Simon Currigan

Have you ever seen a pupil explode over something so small you found yourself thinking, "That reaction came out of nowhere"? With over 18 years of experience supporting schools with SEMH and behaviour, I've seen this pattern again and again and again. And usually, that last visible trigger is often a red herring, and it can cause us to focus our support in the wrong place. In today's episode, I'll show you how stress stacking works, why looking for one simple trigger can lead you down the wrong path, and how to ask better questions so your support matches your pupil's real SEMH needs.

Hi there. Welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and I'm the kind of man who, after visiting the gym, rewards himself with a glace cherry. And according to the pot, it turns out that those cherries are manufactured by BF Skinner and Company. I mean, that's a very niche opening to a podcast, and well done if you understood that. I don't know what audience I was aiming for with that, the hardcore, I guess. So today's episode is going to be okay, and I say say this out loud, I appreciate it. It's the sort of thing that's definitely been used as a double entendre in a carry-on movie. It's shorter than usual, but still useful. This intro right here is why I don't get invited to write for The Time's Ed. Right, back on track.

We're going to look at something that causes a lot of confusion in schools when we're trying to understand behaviour, and that's called stress stacking. Because when a child becomes dysregulated, when they shout out, or they throw something, or storm out, or lash out at another child, we naturally want to know what triggered that reaction. What happened just before the event? What set them off? What was the thing that caused the whole incident? And that is a useful question. It's not a bad question, and it can be useful, but it can lead us down a blind alley if it becomes the only question we ask. Because sometimes the thing that happened immediately before the behaviour wasn't actually the cause. So if the trigger that you saw wasn't the real cause of the dysregulation, the incident, then what was, and how do you get there? And that's what this entire episode is going to focus on. How do you do that?

And before we go any further, however, if you like this podcast, if you're finding it useful, please make sure that you subscribe to School Behaviour Secrets in your podcast app. And if you've got just 30 seconds, leaving a quick review genuinely helps other teachers, SENCOs, and school leaders find the show. It tells the podcast apps that this is something worth recommending, which means we get practical, needs-led behaviour support into more ears of teachers, school leaders, and parents. And if you've already left a review, thank you. You are officially part of my plan for world domination, a very calm, well-regulated, ethically sound, needs-first form of world domination, though it is.

So I'm going to start off actually with a quick story. A few years ago, back in 2016, two BuzzFeed reporters did something that became weirdly, massively popular online that's related to what we're going to talk about today. So what they did was they sat in front of a watermelon, and they started putting elastic bands around it, one after another, to see how many it would take before the watermelon exploded. And people watched in their droves, millions of them, live for like 45 minutes. It broke the internet, which, by the way, tells you something about the internet, doesn't it? Humanity has access to almost the entire sum of human knowledge. And what do we do with it? We gather around to watch two people slowly torture a large fruit. But the image is brilliant for understanding dysregulation because at first, nothing happened to the watermelon. The watermelon just took it. It just sat there. One elastic band went on, then another, then another. And from the outside, for a long time, the watermelon looked basically the same. It didn't suddenly change colour. It didn't vibrate. It didn't shout. "Excuse me, everyone, just so you know, I'm experiencing increasing internal pressure." The watermelon just sat there looking exactly the same, but the pressure on it was building. Elastic band after elastic band after elastic band. And then eventually, one final band went on, and then the whole thing exploded or imploded. You get the idea.

So why am I telling you this? What has this got to do with dysregulation? It raises one question that matters. Which elastic band caused the watermelon to explode? Was it the final one? Was there one band in particular, or was it all of them? That question matters because this is exactly where we can go wrong when we're thinking about behaviour in schools. A child explodes because one pupil looked at them funny, or because someone touched their pencil case, or because they were asked to stop doing an activity, or because the teacher said, "Can you start writing now?" And on paper, it looks like we found the cause. We say, "It kicked off because another child looked at him," or, "She stormed out because she didn't want to do the work," or, "They became aggressive because they were corrected by the teacher." And sometimes, yeah, that might be partly true, but it might not be the whole truth. It contributed, sure, because that final event may simply have kind of revealed the pressure in the child that had already been bubbling up for hours or weeks or days. The final elastic band does still matter, but it doesn't cause the explosion by itself.

Now, the reason we look for one trigger is completely understandable. When an incident happens, we often only see what happened kind of after the fact. As a senior leader, you might physically not even see the event that happened at all. You might just get a call to go in and support in a classroom. And a member of staff tells us what happened retrospectively. A child ran out of the room. There was a broken pencil pot on the floor. Someone's crying. Another child is saying, "I didn't even do anything." And we want to make sense of it quickly.

That's especially true for people like pastoral leads, or school leaders, or SENCOs, or behaviour leads, because often you're the person being called in to help after the incident has already escalated. So we ask, "What happened?" And the answer we get is usually based on what happened in the final few moments before the behaviour, the pressure that was bubbling up inside, became visible. I asked her to start her work, and she refused. A boy made a comment, and she threw her book. I told him he couldn't go first, and he screamed. And again, these details matter. We do need to know what happened immediately before the incident. And from the child's perspective, as they're telling us what caused the incident when we're debriefing them, that might be true from their perspective. That might be the thing that caused the event.

But if we stop there, we create a very kind of shallow explanation of the child's behaviour. We reduce a series of complex events and pressures to one interaction. And when that happens, when we focus on that last elastic band, that information can be a red herring. It can lead us down a blind alley because then we ignore all of the other bands, the stressors that contributed to the student becoming dysregulated.

Let's make this practical with a case study. I'm going to call this pupil Cheyenne. Cheyenne is in year seven. She's bright. She's funny. And on a good day, she can be warm, sociable, and really engaged in her learning. But staff have started to describe her behaviour as becoming unpredictable. Some days she copes well. Other days, especially after lunch, she seems to explode and overreact to tiny things. One Tuesday afternoon, she's in English. The class is starting a written task. The teacher has explained what to do, and the pupils are expected to write a paragraph independently. Cheyenne's sitting next to another pupil who looks over at her and her desk and says, "Cheyenne, you're on the wrong page." And Cheyenne reacts instantly. She snaps back, "Shut up. No, I'm not." And the other pupil says, "You are." And Cheyenne throws her pencil case across the table, pushes back her chair, swears, storms out of the room, and slams the door.

On paper, the trigger looks obvious. It was another pupil correcting her. Cheyenne then felt embarrassed. She reacted aggressively. So the plan becomes: move Cheyenne away from that pupil, control the risk, remind her to use calm-down strategies when she feels annoyed, maybe give her a reflection sheet afterwards about using kind words. And depending on the school, there might be a sanction for swearing and storming out. Now, none of that is necessarily irrational. The visible trigger was the other pupil's comment. And yes, Cheyenne does need support to respond differently when she feels embarrassed or corrected.

But if that's the whole plan, we may have missed the real underlying problems because that comment might not have caused the explosion. It might simply have been the final elastic band on the watermelon. So let's rewind Cheyenne's day. First elastic band: poor sleep. The night before, she struggled to get any sleep. She was worried about school. And once she started worrying, her thoughts started going around and around and around. "What if people laugh at me? What if I get things wrong? What if I have to read out loud?" She eventually fell asleep late. And when she woke up, she was tired before the day even began. And that matters because poor sleep puts the brain's threat detection system, the amygdala, on a hair trigger. Cheyenne arrives at school then with less capacity to cope.

Second elastic band: a difficult morning at home. Cheyenne couldn't find part of her PE kit. There was stress in the house. There was an argument. Her sisters and brothers were shouting. She left feeling rushed and annoyed and already on edge. Third elastic band: transition stress. When she arrived at school, there was a room change, which she struggles with. The class weren't in their usual tutoring because of an issue with the heating. For most pupils, that was mildly inconvenient. But for Cheyenne, who struggles with transition, it was another piece of uncertainty, another pressure, another elastic band on the watermelon.

The fourth elastic band: social stress. At break, Cheyenne approached two girls she usually spends time with, but they walked off together before she got there. Now, they weren't excluding her on purpose. Perhaps they didn't even notice her walking towards them. But Cheyenne, she interpreted it as a rejection. So now she's not just tired and unsettled. She feels socially rejected, maybe isolated, maybe abandoned.

The fifth elastic band: sensory load. Lunchtime was loud, crowded, chaotic. The dining hall was packed. There were chairs scraping, people shouting, the smell of food, cues, movement everywhere. Cheyenne coped with that. And from the outside, she looked fine, but that didn't remove the pressure that she was trying to regulate on the inside. Sixth elastic band: mental processing. After lunch, she went into English, and the task involved listening to a long set of instructions, understanding what to write, organising her ideas, getting started independently. And because she was already carrying lots of stressors, her thinking brain wasn't working at full capacity.

And then we've got the last elastic band, which is shame. She realised she wasn't sure what to do. Other pupils had started writing. She was still trying to find the right place. And that familiar thought arrived, "Everyone else can do this except for you." And then the pupil next to her said, "You're on the wrong page," and bang. Now, did that comment matter? Yes. Obviously, of course it did. It was the moment that all of those stressors suddenly became visible. It was the final elastic band.

But if we treat it as the whole cause or the main cause, we then get caught out by putting the wrong support in place. We might move Cheyenne away from that pupil, but she can still feel rejected at break. We can remind her to count to 10, but counting to 10 is not going to undo sleep deprivation, or sensory overload, or shame. We might sanction the storming out, but the sanction doesn't reduce the stress load that caused her to walk out in the first place. We might tell her, "Next time, use your words." But in that moment, her thinking brain, her prefrontal cortex, has already gone offline, affecting her ability to think logically and plan ahead. She wasn't calmly weighing up at that moment.

a menu of possible responses, like someone choosing a meal deal in Tesco, which, by the way, doesn't include enough sandwiches that come with butter. I don't know if you noticed that. They all come with mayo because if you don't like mayo like me, you're always stuck with the ham sandwich, which is nuts. Point being, Tesco aside, in response to all those stacked stressors, Cheyenne was in survival mode. Her emotional brain had taken over. And this is where we have to be careful because if we misread the cause, we then mismatch the support. And this is where I prefer the approach of writing regulation plans rather than behaviour plans that factor in all of the stressors that affect a student negatively and looking across the sweep of those and putting together a coordinated, holistic plan to support the student. It's a big focus of the book I'm writing now on supporting kids with dysregulation as part of the book deal we have with Routledge. And I'll let you know more about that as we move towards publication. But the purpose of a regulation plan is to proactively analyse and list all of the stressors. We use the PAIN framework and impacts to identify those in a comprehensive, structured way to find out what those stressors are. And if you want to know more about the PAIN framework, I suggest you skip back to episode 255 where I go through them in detail and walk you through how to use that framework. Once we've found those stressors, we start asking questions based on the stressors we've identified, like, "How do we reduce those pressures earlier in a systematic way across the day? Could there be a calm check-in when Cheyenne arrives, especially on days where she looks tired or unsettled because we've noticed there's a pattern of that?

Can we prepare her for room changes before she walks into them? Can we support peer connection at break if this is a persistent problem instead of waiting for social stress to explode later in the day? Can we offer a quieter lunchtime option or a predictable place to go for 10 minutes after a noisy lunchtime if sensory needs are affecting her? Can we chunk instructions in lesson time so she's not trying to hold so much in working memory at once? Can we reduce public correction and embarrassment by giving her private prompts? Can we give her a simple repair script to use after she makes mistakes so that shame she experienced doesn't turn into this explosive, defensive anger?" That is a different kind of behaviour support plan.

It's not just managing the explosion. It's reducing all those stressors so the explosion never happens in the first place. And this is where the watermelon image, I think, is really useful because with the watermelon, the final elastic band gets all the drama. And if you haven't watched it, watch it. It does get very, very tense. That final elastic band is the one we notice. That's the one that appears to cause the explosion.

But actually, all the earlier bands matter too. And it's the same with dysregulation. We often notice the final thing because it's the most visible, that piece of correction, the instruction, the comment. But the child may have been carrying up a stack of stressors long before that moment. And from the outside, they may have looked fine. And by the way, that's a really important point. A pupil can be overloaded and still, on the outside, appear okay.

They can walk into school. They can smile at the adults. They can sit in assembly. They can answer a question, cue for lunch, hold a conversation. But all the while, invisibly, the pressure is quietly building underneath. And then one small thing happens, and the adults say, "That reaction came out of nowhere." But it didn't come out of nowhere.

It came out of a long build up that we just hadn't seen. So the change we need to make is don't just ask about our kids, what triggered their behaviour. Ask, "What stressors had already been stacked before the trigger happened?" That question changes the way you frame your thinking about their needs. It changes the conversation. It changes the support plans that we write. Instead of only looking at the final 30 seconds, we start looking at the child's stress load across the day.

What had they already had to cope with? Which demands were drawing on their limited regulation budget of resources? Were there physical factors like tiredness, hunger, illness, pain, or sensory overwhelm? Were there social factors like rejection, or conflict, or misunderstanding? Were there cognitive factors like too many instructions, difficult writing, working memory demands? Were there emotional factors like anxiety or shame? Were there transition factors like room changes, or timetable changes, or supply teachers?

Which of these are factors we can do something about, and which can we reduce next time? And again, that's where analysing those needs through the PAIN framework and the IMPACTS is really helpful because it gives you a structure for analysing those needs. Now, I can imagine someone listening to this in their car or at the gym thinking, "All right, that makes sense, but it sounds like a lot. Are we supposed to analyse every tiny thing that happens to every child all day?" And the answer is no. That would be impossible because schools are busy. They're messy.

They're human places. And you do not have the time to sit there like a forensic psychologist every time someone throws a glue stick. But for the pupils whose behaviour is long-lasting, it's persistent, and it's confusing, and it keeps looking like it comes out of nowhere, this kind of thinking is essential because it puts you on the right track. And if we don't understand the stress stack, we don't end up chasing the right triggers. We chase any triggers. And do you know what? When you do that, you discover that some of the stressors are usually more important than others.

They're not all equal. Maybe in this analogy, some of them are really big, strong elastic bands, and the others are thinner and weaker. And we only need to focus on the key ones. But considering those stressors across the board is a really important process. And for school leaders, I think this leads to one really important question because the biggest change may not be a strategy you implement for one or two pupils. It might be the questions that you prompt adults to ask across your schools. So in many schools, after an incident, the questions staff are expected to answer are, "What happened?

What rule was broken? Who was involved? What consequence should follow?" And those questions do have a place. We do need to know what happened. We do need boundaries. We do need to think about safety, how relationships are repaired, and who's being held accountable.

But if those are the only questions, they kind of train our staff. They focus our staff on that final elastic band, the final rule that was broken. So we need to add in better questions. What stressors did the child experience before this happened? What were they already managing in their bodies in terms of emotions and cognitive load and social interaction? What need might have been kind of bubbling underneath the behaviour? And what can we reduce next time?

What skill does the child need help developing to cope with those pressures? What part of the environment made that regulation harder? Did we miss any early signs? That moves us away from quick, potentially ineffective responses to smart responses. And again, in the words of Freud, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." It might just be the child having a bad day. We all have them.

We're human. You might go into Tesco and only see mayo sandwiches. But the key thing here is we're talking about pupils that experience persistent difficulties, persistent dysregulation across time. I'm not talking about one or two off incidents. I'm talking about kids who are struggling in the long term and need our help to course-correct. And if you're listening to this and thinking, "Yeah, we do need a more structured way of understanding behaviour in our school," then a really good place to start is our free SEND Behaviour Handbook. It's packed with practical strategies for supporting pupils with SEND and SEMH needs.

And it will help you look beyond surface behaviour so you start matching support in school to the child's actual needs. And you can download it for free from our website, Beacon School Support. I'll put a link in the episode description, but you can also go there directly, beaconschoolsupport.co.uk, and click on the free resources section at the top of the homepage. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. And if you've already downloaded it, but it's still sitting in your Downloads folder, then maybe this is your gentle nudge to double-click on it, have a look inside, and potentially share it with other colleagues in school who would find it useful.

So before we wrap up, here's a phrase that I think sums up this episode that I really like. The trigger may explain the timing of the behaviour, but the stress stack explains why the behaviour happened in the first place. And that distinction for me is really important because if Cheyenne had slept well, had a calm morning, felt secure with her friends, had a quieter lunch, had her sensory needs met, understood the task, felt confident in the lesson, the same comment, "You're on the wrong page," might not have led to an explosion. She might have rolled her eyes. She might have said, "Oh, thanks." She might have ignored it. She might have felt mildly embarrassed but coped with it. So the trigger alone doesn't explain the behaviour. We have to ask what state the child was in when the trigger got pulled.

If this episode has helped you think differently about behaviour, please do share it IRL, as the kids say, in real life with real-life colleagues in school, maybe someone on your leadership team, your SENCO, a behaviour leader, teaching assistant, or a teacher who's just trying to make sense of a pupil whose behaviour feels unreadable. And you can also share it on social media if you think that would help other people. You can use the Share button in your podcast app. It is super easy. These ideas spread best when they become part of everyday conversation in staff rooms and schools.

And also, before I go, don't forget to subscribe to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast so future episodes appear automatically in your podcast app. Like a friend who pops round regularly with a non-mayo, properly buttered sandwich.

That wraps up today's episode. Thank you for listening today. I hope you have a brilliant week. And I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.