Simon Currigan

Have you noticed a spike in behaviour at this time of year, particularly around kids that struggle with anxiety, with more kids wound up and tense, so you get more dysregulated behaviour, and you feel like you're treading on eggshells in your classroom? After working with schools for 18 years around SEMH and behaviour, I've seen this change come up time and time again around exams and transition days and secondary transfer, moving to new classes, and the slow, often difficult descent classes experience towards the end of term. So, in today's episode, I'll explain why some pupils become anxious and dysregulated even though an event that's stressing them out might happen far into the future, and I'll share a simple 3-step method that anyone can use for helping them manage that anxiety today. Hello, I'm Simon Currigan.

Hi there, and welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and if you've ever seen me on video, spoiler alert, I look balder in real life. If you thought the camera added 10 pounds, then in my case, it literally subtracts hair. I'm basically one strong overhead light away from becoming a human lighthouse. Put me under fluorescent lighting in a school hall, and ships start adjusting their course. Children gather round for storytime because they think I'm a wizard's magical orb. Small aircraft request landing permission.

None of this is ideal, but on the upside, if ever there's a power cut during a staff meeting, just point me at a whiteboard and it's business as usual. Anyway, hair loss aside, in today's episode, we're talking about the link between behaviour and anxiety, particularly at this time of year. You've got exams and transition and new classes. Yeah. Kids moving schools, end-of-year disruption. And we're going to look at why some pupils start to struggle even when some stressful event that they're fearing isn't going to happen until way off in the future, months away. But before we get into that, if you find the episode helpful, please do remember to subscribe and share it with colleagues who are supporting pupils through exams or transitions or experiencing end-of-year anxiety, because it might give them a new way of looking at or understanding a student that they're finding difficult to support right now.

So, let's start with something really practical. I want you to imagine a pupil called, say, Lily. She's in Year 6. For most of the year, Lily has coped pretty well. She's, like, had the odd problem here or there, like all kids do, but nothing that's caused any major concern. She's doing okay and hasn't needed any extra support from the SENCO, that sort of thing. Okay.

Then, as the summer term kind of rolls on, something just changes. She keeps asking the same question again and again. What happens on transition day to secondary?

Will I be with my friends? What happens if I get lost? What if I don't know where the toilets are? What if the teachers are strict? What if the older pupils pick on me? At first, everyone in class is patient with her, so the adults answer all of her questions and they reassure her and they say, "Don't worry, you'll be fine." But then the questions just keep rolling.

Not once, not twice, twice, but over and over again. And as the adult, it feels like appearing on the same episode of Mastermind over and over. Same specialist subject, same questions, same answers, same increasingly exhausted adult. And then Lily's behaviour starts to change beyond that. She starts to snap at her friends or refuses to join in with a transition activity talking about secondary school. And she says she doesn't care about the move and she becomes silly during lessons, which is completely out of character. So she rips up a worksheet when she makes a mistake, snaps at the other children.

One afternoon when a teaching assistant asks her to put her reading book away and come to join the rest of the class for whole class time, Lily says, "No, you can't make me." So then you've got refusal. And suddenly the conversation in school starts to change. Adults start saying things like, "She's being rude now," or, "She's choosing not to engage because she knows that she's not going to be here much longer. She's trying to control everything. Maybe she just doesn't like change and she's taking it out on us. And here's the thing.

I understand why staff and other pupils might say that because this is what her behaviour looks like on the surface. It looks like chosen refusal, especially as Lily's done so well in the past. But if we only look at the surface behaviour, we miss what's happening underneath that's driving it. Lily isn't just reacting to being told to put her book away or come and join the other kids for whole class time. Her mind, which is like all brains, is basically a prediction machine, and it's thinking about the dangers of what's coming her way in the future, and it's bringing that danger from the future into the present. And now her body's reacting like there's a physical danger in the room that might be pushing her towards fight, flight, freeze. It's escalating her emotions. in this moment, despite that danger being in the future.

So, all the danger of a new school and new adults and new rules and different toilets and getting lost and being separated from her friends, each of those is like a worry that's being shoved into like this emotional backpack that she's carrying around with her that's weighing her down. At the start of term, at the beginning of the summer, that backpack was fine. It had some natural worries in it from everyday life, but it was manageable. But by June, it's like a suitcase that's been packed for a 2-week holiday in Marbella by someone who packs for, you know, every eventuality, warm days, cold days, maybe put in a coat or two, a couple of ski gloves and a snorkel as well. And maybe we need the wellies. Each extra tiny thing gets added. And then the teacher saying, "Put your book away."

Boom. It's like the zip bursts, if that's not a mixed metaphor, because suitcases don't go boom and zips don't go boom, but you get the idea. Yeah. Suddenly, in this backpack, it's stretched beyond capacity and suddenly all those fears are spilling out because the fears of the future are being mixed up with her worries about today. And that's the key idea for today, really, that anxiety in general is a lie. It's usually never about something that's happening now, today. It projects out into the future and grabs hold of fears that are days or weeks or months ahead and makes them feel like they're happening today in our bodies.

So it doesn't wait like logically until the exam paper actually lands on the desk to kick in, or the transition day begins to kick in, or the child walks through the door of their new school. It makes the body prepare in advance based on what it predicts might happen, and that's usually the worst possible case. And then the brain thinks something is threatening it right now, and it starts responding as if that threat is already happening. So the pupil may be sitting in your classroom on Tuesday afternoon, but biologically, a bit like they've stepped into a time machine, they're already in next week's maths test, or an exam, or September's new form group in a new school. So, their shoulders tense up, their stomach gets tight, their thinking becomes narrower and focuses on threats, and that makes their ability to tolerate and cope with normal classroom frustrations and demands or annoyances go right down. And then we come along and say, "Right everyone, get your whiteboards out," and the child reacts as though we've just asked them to defuse a bomb while riding a unicycle on a tightrope over a field of cactuses. I mean, okay, From that, you can obviously work out that I've internalized way too many Road Runner episodes, but you get the idea.

Now, that doesn't mean that we excuse all of Lily's behaviours or ignore disruptive behaviour or let pupils do whatever they want. Boundaries and expectations are important because they act like guardrails that help our students develop their ability to contain and manage their emotions, which is an important adult skill. As human beings, we can't just let our emotions spill everywhere all of the time. That's not healthy. Just as locking up your emotions all of the time isn't healthy. Those are two opposite extremes of the scale. But if we misread her behaviour, then we choose the wrong strategy.

And when we choose the wrong strategy, we don't just fail to help kids like Lily, we can actually accidentally make their problems bigger. So let's take exam anxiety. A pupil in Year 11 walks into a science lesson and refuses to start a revision task. So the teacher says, "Come on, you need to practise this.

Your exam is next week." And the pupil pushes the paper away and says, "I don't care. This is pointless." Now, on the surface, again, that may look like poor attitude or defeatism or even laziness. And yes, some teachers do have a remarkable ability to make everything in life sound pointless regardless of how good it is. You could offer them free pizza, a trip to Alton Towers, and a suitcase full of cash, and a lot of them would still say, "Yeah, whatever." But with exam anxiety, "I don't care" actually often translates into, "I care, so I can't cope with the possibility of failing."

Or it can translate into, "If I don't try, I don't then have to test whether I'm good enough to pass this exam because I can't cope with the result or the truth that might expose." It could mean this task is making the exam feel too real, too present, and I need to get away from that scary feeling. So, when we respond only to the words our students say by repeating things like, "You do care. Stop being silly. You should care," we miss the point and kind of try to fix the wrong problem, which is whether they care or not. So, they then get stuck and don't make progress. Making progress involves digging into the true root cause of their reaction and what their words are actually telling us.

That's why anxiety doesn't always show up in the way we think it's going to show up in class. For instance, right, some kids internalise their anxiety. So you get kind of avoidance behaviour under the surface, which is often hard to see. So you might see a pupil who withdraws or is very quiet in class or ask to go to the toilet repeatedly, or they complain about stomachaches, or they seek reassurance again and again. Or at the opposite end, maybe they mask all day long before falling apart at home for their parents. They may look even okay on the outside, but they're paddling hard beneath the surface to stay afloat. They're kind of like the swan of emotional dysregulation.

Calm on top, absolute chaos underneath. And just to be clear before we go any further, my advice is not to feed them breadcrumbs. That will not work. I'll get to what to do in a minute. For some other kids, anxiety is external. So that's the pupil who argues back or refuses to do the work or becomes silly or tries to control everything that's happening, or maybe they rip up their work or lash out at their friends. It's the pupil who says, "I'm not doing it," when what they mean is, "I'm trying to tell you that I've got a big feeling I'm finding it hard to cope with.

So that external anxiety is something that's big and obvious that you can see. It gets noticed because often it interrupts the lesson. Internalised anxiety often gets missed because it doesn't. But both of those pupils need our help. The child who turns over a table and the one who's sitting there quietly at the back causing no problem, but is actually sitting there with their stomach in knots, they might both be experiencing the same underlying problem, the same underlying anxiety. The difference is what that distress looks like. One child's anxiety goes outwards and the other's goes inwards.

So what can we actually do to help them? How do we help these students? Because it's all very well saying, look at the underneath behaviour. But what you need is something practical, something you can use. So here's a really simple 3-step approach to help students that you don't need a degree in mental health to use. And those steps are: name it, shrink it, rehearse it. That's name it, shrink it, rehearse it.

That's the framework for today. I'm going to walk you through it now. Step 1 is to name it. This means, Helping the pupil connect what they're feeling in their body with the events that might be coming up, because they might not join the dots between their anxiety and this future event. They just feel wrong on the inside. Now, you don't have to do that in a dramatic way, not in a, "Let's all gather round and inspect your emotional wounds in an intervention kind of way." All you need is a calm, simple conversation, a simple observation that helps the child understand themselves a bit better and what's happening in their body.

So instead of saying things like, "Stop worrying," or, "There's nothing to be anxious about," or, "You'll be fine," we might say, "I wonder if your brain is trying to get ready for next week," or, "It makes sense to me that your body feels on edge when there's a lot changing in your life." Notice the difference. We're not feeding the anxiety. We're not saying the worry is definitely true. We're not sticking labels on things that are sometimes unhelpful for children. We're not medicalising what they're going through, but we're helping the child spot what's happening inside them and make sense of it. This matters because many pupils don't experience anxiety as a clear thought.

They don't sit there thinking, I'm currently experiencing anticipatory anxiety linked to a forthcoming transition event, because kids, you know, don't talk like educational psychologists writing an EHCP report at midnight. Instead, they experience anxiety as feeling sick or having a hot face or feeling their heart beating really quickly in their chest, and they don't connect that to the cause of the anxiety. So when we name it for them, we help them build like this bridge between the feeling they're experiencing and the root cause. So they think, "Ah, this is my body responding to something that it thinks might be difficult in the future." So here's a quick example. Let's say Liam keeps asking, "Who's teaching us tomorrow?

Who's teaching us tomorrow?" And you answer him, and then 5 minutes later, he says it again, and then again, and then again. And at some point, it's tempting to say, "Liam, I've already told you this." And you have, right?

You absolutely have. You've told him so many times who's teaching him tomorrow that the answer is now engraved in your soul. But if we look underneath, Liam may not be asking because he forgot what you said. He may be asking because the answer only calms him down for a few minutes, and then the worry returns. So the question comes back. In that moment, naming it might sound like this. Liam, I've noticed your brain seems to be stuck on what's happening tomorrow.

And I think that might be because not knowing who's teaching you makes you feel a bit stressed or uncertain. So let's write down what we do know now and then make a plan for the bit that we don't. And if you want a practical tool or system to help pupils manage these emotions, we've got a free guide you can download from our website called How to Help Children Manage Anger and Other Strong Emotions. Despite the word anger in the title, the approach works just as well for anxiety or fear or frustration or stress, because the key idea is helping pupil notice bigger emotions earlier on before they hit crisis point, before they move into dysregulation. It includes a simple emotions tracker where people rate the strengths of their emotions and then learn how to take action before they get to the point where their brain is completely overwhelmed by that feeling. So if you'd like that free guide, head to beaconschoolsupport.co.uk, click on the resources tab, the free resources tab. And you'll find the guide to managing strong emotions at the top of the page.

So that's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the free resources tab and look for managing strong emotions. Also, I'll put a direct link to that resource in the episode description. So all you have to do is open up your podcast app and click straight through, and I'll mention that link again at the end in case you are on a treadmill or driving and you can't reach a pen easily right now. So, step 2 in the process is shrink the anxiety. Now, anxiety loves threats to be vague. It loves big, blurry, ill-defined worries.

Secondary school is a huge concept that's actually very vague. Exams is a concept that's huge. A new class is a huge idea. September, actually, for some children can be a huge idea. And for some pupils, those words are not specific enough. They're not real specific events. They're like giant horsemen of the apocalypse.

And when that kind of big event doesn't contain enough detail, it's too vague, their anxious brain fills in the gaps, usually with the worst possible version of what might actually happen. So if we say, "Don't worry about secondary school," the child's brain responds by saying, "Excellent, thanks. I'll now imagine being lost in a corridor the size of Heathrow Airport, Well, every Year 11 pupil points and laughs at me. So that's not helpful. So what we do instead is we help shrink the threat by making the future more concrete and smaller. So it's easier to imagine in detail. Instead of saying, "You're going to secondary school in September," we break it down.

We say things like, "On transition day, you'll come through this entrance, and then this adult will meet you." They will take you to this room. You'll sit with these pupils. The first activity will be this. If you need the toilet, this is exactly what you do. If you feel unsure, this is the adult you can ask. And what we're doing is we're taking this kind of like big, huge, blurry fear and turning it into a series of steps that the pupil can picture.

And the clearer the picture, the less the anxiety. For exams, it's exactly the same. We could say you've got your maths paper tomorrow, and that might technically be true, but for anxious people, it may like kind of hit them like tomorrow your entire future is gonna be decided by fractions. So what we do is we shrink it by making it clearer and more concrete. We say, tomorrow morning, you'll come into school as normal. Your bags will go here. You're going to sit in this exact seat.

The adult will read the instructions, which you've heard before. You'll open the paper when you're told. You start by doing the questions you can do. If you get stuck, which will happen, and expect that because everyone gets stuck in an exam. You'll all be in the same position. Do what we did in class. Put a mark next to that question and move on to the next.

If your body starts to feel panicky, pause, but put both feet on the floor. Take one slow, long breath and look for a question you think you can start. Step 3 is to rehearse it. This is the step we often skip because school is busy and everything's moving at speed. We tell the pupils the plan like I just did, but then we assume they can use that information when they're stressed. And that is a big assumption. You can explain a plan once while the child is calm, but the truth is, when they need it, it sort of vanishes the moment their body moves into threat mode.

It's a bit like going out and buying a fire extinguisher, leaving it in a box, never reading the instructions, and then hoping you'll work out how to use it calmly when the toaster starts throwing out flames in the kitchen. Good luck with that. And start buying cheap toasters, by the way. So rehearsal means practising the plan before the stressful moment arrives, before they need to use it out in the real world. If a pupil's anxious about the exam hall, walk the route when the corridors and the hall is empty. Let them stand in the door they'll walk through. Let them sit where they'll sit on the day.

Practise what they'll do if they don't understand an instruction, in context, in the right room. If a pupil's anxious about transition day, look through photos of the locations and adults. Practise them saying, "I'm not sure where to go." Walk through the first 5 minutes in a PowerPoint or looking at the photos. If a pupil freezes when they feel overwhelmed, practise using the emotions tracker when they are in sort of a lower stress, not when they're in crisis mode. Because the truth is, if the first or second time you try to use a strategy is in the real world during a crisis, the odds are you are going to fail. That's not because they're bad strategies.

It's because the child's brain is already too far up the emotional stress ladder to use them. Think about it from your own life. Imagine someone teaches you how to change a tyre while your car is already halfway off the hard shoulder of the motorway. The rain is bouncing off your face and a lorry's just gone past close enough to rearrange your hair, you know, if you had some. For me, I'd just feel a breeze. In that moment, you're not in the best state to learn. You needed that information earlier in calm conditions, and you needed to practise that information in calm conditions, ideally with a cup of tea and no threat of becoming part of the motorway furniture itself.

And it's the same for our pupils. If we want them to ask for help, we need them to practise the words. If we want them to use a breathing strategy, we need them to practise it when their body is calm enough to learn. This is something I go into more detail about in the book I'm writing on dysregulation.

I'm 40,000 words in now. That's a lot of words. And a big section of that book is about how do we move away from just setting kids targets and how do we get them to actually implement and use helpful strategies in the moment when they need it. And I go into loads more detail about how to do that. That book won't be out for a while yet, but I will let you know more about it as we get closer to its release. Okay, so it's time to wrap up, but there's one final important point I'd like to make. Well, two points.

Bear with me. The first is supporting anxiety isn't about removing every difficult feeling from a pupil's life. That's unrealistic. And the second is our aim isn't to try and cure that anxiety, because realistically, that's something that's really hard to do, even impossible to do, even for experienced therapists. Our aim is to help students manage and cope with anxiety, and those anxieties will come and go and change over time, and that's to be expected. That's the way many students and human beings are built. So it's not like anxiety strategies and support is a one and done from the adult's point of view.

It's about repeated input over time, and you should expect that. So let's bring this together. At this time of year, some pupils become more anxious because it's like they're stepping into that time machine and bringing stresses and worries and fears about the future into the moment today. That could be exams, it could be transition, it might be the end of a familiar routine. It might be the thought of September sitting in the back of their mind like a tiny goblin with a clipboard asking deeply unhelpful questions. And that anxiety can then show up at this time of year in our classrooms and look like withdrawal, like lots of reassurance seeking, like attention seeking, like perfectionism. It could look like avoidance.

It could look like refusal or irritability or silliness. or wanting control, or more dysregulation, which is why pupil behaviour often changes in June and July. The practical response is to name it, shrink it, and rehearse it. And remember, if you'd like a practical tool to help pupils notice and manage those strong emotions earlier, download our free guide, How to Help Children Manage Anger and Other Strong Emotions, at beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the free resources tab Scroll down just a little way at the top and you'll see you can click and download it for free. It's designed to help pupils understand what's happening inside them, to track their emotions and use calming strategies before those feelings become too big to handle. And I've put a direct link to that in the episode description. All you have to do is tap on this episode in your podcast app and it'll bring up some text and you'll see a direct link.

If you found today's episode useful, please subscribe and leave us a review. It helps other teachers, senkos, and school leaders find the podcast. And just as importantly, it gives me something encouraging to read while I'm checking whether the webcam in my office has made me look even more bald than usual. At this point, I take every 5-star review I use to encourage me to engage in some concrete imagery to picture adding one imaginary hair back to my head. So leave that review for education, do it for inclusion, but most of all, do it for my self-esteem about my scalp. I hope you have a brilliant week, and I can't wait to see you On the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.