested in helping staff feel confident with it.

And that's a mistake. You can't demand consistency without giving people the support they need to achieve that consistency. If staff are not implementing well, the question should not always be, "Why aren't they doing it?" Sometimes the better question is, "Have we made this clear enough? Have we made it concrete enough? Have we supported and coached them enough?" And yes, this is exactly where professional development matters.

Staff need training that goes beyond theory and actually shows them what to do, how to do it, and why it works. And of course, here I'm talking about an initiative with some complexity behind it, not the sort of change where we're all going to walk on the left in the corridors. Because in most schools, getting commitment to a more complex strategy is the difficult part. And then N is Nail Consistency. This is where your strategy stops being the thing you kind of launched and becomes part of how your school actually works day to day. And this matters because implementation isn't secured through a bit of one-off enthusiasm at the start, that rah-rah speech, "We can do it. You've got the information.

Now go out and make it a success." It's embedded. It's secured through lots of repetition, routines, shared language, and follow-through by leadership. So if restorative conversations are going to be part of your approach, you need to check, actually go out and check that they're being used in classrooms and hold people accountable for using them. And I mean here accountability in a positive, supportive way. Again, leaders need to be seen to be using the strategy. When we do learning walks, we tell teachers that we're going to be looking to see them using those conversations during our observations.

We need to raise it in professional dialogue, in coaching conversations. We need to highlight good examples of how it's being used in staff briefings so success is noticed and celebrated. Maybe that means a quick shout-out in a meeting. I just want to mention the way Year Four handled that fallout on the playground yesterday really well. We saw calm, reflective, restorative questions, and the pupils were back learning quickly afterwards, and it kind of resolved the arguments between the two kids involved. Maybe it means asking in a learning walk, "How are staff finding the restorative questions that we use? What's going well, and what isn't going well?

What do we need to change based on what we've actually seen? What barriers do we still see to this being successful?" And it's an evolving process that adapts to your school over time. Maybe it means checking whether the approach is being adapted appropriately for pupils with different needs without losing the shared principles underneath it. Because here's the important bit as well. Consistency, especially around SEMH and behaviour, doesn't necessarily mean every adult becoming robotic or having identical practice. It does not mean one size fits all.

In a school that understands needs and SEMH properly, consistency means a shared direction and a shared language and shared principles while still responding flexibly to the needs of individual kids. Because there's a difference between fairness and everyone getting exactly the same. That's the balance.

That's the tightrope we walk. And when we get that right, school for kids with SEMH needs begins to feel safer, more predictable. The relationships are better. They feel more secure, so they're less likely to get dysregulated. So let's pull this together. If you want a strategy to become sticky in school- well, maybe sticky's the wrong word, but you know what I mean here- whether we're talking about restorative conversations or emotion coaching or classroom routines or transitions or relational practice or anything else, launching it, sadly, is not enough. Good intentions and fanfares are not enough.

Training alone is not enough. Leaders have to align implementation. You articulate the vision so people understand the why behind the change in practice. Then you link it to practice so people can see what it looks like in your school in real life. And we involve staff so they help shape your vision into something workable. You guide implementation with training and modelling and support, and then you nail consistency by embedding it into everyday routines, language, and culture. And that is how sensible strategies stop being nice ideas and start becoming normal, effective practice.

And maybe the big takeaway here is this: if implementation is patchy in your school, don't jump straight to blaming staff motivation. We should start by looking at our systems. Have we been clear enough? Have we been practical in terms of how we explain the changes that we want? Have we been collaborative enough? Have we been supportive enough? Have we been consistent enough? Have we held staff to account? Have we done the coaching? Because when staff are trying their best and things still are inconsistent, that usually tells you something important went wrong with the implementation process, not just the people delivering the strategies in school.

Now, if this episode has got you thinking about a strategy in your own school that's sounding good in meetings but looking very different in classrooms and corridors and conversations, it might be worth sitting down with your leadership team and asking, "Where is the real issue here? Where is the real problem? Was it the vision? Did we explain the link to everyday practice? Were staff involved? Did they have room to share their experiences and kind of shape how that strategy is implemented? Did we support? Or is it how we, the leadership team, are committing time to monitoring and accountability to ensuring consistency over time?" And that can be a really useful discussion for moving things forward.

And if you are a school leader and you see students in your school struggling, I've got a free download that can help. It's called the Reducing Exclusions Checklist, and its purpose is, after a big incident, when you feel under pressure and everything's heated about a student's explosion, their behaviour, it's kind of a roadmap of things for you to check to make sure that the right kind of support is in place to help that pupil in the future so you don't get stuck in a cycle of exclusions that don't seem to bring about any change in the student's behaviour. Not every item on the checklist will apply to every student, and it is not intended as an exhaustive list of things to do in sequence before you feel you can move ahead with an exclusion. It is a tool, an audit tool, for checking holistic support has been put in place, practical stuff, concrete stuff for the kids that need it most in your school, those kids who are in danger of exclusion, suspension, and so on.

You can grab that for free from beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources, and I'll put a direct link in the episode description so you can tap on this episode in your podcast app, and you will see a link for it, and you can click right through.

And before you go, before we wrap up this episode, if you know a colleague in school, maybe a head teacher, a SENCO, a pastoral lead, a behaviour lead, or a classroom teacher who would find today's episode helpful, please share it with them. And make sure you subscribe as well because we've got more practical episodes coming your way very, very soon. Thanks for listening. Take care. Have a brilliant week. Why not make yourself a shepherd's pie or a cottage pie? And I'll see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.