What happens when a pupil arrives at school every morning, gets marked present, but then spends a large part of their day hiding in the toilet?

My name's Simon Currigan, and I've spent over 19 years supporting schools with behaviour and SEMH, and in this episode I'm going to introduce the idea of emotionally-based internal truancy and give you three questions to help you make progress with students who prefer to hide in the toilets than come into the classroom.

Hi there, my name's Simon Currigan, and flying in the face of public opinion, I'm back with another episode of School Behaviour Secrets. And look, the more you keep emailing me and telling me to stop, the more you're just encouraging me to carry on making episodes. Meaning, if I keep churning these out, really, you've only got yourself to blame. Look in the mirror, people.

Now, this episode was prompted by something happening at a secondary school that's local to me, actually, and they've started putting large metal shutters over the pupil toilets during lesson time and pulling them down and locking them. You know, the sort of shutters that you normally see covering shops when they close for the night. Presumably, they're doing this because of issues they're having with kids hiding in the toilets, internal truancy, vaping, creating chaos, that sort of thing.

And look, this episode isn't an attack on that school, and I completely get why they're doing it and why other secondary schools are doing the same thing. They're dealing with vandalism and kids fighting and intimidation and groups of kids who are actively arranging to meet in the toilets rather than be in lessons. And when that happens, the problem is the toilets become unsafe or they get damaged, other pupils become frightened to use them, and then staff just spend huge amounts of time searching the building for children who should be in class chasing their tails or just patrolling the toilets. And then schools start asking questions about, should we have cameras in the toilets, and how does that affect GDPR and human rights and that sort of thing. And they're doing that because doing nothing is not an option.

But the shutters, I think, raise a really interesting question.

But before we get into that, if you find the podcast useful, remember to open your podcast app now and make sure that you are subscribed. And if you've been listening to this for a while and you aren't a subscriber, come on, you're better than that. If you're listening to this to a page on our website, come on, you're better than that. Get the podcast app out on your phone or Spotify or Amazon Music or Audible or wherever you listen to music to, search School Behaviour Secrets and subscribe today. It just makes you a better human being. And if you know a school leader who's wrestling with attendance or pupils disappearing from lessons or internal truancy, please share this episode with them too, because there might be some useful information and strategies in here for them.

Right, let's start with something important. I think that going to the toilet is a basic physical need. I don't think that's controversial. It isn't a privilege pupils earn through good behaviour. I'm not, however, saying that every pupil should be able to walk out of lesson whenever they feel like it. Because when you do that, what happens is you get empty classrooms with streams of kids going out the classroom on a revolving door basis. All right, and when I said streams, all right, bad metaphor given the topic, but you get the point.

Schools need sensible systems around movement and going to the toilet so the classrooms don't just empty. And they need systems around how many kids can leave the classroom at one time. I get that. That might mean keeping a supervised toilet block open or using a simple pass system, limiting how many pupils leave the classroom at once, or making sure kids with medical, menstrual, or SEND needs can go when they need to. So there is a balance to be struck here. But I'm sure we can protect children's dignity and health while still having clear expectations about lesson attendance. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

Locking the toilets just creates anxiety for a ton of kids. The kids who don't run around school, if someone's got to go, let's be honest, they've got to go, or what? They wander around school or just sit there in class until they burst and just pee their pants? Or a girl who's just started her period, what is she supposed to do? Are we going to let her just bleed down her legs? Is that where we've got to as a society? Is that the sort of school that you would want to send your child to? And I'm being deliberately concrete and graphic for a reason. Shuttering the toilet may be legal, and it may be within DFE guidance, but is it humane? There's got to be a middle ground here.

And there's also a bigger strategic issue here too, especially if you're a middle leader or a senior leader that you should be paying attention to. In the book I've been writing, Dysregulated, about improving behaviour in our schools, one of the questions I ask in the book of school leaders is this: when you're looking at your data around student behaviour, have you actually solved a problem that you've been looking at, or have you just displaced it? And let me explain what I mean by that.

Let's take attendance. Let's imagine we've got a pupil who's previously stayed at home and they start coming through the school gates in the morning. Their attendance figure improves, and that's genuinely a positive thing. But once they're inside the building, instead of being in class, let's imagine they're now spending lots of time hiding in the toilets, wandering the corridors, or spending long periods in the medical room. Technically, they're present, they're in school, they're attending, but in reality, they're still not accessing education. What we've done in that case is we've displaced the problem from attendance to internal truancy. The pupil's absence has improved. Their absence, however, has moved from being absent outside the school to being absent inside the school.

So what do we do? We close the toilets, we shutter them, and lock them up. Put a portcullis over them. And guess what? The number of toilet incidents falls. And that strategy appears to have worked. But have those pupils who are hanging around the toilets returned to lessons, or are they now hiding in stairways? Are they turning up late? Are they just sort of trudging around the building? Are they spending time with pastoral staff or kicking off in classrooms? Or gradually, are they moving back towards not attending school at all?

I think of it, it's a bit like one of those squeezy stress dolls with bubbles in. You can squeeze the gel at one end, and a bubble just moves and creates a bulge at the other end of the toy. You squeeze that end, and the bubble moves again to the opposite end where it started from. And I guess you can compress those toys from all ends. And when you do that and put the toy under so much strain, what happens? The bubble bursts and the gel flows out. And I guess that's dysregulation. Kids kicking off in class, overwhelmed, melting down, not coping.

That means if we only record and pay attention to the number of incidents in the toilets as a measure of our success, then closing the toilets will look remarkably successful. But the real measure of success is whether those pupils are now spending more time successfully engaged in lessons and learning.

This brings me to something that I think of as emotionally-based internal truancy. Now, you may have heard of EBSA, Emotionally Based School Avoidance, and this is kind of a spin on that. Now, let's call it EBIT, Emotionally Based Internal Truancy. It's not a diagnosis. It's nothing formal. It's an idea I've been playing with, and it won't explain every pupil hanging around the toilets. Some pupils are there by choice just to vape or meet friends or cause damage. Let's be honest about that.

Understanding underlying needs isn't an argument for having low expectations or ignoring behaviour or excusing it or letting kids who are regulated and do know better and can do better off the hook for their actions. But for some pupils, hiding in the toilets is avoidance. Despite their fears or emotions or anxiety, somehow they've managed to get into school, but there's something about certain lessons or tasks or social situations in school that feels beyond them, that they feel like they can't manage. Or maybe there are specific periods of the day that they struggle with. And that's the real problem that was originally driving them to not come into school and is now driving them to avoid the classroom or busy social areas or wherever it is.

So let's take a sample student. Let's take Aiden in year nine. Aiden regularly asks to use the toilet during lessons, specifically lessons like English or history or geography, you know, more formal sit-down lessons rather than something like a technology lesson or a PE lesson. He's often found talking to friends in the corridors, so it looks like he's leaving the lesson to socialise. The toilets are locked, and then Aiden starts arriving late to lessons instead. And then he starts asking for more time to visit the medical room. And when that's refused, he becomes argumentative and ends up dysregulated and outside the classroom anyway. The gel stress toy has popped.

What's changing here is the escape route. The reason he needs to escape has stayed exactly the same. Because when staff look at what's happening with Aiden more closely, they start to realise that Aiden leaves the lesson when it moves from sort of whole-class discussion to independent writing. Now, Aiden's literacy skills are weak. He's frightened of other pupils noticing, and he'd rather be seen as someone who doesn't care than someone who can't do the work. It's a self-esteem shield.

We can keep those toilets locked and shuttered and portcullised 24/7. But unless we deal with his difficulties around mental processing, anxiety about failure, and fear of losing status with his friends, his access to the work, the internal truancy issue isn't going away. It's just that the location where the truancy happens will keep moving around.

So what can schools actually do about this? Well, here are three useful steps. Maintain, analyse, and put support in place. MAP. All right, the P there. For put support in place. That's poor as acronyms go, but I like the acronym MAP and I couldn't wrestle the words into something better. But the process of MAP is good, even if the acronym could honestly do with some work. So let's walk through MAP together.

So first, we've got M for Maintain. Maintain safe toilet access. That means supervision, clear movement systems, and firm responses to damage, vaping, bullying, intimidation, whatever's happening in there.

Secondly, we back that up with analysis. Analysing for patterns of behaviour. Which pupils are persistently leaving? Which lessons do they tend to avoid? What activity is happening when they leave in the classroom? Where do they go when access is restricted? That's going to involve some in-depth thinking about individual students, not treating all of those kids as a cohort who have all the same needs, but digging down into them as individual people.

And if you want help with that, if you want help understanding what drives dysregulated behaviour, then get our SEND Behaviour Handbook. It helps you link student behaviour in school to underlying needs. And I'll bang a direct link in the episode description to that. But you can also go to beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the free resources tab and you'll see the SEND Behaviour Handbook at the top of the page. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk and click on the free resources tab on the homepage.

And if some of those kids that you're analysing don't have underlying needs or emotional issues and they are just choosing to muck around because everyone makes bad decisions sometimes, especially when you're a teenager, use your behaviour policy. Not every student behaviour has a complex route or a route that's deep enough to require that kind of detailed support. Though I'm going to caveat that because in my experience, long-standing behaviours that your behaviour policy doesn't fix do tend to have deeper causes than they look at first glance. So don't make assumptions. If in doubt, I'd go deeper rather than just assume that the behaviour is chosen, especially when it's long-term.

And thirdly, put support around the cause. That might mean adapting the work in class, addressing literacy gaps, dealing with bullying, providing sensory support, or agreeing a planned exit and return system. What you do here is going to depend on the individual student, on the factors that are provoking their need to escape. And alongside that support, the expectation remains clear. We want you in lessons and we're going to be there to help you succeed.

So to recap, schools have genuine reasons for managing access to toilets, even locking them. But if you are going to go down that route, I would see it as a temporary measure. If you've got a sinister lump on your body, ignoring the cause isn't a long-term solution. And a reduction in toilet incidents because you've locked the toilet doesn't necessarily mean the underlying problem has improved or gone away. The shutters may stop the pupils accessing one place, but the odds are you're just shifting or displacing the problem to somewhere else in school. Metal shutters or padlocks don't address the need that drove some of the pupils to seek shelter there. And that is the displacement problem.

If you're interested, the book is due to be released around March, April time. Don't have a final publication date yet, but it's going to be called Dysregulated: Why Our Students Are Struggling and What Successful Schools Do Differently.

Again, if you found this episode useful, please subscribe and leave me a review. Unless your review says I should stop making the podcast because of as we established at the beginning, that sort of thing only encourages me to make more.

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I hope you have a brilliant week and I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.