00:00:00 Simon Currigan

Have you ever noticed how some classes seem to just completely go off the boil in the final week of term, just when everyone's supposed to be relaxing and enjoying themselves? The truth is, the end of the school year isn't just a countdown to the holidays; it's a major transition that stirs up behaviour and emotions and uncertainty. In this episode, I'll show you how to keep the end of term positive and calm, and meaningful but still fun, without throwing all of your routines out of the window and accidentally turning your classroom into a low-budget zoo.

Hi there, my name's Simon Currigan, and welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. Now, I've never shared this with you before, but when we met, my wife's nickname for me was, can you guess, Simon the BEEP. Turns out at the time she didn't realise it was one of the worst swear words, and that nickname lasted for three years. I kind of liked it. It's a true story. It turns out she was a perceptive judge of character who just got to the finish line before years of students and colleagues would get to the same conclusion. I don't know why I've shared that at all.

In today's episode, we're going to be talking about how to keep the end of term sane, because in the final week before the summer holidays, behaviour can definitely go off the boil. Pupils get tired or emotional or anxious or silly or clingy or unsettled or all of the above, sometimes within the same lesson. So today we're going to look at how to manage all that. So the last weeks of term are still fun, but not chaotic, and how to help your pupils end the year feeling proud and safe and ready for what's going to happen in their futures.

But before we go any further, as ever, if you're finding this episode useful or you found any of the previous episodes of School Behaviour Secrets useful, please take a second to like the episode and subscribe or follow the podcast, depending on what app you're using to listen. And if you know a teacher or a SENCO or a school leader who is currently limping towards the summer holidays like a dehydrated badger in a cardigan, please share this episode with them too. It might help them get through the final few days of term with a little more calm and a little less eye twitching.

So let's start with the big idea for today. A few episodes back, in episode 280, we looked at how anxiety can build around transition and exams and new classes and the move to secondary school. So if you want more detail on pupils who are already worrying about what's coming next, I suggest you go back and listen to that episode, because it gives you a simple way of helping them make sense of those future-based worries.

But today, I want to look at this from a slightly different angle. I want to focus on the final week of term itself, not the transition day, not the move to secondary, not September, but those last few days in your actual classroom when everything starts to fray at the edges. So you get the timetable changes because there's leave as assemblies and so on, and the normal work pattern changes because it's about winding down and signalling, you know, the end of this year's curriculum. The kids start looking at you differently because, well, a few reasons. They know they don't have to maintain a relationship with you anymore because a new set of teachers are coming along the conveyor belt, and maybe they're comparing you to the teacher that they're going to have in the future.

And what often happens in that final week is that schools say, "It's nearly the holidays. Let's relax, let's have some fun, and let's ease off just a bit and hope offset doesn't come during that window." And I agree with that. Children should enjoy the end of the year. You should enjoy it too, assuming you can still remember what joy feels like by that point in July. But here's where that can sometimes go wrong. We relax by taking away too much structure all in one go.

So when the normal timetable disappears, from a student's perspective, our expectations for them start to get kind of fuzzy. The familiar rhythm of the day and the week goes, and pupils are suddenly doing like parties and films and quizzes and assemblies and taking down displays or transition work or goodbye activities, and there's non-uniform days. And in the middle of all that, we sometimes wonder why behaviour becomes a problem, because we see that that last week as it should be fun. The kids should be enjoying themselves and having a positive time. But from the child's point of view, that final week can be a very odd kind of unsettling mixture of activities. It's exciting, but it is different. It's fun, but it's unpredictable. It's happy, but it's emotional. It's relaxed, but actually, in social and emotional terms, there's actually quite a lot to regulate. It's quite demanding because you have to rein in those feelings of excitement and sadness and happiness and regulate them all at the same time. It's like someone's taken the normal school day for your kids and genetically grafted it to a packet of Haribo's Tangfastics, shaken everything up, then left the teacher in charge who themselves is on their knees and running on caffeine and the broken biscuits left in the staff room.

Often, in terms of excitement and activities and energy, the term doesn't actually wind down; it winds up. And that's sometimes a problem for children who are also tired and often on their knees from a very busy term. So today I want to give you some practical ideas for making the end of term feel positive and memorable without letting it slide into chaos or turning the final goodbye into an emotional collapse.

And the first idea I want to share with you is this: we need to keep some routine going. Now, I'm not saying you need to run the final week like it's a military boot camp. I'm not saying at 2:45 PM on the final Friday, children should be sitting in silence underlining the date while you say, "Open your grammar books to page 47," because frankly, summer can wait and imperative clauses cannot. No one wants that. Not the children, not you, not even the grammar book. The final week should feel different. It should feel warmer. It should feel like a celebration of the time you've had together.

But different doesn't mean the same as structure-free. For some pupils, losing structure is freeing. They love it. They think, "Brilliant, we're watching a film or we're doing a quiz or we're moving tables. I can cope with this. I like it." But for other pupils, especially pupils who rely on predictability, that loss of structure can feel very unsettling. And they may not show that by saying, "I'm feeling internally unanchored because the classroom rhythms that normally support my self-regulation have been removed." What they do is they go silly or they go loud or bossy or tearful or they ask for constant reassurance. A bit like the work experience boy on his first day with the bomb disposal team. You said, "Cut the red wire," right? The red wire. You said the red wire. It was the red wire.

That's why I'd always keep a few predictable corner pieces of the timetable or foundation stones in place. Not to be boring, but to enable your students to enjoy the fun stuff that's coming. You might start the day in the same way or their lesson in the same way. You may have a visual timetable still up on the board. You might still use the same signals to get everyone's attention. You might still line up in the usual way. You might still have a calm end-of-day routine, but the activities amongst those foundation stones can change. The emotional feel of your lessons can change. But when you combine those changes with familiar structure, kind of like what you're doing is you're telling pupils, "This lesson is different, but in many ways it's the same. We can have fun within limits without things getting too silly or too emotional." You're saying the adults are still in charge. It is still our classroom. So, and this sounds counterintuitive, but the point here is that structure doesn't ruin the fun or take away the fun. Structure protects the fun. It enables it.

The second idea is this: don't make every activity a high-energy activity. This is such a common thing you see in the final week or weeks of school before everyone breaks up for the summer, and I completely understand why it happens. You want the pupils to have a good time, and you want the week to feel special. So we fill up the week with treats, things like party games and films and quizzes and extra playtimes and talent shows and assemblies and leave as events and non-uniform days and there's music and sweets and balloons and exciting announcements and surprise activities. Now, each one of those things might be perfectly fine on its own, but when you stack them together, one on top of the other, these high-energy activities, they can push pupils up and up and up until the classroom starts to feel like someone's just released 30 squirrels into a branch of hobby craft during a glitter promotion. The problem isn't fun. The problem is too many high-energy activities without enough regulation time between them.

So when children get excited, their bodies change physiologically. They move more, they talk more, their impulse control drops, and it doesn't take much for that excitement to tip into tears and dysregulation and conflict. So my practical advice is to build in regulation or calming activities, something that helps your pupils come back down after a period of excitement. So if you do an exciting class quiz, follow it with some quiet, focused handwriting or reading or study. If you have a game outside, follow it with reading or some sort of calm reflection task. If you have a leave as assembly, don't send people straight into an unstructured party with crisps and balloons and music. It's like a runway to land on, like flying a plane. If you're in a plane, you don't want the pilot to say, "Good news, everyone. We're nearing the airport, so from here, I'm just going to vibe it." You want a controlled descent with the wheels down at the right time, with the runway in sight, everyone facing the right direction. And classrooms, they need the same principle. When you get a period of high energy, like the aeroplane up in the sky, then you need to land the plane and have a period of calm. So you have movement and then stillness, loudness and then quiet, group fun activities, then some focused individual work. So don't turn the final week into one long indoor firework display. Have the fun, absolutely, but put in place regulation activities after those busy, exciting, loud times.

The third idea isn't related to that, actually. It's to help people see their progress across the year. And I love this one because it's practical and visual and emotionally, it's actually really useful for the kids. I think I've mentioned it on the podcast before, but I'm going to mention it again because I do love it. At the end of the year, we often tell pupils they've made progress and we say to them, "You've worked so hard or you've grown so much or you should be proud of yourself. You've done really well." And that's lovely. And sometimes we even back that up with grades from tests, right? But sometimes those words and test scores don't actually mean very much because they're not concrete. And for children, progress becomes much more powerful when they can actually see the change.

So one simple activity is to take the first piece of work they did with you at the start of the year and compare it side by side with one of their most recent pieces of work. And then you let them notice the difference. You give them some prompts, so you get them to say or write what the differences are. Maybe their punctuation has improved. Maybe their maths is more accurate. Maybe they can explain their ideas in more detail and can organise an argument more logically. Maybe they can now write independently for 20 minutes when in September, writing for five minutes felt like some sort of unrealistic dream. And you can guide their reflection as they're looking at these two pieces of work with questions like, "What can you do now in the second piece of work that you couldn't do at the start of the year? What improvement are you most proud of? Where did you improve the most? What helped you get better? What would the you from September be most surprised to see in the final piece of work?" And of course, this doesn't have to be purely academic. You can also help pupils reflect on their personal growth. Maybe at the start of the year, they couldn't come into class without support and now they can. Maybe they always avoided group work. Now they can take part. Maybe they found mistakes like they just couldn't cope with them, but now they'll rub out an answer and try again. Maybe they struggled to share. Maybe they struggled to put up their hand to answer a question in class, and now they do it from time to time. That's all progress too.

The fourth idea is to finish on a positive goodbye, not an emotional collapse. And I'm going to tread carefully here because this is one of those areas where teachers can feel things quite deeply. And that's good because teaching is about relationships and caring about the kids. You invest in the children. You know, you care about them. You see them grow. You learn their personalities. You follow their struggles and enjoy their little victories.

So when the year ends, it can feel emotional for you as well as for them, especially if it's a class you feel you've particularly bonded with. And when you've had that kind of strong relationship with a class, especially in primary or at the opposite end, actually, in A-levels where you are teaching small groups of kids and you get to know them well, it's natural that pupils might feel sad to leave that. That sadness isn't bad, and I'm not saying we should ignore it because it's natural. It shows the relationship mattered to them.

But here's the important part. Our job at the end of the year is not to make children feel like they can't cope without us. It's to make them feel excited enough to move on, safe enough to move on. Because sometimes, without meaning to, adults can make that final goodbye just too big emotionally. We create this huge emotional moment where everyone's blubbing, the music is playing on the stereos, the kids walk out the door, the teacher's crying, three children are sobbing, one child is, you know, pretending not to cry by aggressively eating a packet of crisps and saying, "Oh, this flavour's super tangy. It's making my eyes water."

But that ends the year on a low and not a high. And I think the aim should be warmth for being thankful for having had a good year and recognising the good relationships between the adults and the children. But the children should leave excited about moving forward. So the message is, "I'm proud of you. We had some good times, but now you're totally ready for what comes next. You're going to go and be a real success in the next year group," rather than, "This is the end of the most meaningful teaching relationship you'll experience in your life, and now we must all emotionally dissolve onto the carpet." That's probably a bit too much.

The fifth idea, kind of connected to that, is to help pupils move from looking back to looking forwards. For primary pupils, that might be an activity based on, I call it actually, "What I'm ready for next year." Pupils write or draw three things they've learned to do this year that will help them in the next class. Things like, "I can ask for help when I get stuck. I can keep trying when the work is hard. I can be a kind partner. I can use calming strategies given to me by adults. I can organise my things independently. I can line up without making the noise of a reversing bin lorry." And that last one may still be a work in progress for some pupils, obviously.

Remember, walk before you can run. But the point is that pupils start to see themselves as more capable. We're not saying you'll never find the next year difficult. What we're saying is, over the year, you've changed and grown. Now, thinking about the next year, you have developed skills that you didn't have before, and those are things you're going to carry into the next class. So let's think about those and crystallise those in our heads now.

For secondary pupils, I really like the idea of writing a letter to next year's students. So let's say you teach year eight. Your current pupils are going to write to next year's year eight class, if that makes sense. The kids coming up to this class in September. And the prompt might be, "What advice would you give to someone starting this subject in this class next year? What helped you do well? What mistakes do you advise them to avoid? What do they need to know about this subject or working in this room or working with this teacher?"

And this works brilliantly because it gives pupils status. They kind of become the expert and they get to pass that knowledge on. And you could actually keep those letters and show examples of them when you do meet your next class. Obviously, like vet them first, because they could have anything written on them. But pick one or two good examples that are useful for the kids coming into the group in September. And that's good for pupils who might not always feel like they've been successful in your old class in school. You're helping those students that are leaving to think, "I learned something useful, and now my experience can help someone else." You'll get some very honest feedback, so brace yourself for that. An idea encapsulated by my wife's nickname for me, I might add.

Okay, right, so let's wrap this up. Sometimes silliness at the end of term is just silliness. Kids are kids. Not all behaviour is complicated. All behaviour is communication, but it's not always communicating something very interesting. But sometimes that silliness is the child's way of saying, "These feelings are too big. They're too much for me, and I don't know what to do with them." So rather than only focusing on surface behaviours, what we can do is tweak the design of the final week in a way that reduces the need for those behaviours in the first place.

And this links really naturally to SEND because pupils who send can find that final week more difficult for very specific reasons. And people with ADHD may struggle when lessons become less structured and there's more waiting around. An autistic pupil may find the changes in the timetable and the room layout or noise overwhelming. A pupil with sensory needs may struggle with the parties and the assemblies and films or busy corridors. A pupil with trauma or attachment-related needs may experience goodbye as more scary and threatening than the adults expect.

And if you'd like help thinking through those possible needs, we've got a free resource called the SEND Behaviour Handbook. It helps you link common classroom behaviours to possible underlying needs like autism or ADHD or trauma and attachment and other areas of send like PDA and ODD. So you can look beyond what the behaviour looks like and think about what might be driving it instead. It's completely free. It aligns with everything we talk about in the podcast, and I'll put a link in the episode description so you can tap on your app and tap straight through to the guide and get your free copy. You can also go to beaconschoolsupport.co.uk and click on the free resources tab at the top, and you'll see it at the top of the free resources page. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. So if you're supporting pupils whose behaviour often changes when the routines change, especially around the end of term, it is a really useful guide to have to hand.

So here's a simple framework you can use to wrap and sort of encapsulate everything we've talked about. I'll call it the calm goodbye. And yes, I know I've used calm before for emotion coaching, but honestly, there are only so many friendly four-letter acronyms available before you accidentally spell something more rude. And given the introduction to this episode and my wife's name for me, I think we've all had enough of dodgy four-letter words for one day. So here we go.

C is for core routines. Keep a few familiar routines standing. The start of the day, the visual timetable, your attention signal, your expectations, how you end lessons. You can change the activities and make them fun without removing every structure that makes your pupil's time in your classroom successful.

A is for alternate energy levels. Don't timetable high-energy activities back to back. Build in calming activities in between them. Excitement, then calm. Movement, then stillness or focus. Partying and then quiet. Help pupils come down before they crash down.

L is for look back at progress. Use the first and last pieces of work. Use memory activities. Use what I'm proud of prompts. Help people see the year wasn't just something they survived. It was something that they grew positively through.

And finally, M is move them forward. Say goodbye warmly, but build excitement for what happens next. Write letters to next year's pupils. Get them to talk through about what they're ready for and what's new and exciting in the future. The message is kids' endings have some sadness, but they have excitement and hope in them too. Now get out of my classroom and enjoy your summer. That's the balance.

If this episode has been helpful to you in a tricky week of the term, please subscribe or follow the podcast and leave me a review. It genuinely helps other teachers, SENCOs, and school leaders find the show when you do that. And if you do leave a review, just think, "You'll be making my mom and dad proud." I hope you have a brilliant week. I hope your final few days of term are calm and fun and positive. And if the weather forecast is anything to go by, only mildly hot and sticky. And I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.