Simon Currigan

Have you ever used a behaviour strategy that worked brilliantly in the moment with either an individual student or a whole class, only to find the same behaviour came back again tomorrow? My name's Simon Currigan, and in over 18 years of supporting schools with SEMH, I've seen this crop up again and again: strategies that kind of calm the behaviour down today but don't break that pattern of behaviour in the long run.

And in this episode, I'll show you why "did it work" isn't always the best question to ask yourself when dealing with behaviour in class, and I'm going to give you a simple way to check what you're doing is helping build better behaviour in class for tomorrow, not just buying you five minutes of peace today.

Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. My name's Simon Currigan, and the two fasts I like least are breakfast and an Amazon fast. I mean, let's start with breakfast, yeah. Breakfast isn't natural. Stone Age man didn't have a fridge to keep chilled milk and orange juice in, or a charcuterie plate to munch on with his croissants. Breakfast, being the most important meal of the day for me, is the best marketing campaign ever invented, promoting cereals that are so lacking in nutritional merit the companies who make them have to literally add vitamins and minerals to them. Otherwise, you may as well just suck on a piece of cardboard. That said, though, a late-night bowl of Frosties —I've got nothing against that. That's everyday luxury.

And an Amazon fast, where you promise yourself you're not going to order anything unnecessary for a month, and then, you know, three days later you find yourself stood at the front door pretending to be surprised by the arrival of a USB cable, a pack of gel pens, and something made of silicone that's probably a kitchen gadget, but now it's been shipped over from China. It seems wrong to ship it back 8,000 miles. Who needs that kind of guilt? In the future, a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous, I imagine community halls will be packed, full of people sitting in circles, starting the evening with the words "My name's Simon, and I'm an Amazon Prime subscriber," before rattling off all the tat that they've bought off their wish list. So I say no. No to breakfast and no to Amazon fasts. And there is probably a link in there to today's episode, but if there is, I can't find it.

Because today we're talking about the behaviour strategies we use in class because they give us, the adults, short-term relief from the behaviour issues that we're seeing in class but might be problematic in the long term. So they make the problem stop, maybe get the class working quietly, maybe stop an individual student disrupting the learning of others. Basically, they help us get on with the lesson. And in a busy classroom, that does matter. If people are refusing to work or calling out or the whole class is getting noisy, you don't always have the luxury of sitting down with them for an afternoon, sipping on a cup of tea, and hosting a class discussion on the children self-actualising. Sometimes you just need that behaviour to stop. I've been there and I get that.

But here's the problem: just because a strategy works in the moment, in the short term, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's helping in the long term. Sometimes the very thing that appears to solve the problem today teaches the student something about you or the way you run your class that makes your teaching harder tomorrow. Or it might, in the long term, hold back their success or how they feel about themselves. And that's what we're going to explore in this episode. We'll look at how that works with individual pupils. We'll look at how that works with whole classes. And I'm going to share three simple questions that you can use to decide whether an approach that you've taken in terms of a behaviour strategy is really working or whether it's just buying you a few minutes of peace while the real problem keeps simmering away under the surface, or the problem keeps recurring, and it becomes more embedded and difficult to shift.

But before we get into that, if you're finding the School Behaviour Secrets podcast useful, open your podcast app now and hit follow or subscribe if you've not already done that. It's the most efficient way of making sure you never miss another episode. It's the lazy man's approach because it makes your podcast app do all the hard work of remembering when the episodes are released. And it also helps the show reach other teachers, SENCOs, and school leaders who are looking for practical ways to support their students with behaviour and social, emotional, and mental health needs in school.

Right. Okay. So let's start with the reality of a classroom and think about how to apply this short-term versus long-term thinking. Because it's very easy to talk about behaviour in a calm, balanced way when you're not actually in front of 30 students. It's easy to say, "Well, we need to look at the behaviour and consider the underlying need." And when people post on social media when they've had a hard day teaching and how that behaviour is getting to them as a person and how it's making them feel and they're stressed, and then someone wisely bangs in the comments something about behaviour being communication, I can feel the collective eye roll of 50,000 teachers looking at that post, who are then thinking to themselves, "Well, when was the last time you were in a classroom?"

So it's absolutely true to say we need to think about the drivers of behaviour, but I completely accept it's also easier to say that when a pupil isn't lying across the door to the classroom like a human draft excluder, another child is crying because someone's just called them a potato, and three pupils are still trying to finish the work from 20 minutes ago, and you've just realised you wrote Wednesday on the board when it's very clearly Thursday. In real classrooms, the adults are under a lot of pressure. They have a lot of balls to juggle. You're trying to keep the lesson moving. You're trying to keep everyone safe. You're trying to protect learning time. And to maximise that, you're trying not to say the thing that's currently in your head to that student who thinks you can't see them looking at their phone because, you know, professionally that wouldn't be your finest hour.

So in real classrooms, there are lots of things going on. So, of course, adults in that situation, they're human beings who reach for strategies that work quickly. We all do. I do. When a pupil refuses to work, we might reduce the demands to ease the stress and tension. A pupil keeps making silly comments, so we pretend we haven't heard them. And then when those comments stop, we pat ourselves on the back and call it tactical ignoring. A class is noisy, so we raise our voice, and then the room goes quiet. And in each case, as the adult, you get a little burst of relief. Your nervous system on the inside kind of says, "Thank goodness for that. The crisis has passed."

But the danger is that we mistake a short-term fix, which leads to a behaviour change, for the problem being solved in the long term. And those are not the same things. A behaviour stopping in the moment only tells us one thing: that the strategy changed what happened in the next, say, 60 seconds. It doesn't tell us whether the pupil's need was met or addressed. It doesn't tell us whether the pupil learned a coping skill for being in that situation. It doesn't tell us whether the class became more independent or more responsive or more settled over time. And it definitely doesn't tell us we've just made the same behaviour more or less likely to happen again tomorrow.

So the big idea of today's episode is this: when we use behaviour strategies in the classroom to address an issue, they don't just stop behaviour. They also teach children behaviour. Every time we respond to a behaviour in class, it tells our pupils something about us. It tells them what works to get them what they want or avoid what they don't want. It tells them what adults notice. It tells them how to avoid things that might feel difficult or uncomfortable. It tells them whether they need to make their behaviour bigger to make sure they get a response. And with whole classes, it teaches the kids routines. It teaches pupils whether the first instruction matters or if they can safely ignore the adult until their voice goes up three notches and the vein in their forehead makes a guest appearance and starts to throb. So when we evaluate behaviour strategies, we need to ask a deeper question, not just, "Did it work?" but, "What did I teach them in that moment?"

Let's take a common example: tactical ignoring. Now, I want to be very clear here. Tactical ignoring can be useful. There are absolutely times when a pupil makes a small comment, pulls a face, mutters something under their breath, or throws out a little hook, a bit of bait to see if the adult will bite. And if we respond to every single tiny behaviour we see in class, we end up pouring attention over exactly the thing that we want less of. So throughout this entire episode, obviously, I want you to hold in your head the reminder that every student's an individual. Every class actually acts like an individual. And what works for one child might not work for another.

If we did stop the lesson over and over to respond to a child that kept shouting out or engaging in some other form of attention-seeking behaviour or connection-seeking behaviour, whatever you want to call it, everyone gets frustrated, including the pupils who are actually trying to learn. And they're important too. So sometimes the right thing to do in that situation might well be not to bite. Well, not bite. Don't bite the pupils. That's the wrong word. You know what I mean. Don't take the bait, right? Definitely don't bite them. Don't instantly react when a pupil makes a silly comment. We keep our face neutral. We carry on with instruction. We give attention to the pupils who are doing the right thing. Now, that can be good practice depending on the situation.

But here's where it gets tricky. Situations are different. Tactical ignoring is only a solid, safe behaviour strategy to use when we understand what it is we're ignoring. Because we know the same surface behaviour in two separate students can have very different drivers. Imagine a pupil who keeps making daft comments during whole class input. Nothing huge. Just a running commentary like they're channelling the late great John Mottson. You're explaining the task, and they're muttering something to the child next to them. A couple of pupils laugh. You keep going. Then they do it again. You choose to ignore it. Over time, the comments might reduce in frequency. So on paper, at the end of the day, when you think back over what happened, it appears like the strategy has worked. Go you. Recorded in the behaviour log. Go home victorious.

But what if those comments weren't just about attention in the simple sense? What if they were the pupil's awkward attempt to form a connection with you or the students around them? What if that pupil feels invisible in class, and that's what was driving their behaviour? Or they have very low self-esteem, and they're trying to gain the admiration or the status they want from their peers? What if they've learned the early wounding message that they, as a human being, don't matter to their friends or their family or in school at all?

Now, I'm not saying every silly comment is a deep cry from the soul. Sometimes a silly comment is just a silly comment. Kids are kids. Adults aren't much better. We are all human. We all have good days. We all have bad days. But for that pupil with a long-term need, think about what we just taught with that tactical ignoring. In the short term, that approach may well have worked. But what have we reinforced in the long term? The pupil might learn, "When I try to connect with the adult, I get rejected." And then because of the way they've kind of interpreted your response, it kind of reinforces the sense that they don't matter. So they don't try to connect in the future because they've taken a big hit to their self-esteem. And that really matters because sometimes low-level behaviour doesn't disappear because the underlying need driving it has gone away. It might disappear because the pupil has learned from their perspective that they don't matter, and it's not worth trying.

So what's the answer? Do we never tactically ignore? No, that would be daft. It would be dogmatic. It would be taking a very broad brush. And that's not what I'm saying. You might choose to ignore that behaviour in the moment, but that doesn't then necessarily mean abandoning or never thinking about what happened. So we might not respond publicly to that in the moment. We might keep the lesson moving, skip over the behaviour. We may avoid giving the behaviour an audience so the other children copy it. But later, quietly, we then kind of go up to the student privately and say, "Earlier, I noticed you were making a few jokes while I was explaining the task, and I didn't want to go into it in front of everyone, but I did want to check in with you. Is something going on?"

Now, that is a completely different message. Now, the pupil learns the adult won't get pulled into every behaviour, but they've also learned I haven't been overlooked. And there's a balance there. Now, I don't want to get dragged too far into that example because we only did an episode on attention-seeking behaviour and how that can be a dead end in thinking about behaviour a few weeks back.

So what I want to do now is to move on to another example of a response that might work for an individual pupil in the short term but create problems in the long term. It's the example of removing work demands. And again, I'm going to say it over and over. We need to be balanced here. Sometimes reducing a demand is exactly the right thing to do. If a pupil is overwhelmed, anxious, overloaded, close to dysregulation, just pushing them harder is unlikely to help. In fact, it might push them straight up what I call the energy ladder into fight, flight, or freeze. So yes, we may reduce the task in the moment. We may offer them some scaffolding. We may give them a short regulation pause. We might make the first step easier or smaller. We may change how the pupil accesses the learning, and that can be good practice. And I'm not saying that is always a bad thing.

But here's the trap. Let's say a pupil refuses to start their work. The adult says, "Just do the first paragraph." The pupil refuses. The adult says, "Okay, just write the date and title," and the pupil refuses. And the adult then, thinking they've got nowhere to go and it's better not to escalate, says, "Okay, that's fine. Leave it for now." And then the pupil appears to calm down. You know, their shoulders relax. And in the moment, the tension drops, and the argument goes away. And the adult can then return to the rest of the class, and the whole room actually feels calmer.

But what might the pupil have learned in that situation? They may have learned if I refuse for long enough, then the adult always takes the demand away. And if that work was making them feel anxious or embarrassed because they weren't sure what to do or kind of overloaded, that relief is really powerful. Avoidance feels really good in the short term. If I'm scared of failing and the task goes away, my anxiety falls. If I don't know how to start a task and the adult leaves me alone, my stress kind of drops. And my brain then notices, and it says, "That worked. Do it again in the future." And this is not necessarily then the child being manipulative. They're learning, right?

And here's the really awkward bit. The adult is learning too because if removing the task ends a conflict, which they feel they might, in inverted commas, lose, the adult also feels relief. So next time when that situation comes up, the adult is then more likely to remove the task again. And we've got a pattern in place. The pupil learns to avoid the things they find challenging or unsettling or uncomfortable or difficult. And the adult kind of tacitly supports that. And the gap between the pupil and their learning gets wider and wider.

So what do we do instead? Well, today we might well reduce the stress. But then we've got to think about where does this go in the long term? What is the plan to help the students access their work? And we need that plan. We've got to get through today because we have to get through today before we can get tomorrow. But then we need to start thinking about how are we going to implement a plan consistently so they don't fall behind? We don't want them put under so much pressure or anxiety or whatever it is that they then get overwhelmed. But what might that look like to help them reengage with their work? So that might be giving them lots of choices about how the work is done, using work recovery breaks, incorporating some self-directed learning. It's going to depend on the situation. It's going to depend on the student. And especially for kids affected by demand anxiety, that's going to involve walking a tightrope where they can meet their potential on one side of the rope, and they can't cope emotionally on the other.

But that strategic thinking for persistent behaviour, not one-off behaviours, but persistent behaviour, that's where progress happens, not when the demands disappear completely, but when the pupil learns, "That was hard. I learned coping skills. I got through it." And I think at times we have to remember it is okay for pupils to feel uncomfortable, but there's a difference between being slightly out of your comfort zone and drowning in challenge. And that sweet spot means thinking about what works today might be making things difficult for everyone, you and the students, tomorrow. And I'm not pretending that tightrope is easy to walk. And some days you succeed with it, and some days you fail. But you need to work out where that tightrope is going in the long term.

By the way, if you want a practical way of thinking beneath the surface of the behaviours you're seeing in your classroom, we've got a free download that can help called the SEND Behaviour Handbook. It's designed to help you understand the needs that are driving your students' behaviour so you can choose the strategies that are more likely to help them. You can get it 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 straight through and get your own copy. Again, it's completely free. It's been downloaded over 100,000 times. And I know a lot of SENCOs tell me they download it, and then they print it out and leave copies in their staff room to help their team. And that's absolutely great.

Now let's move from individual pupils to whole classes because the same short-term, long-term effect happens in general classroom management too. So let's talk about shouting. And I'm not saying this to wag a finger. Most adults who work in schools have raised their voice at some point. If you work in education and claim you've never raised your voice once, I can only assume you either have the patience of a saint, you work alone in a cupboard, or you've only ever taught six children in a meadow while someone gently plays the harp nearby. And I'm going to admit, right, early in my career, I was a big shouter. I think because when I was a student teacher, that behaviour got reinforced for me. Once I was teaching a class, and they were all doing their own thing, talking all over me, and I wasn't quite sure what to do, I felt really out of my depth, so I raised my voice. And the teacher in the room then reinforced that when she spoke to me at the end of the day. She said it was exactly what those kids needed. It stopped them from misbehaving, and it got them back in line. And in the kind of absence of any other useful input in terms of behaviour management from my teacher training course, which was basically a vacuum in terms of classroom management and how to work with kids with needs who might present some challenging behaviour, that kind of then filled the gap. So I've definitely been guilty of this. Until I started working with kids with more complex needs and looking at what drove and caused their behaviour, I have done my fair share of shouting.

So okay, let's use me as an example of this. Earlier in my career, the class was noisy. The adult gave an instruction, me, in their normal voice. A couple of pupils responded. Others kept talking. I kept repeating the instruction, still didn't get enough response. The noise from the kids continued. I got frustrated and raised my voice. And now the class goes quiet. And again, in that moment, it felt like the strategy worked.

In the short term, the class's behaviour change reinforced that behaviour in me. It felt like that strategy worked. But over time, what I was doing was making things worse because what was I teaching them? It may teach the class that the first instruction that I give doesn't matter, and the second instruction doesn't matter. An instruction given in a normal speaking voice doesn't matter. The kids only learn that things get serious when they hear the cross voice, the loud voice. So the class learns to do what they want until they hear that signal. And the thing is, right, it was me teaching them that routine.

Without meaning to, I trained the class to wait until they heard me sounding cross, which for me was exhausting because now I had to keep escalating to get their attention and get the class to focus. So what's the alternative? Well, the alternative is not to become passive. It's not to whisper gently while the class behaves like someone's tipped a sack of ferrets in the back of the room and ignore the chaos. What I learned was you have to build long-term routines that don't depend on me raising my voice every time I wanted their attention.

It means deciding exactly what you're going to do to get the class's attention and teaching that routine to the kids when they're calm, practising it, rehearsing it, showing pupils what ready looks like, what it sounds like, what they should be doing with their hands, where their eyes go, what happens to the equipment that they've been using, how quickly I expect that transition to happen, making the students who do that well feel good about that behaviour, and then calmly following through when pupils don't respond and doing that relentlessly, even when it's hard, even when it's wearing your patience down.

So right, let's pull all this together because we've talked about lots of different examples, because the focus of this episode isn't shouting out. It isn't demand avoidance. It isn't tactical ignoring. It's that when a short-term behaviour strategy that appears to work now does damage in the long term, tactical ignoring can reduce behaviour, but in some cases, if we're not careful, it can leave a child feeling unseen. Removing a demand can reduce conflict, but if we're not careful, it can actually strengthen a pupil's avoidance. Shouting can get the class quiet, but if we're not careful, it can teach the class they can do what they want until the adult raises their voice.

In each case, the strategy may work in the moment, but we need to ask what it teaches the kids next time. Did it teach the pupil that adults are calm and predictable? Did it teach them a better way of asking for help? Did it teach them that they can tolerate a small amount of discomfort and still succeed? Did it teach the class that routines matter, or did it teach something else, or did it do some damage that I wasn't expecting? And again, of course, you have to sit everything I've said based on your knowledge of your individual pupils. What's helpful for one can set another student back, you know, academically or emotionally or socially.

That means when we're reviewing persistent behaviour, supporting staff, or talking through incidents, we need better questions, not just what did I do to make it stop, but what was driving it? What did the pupil learn about me or the adults? What do we want them to do next time instead? And how can we avoid this situation in the future without swerving the task? What skill needs teaching? What long-term support needs to be in place so the situation doesn't come up again in the future?

So the next time a strategy appears to stop a difficult situation, ask yourself three questions. The first question is, what happened immediately afterwards? That question matters because the short-term outcome is not irrelevant. Sometimes reducing that behaviour or disruption in the moment is exactly what we need to do. But don't leave it there. Secondly, if the behaviour is persistent, what need still might be there that's driving it today and in the future? This question stops us being fooled by the surface behaviour disappearing in the moment. And thirdly, what response is needed in the long term based on that? Because a strategy hasn't really worked if it buys us five minutes of calm today, but we have to deal with the same issues cropping up day after day after day after day, or has what we've done caused some emotional harm somehow unintentionally that we might not have noticed.

If you found today's episode useful, please take a moment to follow or subscribe in your podcast app. And if you know a colleague who's wrestling with a strategy that seems to work in the moment but keeps leading to the same behaviours again and again and again in this class, then share this episode with them. It might give them a different way of looking at what's going on and improve both the life of their students and their work life too. And don't forget, you can download your free copy of the SEND Behaviour Handbook from beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. I will put a direct link in the episode description. It's packed with practical ideas to help you look beyond surface behaviours and understand what might be driving them. Thank you for listening today. I'm off for a late-night bowl of Frosties because if you eat that junk in the evening, it's like a guilty pleasure and definitely not a late breakfast because you all know I stand on that. I hope you have a brilliant week and look forward to seeing you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.