Simon Currigan

Are there pupils in your school who look calm and quiet and compliant, but underneath they're really anxious, overwhelmed, or just holding everything together until they get home, or they just fall apart? As someone who spent years helping schools understand what's really driving behaviour, I've seen how easy it is to mistake visible compliance for genuine regulation.

And in today's episode, we'll look at the tension between compliance and regulation, why doing what we asked doesn't always mean that a pupil is okay, and how to spot the children who may be doing well on the outside but are actually struggling beneath the surface.

Hi there, welcome to School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and I like to think of my brand as being reassuringly shallow. Just ask my wife. I binge-watch shows like Temptation Island. I think playing games with tactical depth is where you just run around the video game, spamming the X button to kill the enemies. And I spent a lot of time watching the snooker over the last few weeks and giggling because the presenters seem obsessed by talking about how hard or how soft Kyron Wilson's tip is. I mean, come on. They're professional presenters, and they're obviously talking about his snooker cue, but they know what they're doing. So, fair warning: if you're looking for a host with chin-scratching depth, prepare to be disappointed. If you're a human being who's lived and breathed working in schools and classrooms like me, then you should pull up a chair. You, my friend, are in the right place.

In today's episode, we're asking a question that, on the surface, sounds quite simple to answer. In school, do we mistake compliance for regulation, and does it even matter? And I want to be really clear from the start: this is not an episode where I'm going to frame compliance as bad. I'm not a massive fan of the word compliance. I think it should be reserved for use about, you know, prisoners and those checks that they do to see if an aeroplane is safe to fly.

But equally, I'm not going to argue that schools don't need routines or boundaries or expectations because that would be nonsense. Schools need kids to follow instructions. Teachers need the pupils to line up, come into class calmly, listen when someone else is speaking, move safely around the building, complete their work, and respond to adult directions. Without that, you would just have chaos. Corridors and playgrounds, you know, would eventually become unsafe. And the pupils who actually need the most predictability, the kids with complex SEMH needs, end up getting even more stressed. So compliance does matter, but I want to talk today about the tension between compliance and regulation.

So let's define our terms here. Compliance tells us what a pupil is doing on the outside. Regulation tells us what is happening on the inside. And those two things are not always the same. A child can be sitting still in class, sort of looking at the board, holding a pencil, doing exactly what we ask them to do, and still be anxious or overwhelmed or masking or confused or emotionally exhausted or seconds away from falling apart. And that difference matters because if we assume that if a pupil's following the classroom expectations, then they must be okay, we can miss the pupils who are struggling on the inside, who are sitting right in front of us day after day after day and are still worthy of our help.

By the way, before we go any further, if you're finding the School Behaviour Secrets podcast useful, make sure you subscribe now so you don't miss future episodes. And if you've got 30 seconds, leaving a rating or review really does help other teachers, SENCOs, and school leaders find the podcast, which means more people get to hear these ideas, more staff can have productive conversations about behaviour, and hopefully that means more children get the support they need to do well in school.

So let's start with a real ordinary classroom example. Imagine we've got a pupil sitting at their desk doing a writing task. You've explained the activity, and everyone else has started. The room looks calm, and this pupil isn't shouting out. They're not arguing. They're not ripping up their sheets in anger. They're not walking around the room. They're kind of just sitting there quiet as anything, pencil in hand. If someone from the senior leadership walked in at that moment, they might think to themselves, "Lovely, calm classroom. Everyone's engaged."

But look a little closer. That pupil has written the date but not a lot else. They keep glancing at the child next to them. They copy the first few words from their book, and then they rub them out, and then they look back at the board. They nod when the adult checks in, but they never really get to grips with the task. They don't ask for help because they don't want to look stupid. Or maybe they've asked for help before, and they've been told, "I've already explained it," or they're terrified that if the adult comes over, everyone will notice that they don't understand the work.

So on the surface, they're compliant. They're quiet. They're not disruptive. But on the inside, maybe they're not so regulated. Their brain is not in a calm, flexible learning state. Maybe their body feels a bit under threat. Not physical threat, but social threat, task threats, fear of failure, fear of being noticed for the wrong reasons, which is, let's be honest, every teenager's nightmare. Fear of getting it wrong.

And here's the uncomfortable bit about all that: because they're not disrupting the lesson, they might not then get noticed and get the support they need. And the problem in schools is visible disruption from the pupil gets noticed by the adults because, well, you can't miss it, can you? If a pupil's throwing a chair, swearing at another child, or walking out of the room, we notice immediately, and we have to do something about it.

But the quiet pupil, who is like flying under the radar, kind of disappearing inside themselves, that child can go unnoticed for months or sometimes even years. And because they're compliant, we may even praise what we see. "Good girl. Well done for sitting quietly or working quietly," or "You're always so sensible." And of course, sometimes that praise is absolutely deserved. Some pupils are calm and settled and managing brilliantly, but not always.

Sometimes the thing we're praising isn't regulation. It's endurance, or it's masking, or it's fear, or it's a child spending every ounce of energy they have just holding it together rather than learning and improving academically. So I want to make the distinction really clear. Compliance is about: is the pupil doing what we asked? Regulation is more about: what state is the pupil in while they're doing that?

And both questions are relevant. If we only ask the compliance question, the first question, we can end up over-indexing on obedience. If we only ask the second question, we can end up sounding like expectations don't matter. And that is not helpful either. That means, from my perspective, the goal isn't to choose between compliance and regulation. The goal is to understand the relationship, the tension between those two things.

Because in the real world, pupils don't fall neatly into two groups: compliant pupils over here and dysregulated pupils over there. The Venn diagram of those pupils is more complicated than that. So for this episode, I'm going to split kids into four possible states. And I'm going to preface this by saying, yes, those boundaries between those states are fuzzy, and which group a pupil sits in can change from day to day or lesson to lesson. So that said, I want you to imagine we're going to position the kids in groups based across two categories. Are they compliant or not? And are they regulated or not? And when you combine those two ideas using maths, we've got group number one, which is compliant and regulated; group number two, compliant but dysregulated; group number three, non-compliant and dysregulated; and group number four, non-compliant, but let's say they're trying to regulate. And once you start seeing behaviour through those four groups, it affects the way you judge what's happening to the pupils in your classroom.

Let's start with the first group: compliant and regulated. Now, this is what we're aiming for. We've got a pupil who understands the routine. They know what's expected. They feel safe enough with the adult. They have the skills and capacity to meet the school's expectations. So when the teacher says, "Come in, sit down, and start the task on the board," they can do it. Not because they're terrified, not because they're frozen, not because they are desperately trying to avoid attention, but because they are settled emotionally enough to think, to respond, to focus, and get on with the learning. That is a good thing, and we shouldn't be embarrassed about wanting this for our kids. This is the success zone because calm, predictable routines do help children. Clear expectations help children. Consistent adult responses help children. The issue is not compliance itself. The issue that I want to raise is assuming that all compliance comes from a place of regulation.

Now, for this group, it does, but for the next group, it doesn't, which brings me to the second category, which is compliant but dysregulated. And this is the group I think we miss most often. These are the pupils who look okay from the outside but are not okay on the inside. The child who sits through assembly with their hands over their ears or their body is tense or imagining they're somewhere else so they don't have to confront the reality of where they are right now or doing everything in their power not to run off while sitting absolutely perfectly still. This could be the pupil who smiles and nods when the teacher gives them an instruction, even though they have no real idea what to do next because they haven't processed that instruction. The child who never dares ask a question because speaking out in front of others, their friends, feels like socially dangerous, like they might get judged by their peer group. The student who follows every rule perfectly in school, but then when they get home, they explode because their parents give them the wrong colour cup or because home is the first safe place. They can let out all that nervous tension and stress and let that energy finally go.

The student who suffers from after-school collapse. And it's real for students of all ages. After-school collapse is a thing. And what happens then is parents talk to school about the behaviours they're seeing at home, the emotional outbursts, and the school turns around and says, "Well, we don't see that here. They're absolutely fine in school." And then the parent says that they are not fine. They fall apart every afternoon, and then school starts giving parenting advice or suspecting that their parenting isn't up to scratch. I mean, no judgment. I've said those things, and I've thought those things. And in that situation, both parties are telling the truth. School sees the child holding it together with no apparent issues. Home sees their child falling apart, the same pupil, but the behaviour is different because the situation, the context is different, the demands are different, and the perceived levels of safety in the child's head are different. So the same child presents different behaviours.

I've been thinking about this a lot while writing my book about dysregulation in schools. And one of the big themes in the book is that behaviour that looks calm, compliant, or even random can still be driven by hidden stressors. We often think of regulation as emotional regulation. Can the child manage anger or anxiety? Or can they stay calm? Can they avoid shouting or crying or storming out? But our bodies regulate far more than emotions. Pupils are regulating sensory input, social pressures, anxiety, hunger, tiredness, pain, working memory demands, transitions, uncertainty, communication needs, and a hundred other pressures throughout the day. And that is regulation, and that takes effort. If a pupil is using most of their regulation capacity to cope with the noise in the classroom or the social pressure in the dining room or the fear of being laughed at or the effort of processing complex instructions, there may not be much left over for flexible thinking, problem-solving, remembering facts, or managing frustration in the classroom. So the child may look compliant, but internally their system is working flat out. I'm thinking here of the image of the swan, which looks kind of calm and serene on the top of the water, but if you look underneath the water, their feet are paddling furiously.

This is where the phrase "hidden dysregulation" can be useful. Visible dysregulation is easy to spot, right? So that's the child who shouts, hits, swears, runs, throws, cries, or refuses. Hidden dysregulation is different. That's the child who freezes, the child who withdraws, the child who becomes overly compliant, the child who watches what everyone else is doing before they act, the child who will do almost anything to avoid being noticed. And because hidden dysregulation doesn't always inconvenience the adults, it can actually be mistaken for success, meaning sometimes what we call regulation is really just behaviour that doesn't inconvenience the adults or draws their attention.

Now, don't say that to bash teachers. Teachers are managing 30 pupils: curriculum pressure, behaviour incidents, workloads, assessment, parents, emails, meetings, and the photocopier refusing to print in colour, even though you know you chose colour. We all naturally respond and notice the things that create the most immediate stress and draw our immediate attention. But if we only look for dysregulation when it becomes disruptive, we miss a whole potential group of pupils whose distress has, to quote the jam, "gone underground."

The third category I want to look at is non-compliant and dysregulated. This is the group schools usually notice: the pupil who refuses to start their work, who pushes the book away or argues or runs out or swears or disrupts the learning of the whole class or whatever. You know who I'm talking about. Their stress, like, explodes outwardly so no one can miss it. And because it's visible, the teacher notices it. It gets recorded, discussed, challenged, appears on CPOMs or whatever behaviour tracking system you use. Leaders get involved. Parents get called. Detentions are issued. You know the drill. And often these pupils absolutely do need support. I'm not suggesting otherwise. But the danger is that we start to form a very narrow picture of what dysregulation is. Dysregulation only means loud and visible or disruptive or non-compliant. And if that's the label we use in our heads, it's easy to slip into thinking compliance must mean regulated. And that's where we make the mistake. Some dysregulated pupils explode outwards, but others quietly kind of collapse inwards. Dysregulation can look different in different kids.

And then we have the fourth category: non-compliant but trying to regulate. And this is the one that can really challenge our thinking because sometimes the behaviour that looks like refusal might actually be a clumsy attempt by the student to prevent something that they perceive as worse from happening next. All right, so that was a bit convoluted. Let me give an example. Let's take the example of a pupil refusing to enter the hall because they know the noise in there will tip them over the edge. Or a student puts their head down on their desk because they're trying to block out the anxiety from the demands of their work or the pressure they put on themselves to get that work absolutely perfect. Now, ironically here, the student is using a regulation strategy, but it's just a really bad one.

So in these situations, we still need expectations. We still need boundaries. We still need to teach pupils how to communicate their worries and needs safely and respectfully. But we still need to be careful because if we interpret every act of non-compliance as defiance, we might punish the very moment that that child is trying to use a tiny bit of self-awareness to regulate. And I think it's a bit like imagine they're learning to ride a bike, but they don't have the skills to balance the bike yet. So the bike is swerving everywhere. They know they need to do something, but they're overcorrecting or correcting the bike in the wrong way. In a really clumsy way, they're trying to regulate the direction of the bike.

So in those situations, we might still say, "Look, assembly's part of school, and we're going in." But then we might also start looking for reasonable adaptations like, "Look, let's agree where you sit to make this easier for you. You can sit near the exit, or maybe they have some discrete ear defenders if they need them. We might talk to them about how long they're expected to stay in the hall so they don't feel like they have to hold in this stressful situation in the hall forever, which feels impossible to them. There's a time limit on them. And we can say things like, "If it becomes too much, here's a discrete signal you can use to let me know before you reach crisis point." You know, insert appropriate strategy to meet whatever the student's needs are here. When we do that, we're not removing the expectation. We're not saying they don't have to comply. We're working with the child to build their capacity to meet the expectation.

So how do we spot pupils who may be compliant but not regulated? Well, we need to be careful here because we don't want to over label kids who aren't struggling. And none of the signs that you might see prove anything by themselves. We're not trying to diagnose every child as secretly distressed. Some pupils are just quiet, and that is fine. Some pupils are naturally thoughtful, and that is fine. Some pupils are just introverts, and that is fine. Some pupils are absolutely fine. But there are clues that we can look for that tell us something else might be behind that.

So a pupil who appears overly tense or overly watchful when they're in the classroom, a pupil who rarely asks for help, but when you look at their book, you can see that they clearly need it, a pupil who copies other pupils rather than working independently, a pupil who becomes distressed by small corrections, a pupil who seems exhausted at the end of the day when they walk out the door, a pupil who looks fine in school, but you're getting emails from their parents telling you that they collapse emotionally regularly at home, a pupil who avoids attention or avoids making public choices or avoids challenging themself with their work or avoids anything in the classroom that might put the spotlight on them by themselves. None of these are proof that the child is dysregulated or has significant underlying needs, but they may be clues when you fit them together with patterns of behaviour.

And when you see that pattern, the adult response needs to be around asking, "Are these behaviours, when they're persistent, are they genuine clues about a possible regulation issue, or are they safe to ignore and they're just one-off behaviours?" The answer, as ever, comes from knowing your students well. If you're struggling to understand your pupils' needs, by the way, I've got a free resource that can help. It's called the SEND Behaviour Handbook, and it helps you link the behaviours that you see in your classroom with possible underlying needs for your students, like trauma or ADHD or autism. And it gives you key facts about conditions like PDA or ODD or DLD to get you moving in the right directions to supporting your students so you understand how they might affect your student's ability to regulate in the classroom. You can get it by going to beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. Or by clicking in the link that I'll put in the episode description, you can download it for free, and it's already been downloaded by 100,000 practitioners around the world.

Now, what I'm not saying in this episode is that students shouldn't be exposed to hard things that put them out of their comfort zone. When that's done in the right way, in a structured way, that's where a lot of emotional growth can come from for your students. That's how we develop resilience. We teach kids coping skills to manage out in the real world. If we don't do that, they become victims to their environment. We want to avoid them becoming, in the words of the world's foremost thinker on psychology and learning, Donald Trump. We want them to not become snowflakes.

So there's a tension here then between how do we help them develop those coping skills and resilience without drowning them in the process? And that's an especially important question for school leaders because if our behaviour systems only reward visible compliance, we can unintentionally create a culture where pupils learn to hide their distress and worries and struggles rather than to ask for help to manage it.

Some children become very good at surviving school. They keep their heads down. They copy others. They don't ask questions. They say what the adults want them to hear. They hold everything together until they get home. But surviving school is not the same as thriving in school. And for me personally, survival seems to be a very low bar for what we should be aiming at for our students in our education system today.

And compliance does not automatically prepare pupils for a life beyond school where they will need more than obedience to do well and survive. They need self-awareness. They will need to recognise when they are becoming overwhelmed or confused about how to join in with teamwork. They will need to ask for help from time to time. They will need to solve problems and manage conflicts and make decisions and repair relationships and cope by themselves when no adult is standing there telling them exactly what to do next. If we only train pupils to comply under adult control, we may not be building the internal regulation skills they need for that independent life in the future.

That's why the question isn't, "Do we want compliance or regulation?" We actually want both. We want pupils to follow reasonable instructions, respect reasonable boundaries, and contribute safely to the school community. And we want them to develop the internal skills to manage stress and tolerate frustration and recover from setbacks and make good choices when adults are not immediately directing them.

Compliance, it's the outside behaviour we see. Regulation is the student's internal capacity to meet that demand. And when those two things line up, that is brilliant. That is the goal. But when they don't, we need to notice that there's a problem. And so this week, I'd like you to choose one pupil who appears compliant but who you suspect may still be struggling. Not the loudest pupil, not necessarily the child with the most incidents, but think of the pupil who is quiet but tense, maybe watchful, maybe slightly overeager to please, actually, or maybe they go home exhausted at the end of the day, maybe going under the radar.

Then ask yourself one question: What might it be costing them on the inside to achieve that compliance? And once you've answered that, identify one small adjustment, if they do indeed need it, that could reduce their stress load while keeping the school's expectations in place. Don't lower standards. Increase their capacity to stay regulated and meet the standards.

If this episode has made you think of a pupil in your school, please share this episode with a colleague or your SENCO or your behaviour lead or your staff team to help them support the students that they're working with or use it to prompt a discussion with your staff about the tension between compliance and regulation and how it applies to the students that you teach in your school.

Thanks for listening today. I'm off to fire up an episode of Deepfake Love. Have a brilliant week. And I look forward to seeing you on next week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets.