Simon Currigan

Have you ever had to deal with behaviour that had a social root  - so, maybe a student's being left out of a social group, or had nasty rhumours spread about them, or had others deliberately post something unpleasant about them in an online group chat? There's a term for that: relational aggression, which is when kids weaponise social relationships to hurt other pupils, and it can push their victims toward anxiety, dysregulation, and sudden behaviour changes that adults might find hard to explain. And in today's episode, I'll show you how to understand relational aggression through the pain framework, so you can spot those issues earlier and respond in a way that reduces incidents of relational aggression in the future.

Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. My name's Simon Currigan, and I'm currently doing an adult paint-by-numbers of a cat drinking wine, eating cheese, and gambling with casino chips. No word of a lie. Look it up on Amazon; it's a real thing, and it looks gorgeous.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Simon, are you all right? Mentally?" And the answer is: not any worse than usual, clearly. But you have to understand that when you look at this painting, this cat has everything. It's got poise. It's got sophistication. It has a glass of red wine and a cheese board. The devil may care confidence that someone has just gone all in on a pair of twos. And as I'm sitting there, carefully painting the little piles of casino chips, trying not to turn the cat's face into something from a ghost story, it occurred to me that from the outside, the cat looks calm and in control and socially successful.

But who knows what's really going on underneath, yeah? Maybe it's been excluded from the other cat's poker night. Maybe a Siamese cat whose partner friendship group has said, "You can't sit with us." Maybe the tabby has removed it from the cat WhatsApp group. Maybe the whole bohemian cheese-and-wine thing is just a front for its deep social pain. And these are the kind of things that keep me awake at night. It's also a terrible segue into the topic of today's episode, which is relational aggression.

Although I will say, the paint-by-numbers cat thing is true. But stay with me anyway, because although the idea behind relational aggression is really important—and I'd be willing to bet it affects every single school in Britain—relational aggression sounds like something you'd find in a psychology textbook, probably in a chapter called "Peer-Mediated Social Hostility in Adolescent Environments," which is the kind of title that makes you want to put your head into a laminator, which is a terrible way, by the way, to end your life, because it just takes ages to warm up. Although I imagine it'd leave you with a beautiful-looking corpse with incredibly smooth skin.

So the idea behind this is incredibly important. Relational aggression is when a child uses relationships or belonging to a group or social status to hurt, control or punish another student. So instead of using their fists, they use friendships. Instead of shouting, they freeze a pupil out of their social group. Which means, while physical aggression uses the body as the weapon, relational aggression—as the name suggests, relational—uses relationships and belonging and social interaction as the weapon. And for children and young people, social belonging is not a small thing. And for some kids, especially adolescents, it's everything.

Let me give you a simple primary school example before we look at how this works in secondary. Imagine we've got a Year 5 pupil called Ava, and the class are doing a group task in science. The teacher asks the children to work in threes and make a poster about habitats. Ava moves toward two girls that she normally works with, but one of them sort of quietly says, under her breath, "Our group's already full."

Now, it isn't. There are only two of them in the group, and the teacher said to work in threes. But then they turn their backs, pull another child over, and start whispering to each other. So Ava stands there for a second, trying to work out what's just happened while the rest of the class are already getting started with the work. Then the teacher, who sort of sees Ava standing still but didn't see the social rejection that came before it, says something like, "Come on, Ava, move along. You need to join a group quickly and get started, please." And Ava says, "I don't want to. This lesson is stupid."

From the adult's perspective, that might look like it came out of nowhere, like it was an overreaction. But from Ava's point of view, she's just been publicly rejected by what she thought were her friends. And now, on top of that, an adult is drawing attention to the fact that she isn't part of a group. So her brain isn't thinking, "How can I engage successfully in this science activity?" It's thinking, "Everyone can see I've been left out." And now the adult is drawing attention to it. The behaviour to the adult looks like it's related to the task, but the stress underneath it is social.

This is where the PAIN framework helps us make sense of what's going on. Now, PAIN stands for Primary Areas of Internal Need, and it's a way of looking beneath the surface of a behaviour to ask, "What's really driving the behaviour that we're seeing in our pupil? What stress is behind it?" Because behaviour that looks random is often the result of different stressors stacking together, and so the pupil doesn't have the capacity to cope anymore. And one of the areas in the PAIN framework is integration and belonging. In plain English, that means asking, "Does the pupil feel accepted as part of the social group? Do they feel safe with their peers?"

Because if the answer to those two questions is no, school becomes a very stressful place for that student. Suddenly, every group task or playtime might become a threat or a time when they may experience rejection. And by the way, a lot of listeners have been in touch asking if we have a download about the PAIN framework, and I don't just yet. If you want to know more about it, then you'll have to go back to previous episodes for the moment. But I am writing about this more deeply in a book from Routledge, all about dysregulation. And what I'll do is, as I get closer to completing that, I'll also produce a free download that kind of works with the text, that links well with the book, so the two work together well as a whole. And I'll let you know about that as and when it happens here in the podcast.

But you can see from Ava's example why relational aggression matters so much for behaviour. Because although there's no physical injury underneath, what we've got is a pupil whose sense of belonging has just taken a punch in the face. And that's part of the problem: relational aggression, because it's not obvious, because it's not that visible, it's hard to pin down. It can be subtle. Students can engage in plausible deniability, and as the adult, it can be hard to get to the bottom of, because it feels like trying to untangle a set of he-said-she-said arguments.

Kids can use phrases like, "We weren't being mean. We just didn't want to play with her today," or "It was only a joke. She always overreacts," or "I didn't say anything," or "She's just sensitive." And yes, children do fall out, and friendships do change. Pupils don't have to be best friends with everyone. And we have to be careful, you know, not to pathologise normal changes in friendships. But there is a big difference between ordinary friendship changes and where a pupil's engaging in a repeated pattern of behaviours to exercise power at the expense of one other individual. And that's the distinction we need to look out for here.

And this isn't just girls being horrible to each other. That's really narrow, and it's not accurate. Boys also use relational aggression too. Younger children use it. Older children use it. It happens in primary school, secondary schools, playgrounds, corridors, classrooms, lunch halls, online spaces. In primary school, it might sound like, "You can't come to my party," or "If you play with him, you can't be my friend." In secondary school, it might be a group chat going silent the moment someone posts or joins the group on social media, or an unpleasant screenshot being shared, or a pupil being removed from a group chat, or a group deciding who is socially acceptable today and who's been voted off the island, so to speak.

And let's be honest, secondary school pupils don't need a whiteboard, a staff meeting, or a ratified friendship policy to organise this. They can run a full social exclusion campaign from a phone screen at 10:47 p.m. while technically being asleep, according to their parents.

So let's look at what this might look at in a secondary school. So imagine we've got a Year 9 pupil called Jayden. He arrives at period 3, already wound up, and he sort of keeps his coat on, doesn't get his equipment out, and when the teacher asks him to move seats, he mutters something under his breath. The teacher challenges him, and Jayden says, "Why are you always having a go at me?" and walks out. On a behaviour log, that incident might go down as defiance and leaving the class without permission.

But when we drill down into actually what happened, we can see that Jayden, despite his behaviour, is the victim here. Because the night before, someone posted an embarrassing screenshot of him in the group chat, and the other pupils reacted with laughing emojis. One friend didn't defend him. Another removed him from the chat after he saw some of the reactions of the other members of the group. And by the time Jayden walked into school, he had already experienced humiliation and rejection and loss of status. So when the teacher then asks him to move seats in front of the class, he then felt like, "Well, everyone's looking again at me and laughing at me in public." And that's when the behaviour we see in school and in the classroom starts to make more sense.

And the thing is, in secondary schools, whereas relational aggression used to be done through whispers and kind of in-person public exclusion, now it's fully high-tech. It's done through phones and social media and group chats. So this is tricky, because we do still need boundaries. If Jayden walks out of class, handles things the wrong way, there still needs to be a follow-up for that. If Ava speaks rudely to an adult, that still needs sorting out. But if we're never curious about why that happened, and we don't understand the social stress that was causing those problems, we're probably going to see the same behaviour over and over and over. And in truth, it's probably going to escalate and get worse. Or maybe the student will bottle up the emotional issues that they're struggling with, which will make things much worse for them in the future in terms of their mental health.

That's why staff need to be curious. Not naive or gullible or believe every single excuse for inappropriate behaviour, but curious. And with relational aggression, a red flag can sometimes actually be a sudden behaviour change. So bear that in mind. When we see or we suspect relational aggression is at play, we need to ask, "What was happening socially before we saw this behaviour in class? Could it be related to some sort of exclusion or embarrassment or rejection or status loss? Is the same person, the same student, always left out? Who is always laughed at? Is there someone who always controls the group chat or the game or who decides who is in and who is out?" And we'll only get to those answers if we ask the right questions and, of course, have a trusting relationship with the student or students involved.

And this links to another part of the PAIN framework: contribution and care. Integration and belonging is about whether the pupil feels they can get their needs met in the group. Do they feel safe? Contribution and care is about how they support other pupils. Can they raise them up and celebrate their achievements? Can they take part in reciprocal relationships? In everyday language, it's about whether a pupil can contribute to the group in a healthy way. Things like, can they give way to others' opinions? Can they lead without controlling? Can they sacrifice what they would like for the needs of the group?

Because there are two sides to this. And some pupils who use relational aggression aren't sitting there with, like, a little villain moustache stroking a cat and plotting, "Today I shall destabilise the social ecosystem of Year 10," and then laughing maniacally. And you know that cat? In my experience, from my paint-by numbers, he's probably drinking wine, eating cheese, and gambling. Often, in terms of relational aggression, that student, the aggressor, is often struggling themselves in some aspect. And what we're seeing is a pupil who has their own poor pro-social skills, their own anxiety about their own status, or has a strong need to control the group because that control makes them feel safe or important or strong for some reason.

Meaning, if a pupil keeps excluding others, the answer isn't just to tell them, "Stop being mean." That might be necessary as a limit, but it isn't an intervention that deals with why they were engaging in that behaviour in the first place. They may need explicit teaching or work around how to lead a group fairly, how to disagree without withdrawing a friendship, how to tolerate people you don't 100% get along with, how to make room for other people's ideas, and how to repair a relationship properly when you've caused harm.

And by repair, I don't mean the classic forced apology, where the child stares at the floor and says, "Sorry," which we all know means they only regret being caught. Real repair means understanding the impact of your actions, taking responsibility for them, making amends, and then changing your own behaviour in the future. And like any skill, some pupils need it taught, modelled, and practised. So this is actually a really complex issue.

So what can schools actually do about it? The research into anti-bullying and relational aggression points towards something practical. We shouldn't treat this as a one-child problem. Relational aggression needs a group to be effective. It can only be used when there's an audience. I'm talking about here, the other kids who stand by and laugh and watch and spread the rumor and pile into the text chat afterwards. The aggressor relies on them for status and power, and often the audience stays silent because deep down, they're scared of being next. They're scared of what happens if they stand up to the aggressor. That means our response has to look beyond the child being victimised. We need to understand what the group is doing that keeps this form of bullying going. And that matters because punishment on its own often won't be enough to change behaviour when that behaviour is being endorsed by the group. So I'll suggest three practical strategies here.

First, for repeated incidents of a student having difficulties with their behaviour or a sudden change in behaviour, be curious and look at social stress as a possible factor. Instead of asking only what triggered that student's behaviour, remember to think about what's happening socially before the incident happened. Had there been some form of embarrassment or rejection or status loss? Has something happened online? Are there repeated patterns of incidents involving the same pupils? If you use the pain framework, you're looking especially at integration and belonging, anxiety and emotions, and possibly contribution and care. You're asking, "Was what I saw in class the result of a build-up over time, the final straw that broke the camel's back?"

Secondly, teach the bystanders what to do. And I mean teach it explicitly, not just be kind, because be kind is so vague it can mean almost anything. It's like telling someone to drive safely when what they actually need is, "Stop reversing into the pond. Stop. Brake. It's the middle pedal." Sorry, just a flashback there. Pupils need to know what to say and what to do in the moment. In primary school, that might sound like, "That's not fair. Let her join in," or "I'm not passing that message on," or "Come and sit with us. Ignore that." In secondary, it might be, "Leave it. This is getting nasty. It's too much." Or "No, I'm not screenshotting that," or "Don't put that in the group chat. It's not fair." The point is, we need to give bystanders these concrete responses and scripts they can reach for when they see something they don't like, something they wouldn't like being done to them. If pupils don't know what to do in that situation, what might happen then is they might freeze or go along with the dominant child because they're scared of becoming the next target. So we have to teach it, not just wish for it. And also, we might also need to set up private back channels to pass this information onto us if they need it to avoid feeling that they might be victimised by the aggressor.

Thirdly, don't assume pupils know how to use friendship well at any age. Some pupils, whether they have SEND or SEMH needs or not, find this especially hard because reading social cues, managing emotions, coping with rejection, understanding another person's perspective, or communicating clearly may all be areas of difficulty. And especially as kids get older, these social and pro-social skills become way more complex. I think of the social side like maths, really. A good analogy for this is the way we think about maths. We don't teach addition in Year 1, and it's like, "Job done. They can add now." The complexity of the maths we expect increases as the children get older. So they might start with adding whole numbers and then progress to decimals and then adding fractions and then adding algebraic factors and then adding complex numbers. So we have to keep reteaching maths and what addition means at different levels of complexity. And it's the same on the social side. It becomes more complex with age. So we have to go back to what healthy friendship looks like when you're 14, because it's not the same as when you were 10 or when you were 8 or when you were 4. We teach what exclusion sounds like at different stages. We teach how to disagree without humiliating. We teach what to do when a joke stops being funny. We teach how to include someone without feeling like you've lost control of the group or that you've become less important or you've lost status. We teach pupils how to lead, how to make things right after someone's been hurt emotionally or socially. And it's a job that's never done. So we need to keep revisiting it on a spiral curriculum and these differing levels of complexity.

And if you're supporting pupils where SEND, SEMH, and behaviour are kind of overlapping and they're messy, and you're not quite sure what's causing the behaviours you're seeing in school, this is exactly why we created the free SEND Behaviour Handbook, because persistent long-term behaviour is actually rarely simple, and it's easy to misinterpret anxiety or social rejection or emotionally heightened behaviour the wrong way. And that's where the information in the book comes in. It helps you look beneath the surface to link behaviours you might see in class with possible underlying needs. It helps you think about what might be driving behaviour and to start matching the support you give a pupil to potential needs. And it comes with loads of fact sheets on conditions like ADHD and PDA and ODD and more. You can download it for free from beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the free resources link and you'll see it at the top of the page. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on free resources and you'll see it at the top of the page. And I'll also put a direct link to the handbook in the episode description. Get your free copy today. It's been downloaded over 100,000 times.

Okay, before we finish, I want to come back to the main point. The damage caused by relational aggression is easy to underestimate because often it doesn't look big or dramatic to adults. There's no shouting, there's no fighting. There might not even be this big obvious incident to log. But for pupils experiencing it, the impact of relational aggression can be huge. It can result in shame or anger or anxiety or humiliation and a deep sense of being unsafe in the social group.

So we have to think about how we support that student, both as an individual, how we help them now they're experiencing this form of bullying, and how we have policies that help stop this happening to other pupils in the future. But just as importantly, we also do need to think about the pupils causing the harm with more depth. We have to ask what's driving them to do those things in the first place. We have to ask what need or deficit is being met here in an unhealthy way. And that's not to excuse their behaviour or be victim-blaming or say that there shouldn't be any consequences for what they're doing. There absolutely should be consequences, and the person who's being victimised here is super important.

But if we want those behaviours, that relational aggression, to reduce, we can't just tell pupils to be nice and that being unkind is against the rules and hope for the best, because we already do that and it would have worked already. We have to change the group norms, teach the bystanders what to do, and help the pupils build the social problem-solving skills that help them to belong and feel important without needing to push someone else out, without their feeling good being at the expense of another pupil. And it's easy to kind of create a monster of the pupils who are doing that to characterise them in that way. But actually, they're doing it for reasons too. And if we don't address those reasons, we're just going to go around and around and around in circles. So it's a complex issue.

If you found today's episode helpful, don't forget to download the SEND Behaviour Handbook at beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. And if you know a colleague who's dealing with social problems like this in their class or potential relational aggression, make sure you send them a direct link to this episode. You can use the share button in your podcast app, and it will help you send them a link in a text or in Messenger or by email or WhatsApp or Teams or whatever your messaging app du jour happens to be. Thanks for listening today for this difficult topic.

I'm off to paint a cat playing poker and shoveling back wine, and I look forward to seeing you next time on School Behaviour Secrets. I hope you have a brilliant week. Until then.