Have you ever worked with a pupil who seems perfectly capable of doing their schoolwork, but spends most of the lesson finding ways to avoid it? And could their apparent lack of motivation actually be the sign of something other than laziness or poor attitude? After spending over 19, yes count them, 19 years supporting schools with behaviour and SEMH, I've seen how easy it is to misinterpret avoidance in the classroom. So in this episode, we're going to explore why some pupils avoid everyday classroom demands, how to identify what might be driving that behaviour, and what you can do to help your reluctant pupils engage. Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. I'm your host Simon Currigan, my co-host is Emma Shackleton, and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents, and of course students when classroom behaviour gets in the way of success. We're going to share the tried and tested secrets to classroom management, behavioural special needs, whole school strategy and more, all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential. Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world, so you'll get to hear the latest evidence-based strategies before anyone else. This is the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. Hi there, welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan and I'm the kind of guy who thinks salmon is a fancy food for fancy people, not for the likes of me. It might be why I'm Omega 3 deficient, but there you go. I don't know when I decided that salmon was too posh for me. It might be something to do with those tiny little sandwiches people serve at weddings, where you get a bit of salmon wrapped around something green, balanced on a cracker, and everyone just smiles and pretends it's a proper meal. Anyway, we'll come back to my irrational salmon prejudice later, especially smoked salmon. That's even worse, because it turns out that it's actually relevant to today's episode. Yeah, get that, an episode where the intro is relevant to the content. I'm turning podcasting pro, people. Anyway, today we're going to look at something that happens in classrooms every single day. Pupils avoiding activities that they don't want to do. We'll explore how that avoidance might not be driven by a lack of motivation, and I'll show you how to use a practical framework to work out what's going on under the surface. And importantly, we'll talk about the difference between helping children push through discomfort, which is an important part of growing up, and expecting them to push through genuine distress, which is another thing entirely. Before we get started, though, if you're finding this podcast useful, please make sure you're subscribed or followed us in your podcast app. And if you work with someone who's constantly battling to get people started with their work, why not share this episode with them? It might give them a different way of looking at a child that they're finding difficult to motivate. So let's begin with a pupil called Jack. He's in year six, and his teacher is becoming increasingly frustrated with him. Now, Jack's a bright lad. When they're discussing a topic as a class, he's got plenty of ideas during whole class time. And when the lesson involves practical activities, he's usually happy to join in. But the moment his teacher asks everyone to complete an independent writing task, well, you know, something changes. Then Jack suddenly needs to sharpen his pencil, and then he can't find his ruler. Then he remembers he's desperate for the toilet, despite having been at break just 15 minutes earlier. Eventually, after a lot of prompting and conjoling, he writes the date and title, and then he sits there just looking at the page. And when his teacher encourages him to get started, he says, this is boring. And as she pushes him, he becomes argumentative. Now, from the teacher's perspective, it's pretty obvious what's happening. Jack doesn't want to do the work, so he's doing everything he can to get out of it. And she's right about that. He is avoiding the work, and he is doing everything he can not to do it. But the question we haven't answered yet is this, why? Now, the natural response might be to try and motivate Jack. Perhaps we remind him with a negative consequence that he'll miss some of his playtime if he doesn't finish his work. Or we offer him a positive reward if he gets through the first paragraph. Or we sit beside him and encourage him to engage with the writing or make a good choice or whatever. And I'm not saying that those approaches are automatically wrong, by the way. There are times when rewards and encouragement and consequences are perfectly reasonable tools for managing behaviour. But here's the problem. They all assume to some extent that Jack's difficulty is that he's lacking in motivation, that he could get on with the work, but he simply doesn't want to. He's choosing not to. But what if that approach misses something? And that isn't the case. Because avoidance can serve a very useful purpose for the person who's doing it. If an activity makes you feel uncomfortable, then finding a way to escape that activity makes you feel better. It gives you temporary relief. And guess what? That relief then reinforces more avoidance in the future. Basically, avoiding the discomfort felt good. So your brain learns to avoid the discomfort by doing that again in the future. Psychologists call this negative reinforcement, which sounds like a punishment, but it isn't. What it actually means is that when you remove an unpleasant experience, then you make an avoidance behaviour more likely to happen again. In Jack's case, every minute he spends searching for his rubber is another minute he doesn't have to face the writing task. So the avoidance is achieving something for him. It achieves or reduces his discomfort, at least for now. And of course, the writing still has to be done. So in the longer term, he's actually making the situation worse. But our brains, especially our emotional brains, aren't always particularly good at prioritizing the long term when something feels unpleasant right now. Our emotional brains care more about relief in the moment. And I want to make a distinction here, because there is a difference between discomfort and distress. Discomfort is something we all need to learn to tolerate. And actually, without discomfort, we wouldn't grow very much as human beings. Think about learning to ride a bike or giving a presentation or sitting an exam or building an exercise routine, having a difficult conversation or trying to master something that you're not naturally good at. All of these things involve a degree of discomfort and developing the confidence and the skills to deal with that discomfort is an important part of education and growing up. Pushing through discomfort helps us grow as human beings, which brings me back to salmon. Now, if my wife serves me salmon for dinner, I will eat it. I might moan about it. I might spend the whole meal thinking about how much happier I'd be with a steak or a burger, but I will eat it because I know it's good for me and because the level of discomfort involved is perfectly manageable. I'm not in danger. I'm not overwhelmed. I'm just a middle-aged man being unnecessarily dramatic or picky about his dinner. I'm not mad about the taste, but it's not making me vomit either. And that isn't a comment, by the way, on my wife's cooking. It is absolutely not a comment on my wife's cooking. It doesn't matter who cooks it. Salmon is just not my preference. But imagine my wife served me a plate of broken glass or razor blades and told me to eat that instead. Suddenly, we're talking about a completely different kind of experience, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that forcing me to eat it would help me develop resilience. I'd probably develop a quite strong motivation to avoid coming home for dinner at all. Now, obviously, right, that's a that's a deliberately extreme example. And discomfort and distress aren't like two neat categories that every experience can be sort of filed into. There's a lot of ground between them. And what one person can manage might be overwhelming for someone else. But the important point is this. Sometimes we want children to learn to push through manageable discomfort because that's how they develop confidence and independence and resilience. But when the demands we're placing on them are genuinely overwhelming, simply increasing the pressure to engage isn't necessarily going to make them more resilient. It might just make them more desperate to escape. So let's go back to Jack and ask a different question. Instead of asking, how can we motivate him to do his writing? Let's ask what's making writing so uncomfortable for him in the first place? And to answer that, I'm going to refer back to the PAIN framework. And PAIN here, if you've not seen any of the episodes on the PAIN framework, it stands for the Primary Areas of Internal Need. PAIN helps us identify different sources of stress that can contribute to emotionally driven behaviour. And it's based on the work of Stuart Shanker and his team on self-regulation. We've got lots of other episodes on the PAIN framework if you want to deep dive into them, which this isn't. But I'm just going to touch on it because it's relevant. The idea is that our brains and bodies don't just regulate emotions. They're constantly dealing with lots of other demands as well, from sensory information and mental processing to social relationships, changes in the environment. And when those demands become too great. our ability to cope starts to suffer. Inside the PAIN framework there are seven categories of need which I group under the acronym IMPACTS. Now I'm not going to run through all seven today because we're focusing on avoidance, but I'll show you how we might use a few of them to understand Jack's behaviour and this is important. I'm not trying to diagnose Jack with anything and I'm not assuming that every child who avoids writing has the same difficulties. The PAIN framework gives us a way of investigating different possibilities using what we already know about Jack from working with him, what we observe in class and of course what Jack tells us himself. The first category for Jack I'd look at is mental processing. Now Jack can explain his ideas perfectly well verbally when he's talking, but perhaps for him writing them down is much harder. He has to decide what he wants to say, organise his ideas into coherent sentences, remember what he was going to write, think about spelling and punctuation and then physically with his pen or pencil get those words onto the paper and there is a lot going on there and perhaps some of the processes involved in that are much more effortful for Jack than they are for other pupils in his class. So when the teacher asks everyone to write a paragraph Jack isn't facing the same level of difficulty as his peers. From the outside that write a paragraph sounds like a simple instruction. From Jack's perspective though it might feel like being asked to pull a truck down a road like one of those strongmen competitions and the longer he sits there struggling the more uncomfortable he feels starting the task. Then in the PAIN framework we might look at anxiety and emotions. Imagine Jack's been having difficulty with writing for several years, he's used to being one of the last pupils to finish, he's used to making mistakes, he's used to having to correct his work and watch the other kids complete tasks that seem much easier for them and over time he might begin to associate writing with frustration or embarrassment or failure. So now even before the lesson starts, before the writing starts, he's anticipating how difficult it's going to be. That anticipation, that prediction alone can increase his stress. He doesn't need to wait until he's actually struggling with the work to feel uncomfortable just like you don't have to be in the dentist's chair to feel uncomfortable with the drive to the dentist. Just knowing the writing task is coming for Jack can be enough. What we predict will happen, even if our prediction is inaccurate, affects our brain's behaviour choices right now. And then there's another impacts category we could consider, integration and belonging. Perhaps Jack worries about what the other pupils will think of him. He might be perfectly comfortable offering answers in a class discussion where he's able to demonstrate what he knows but feel exposed when everyone else is writing confidently in class and he's still staring at a blank page. Now that adds another layer of discomfort. Now notice how all these different pressures can stack one on top of the other. The mental effort of writing, the fear of making mistakes and the embarrassment of falling behind aren't necessarily separate experiences and they all contribute to Jack's overall stress together. And this approach, the pain framework, the impacts, stress stacking, this is something I go into in loads of detail in my new book that's coming out soon. It'll be published by Routledge. It's due out March-April time in 2027. I will keep you posted as I have more information about that. But this is why the pain framework is useful. Rather than concentrating exclusively on Jack's behaviour, the apparent work avoidance, it encourages us to investigate what's causing the work avoidance. Because if we understand what makes writing difficult or uncomfortable for Jack, we've got a much better chance of putting in place support that will help him. But if we decide he's simply lazy and keep turning up the pressure, we might accidentally add to the very stress that's causing him to avoid the work in the first place. Meaning, ironically, we end up with more work avoidance, not less. So what would that support actually look like? Well, the first thing I'd do is look for ways to reduce the mental effort involved in the task that Jack, as an individual, specifically finds difficult. Maybe Jack needs some form of scaffolding, a writing frame, or a few bullet points to organise his ideas before he starts. Perhaps we could let him talk through his first sentence with an adult or break the task into smaller steps so he doesn't have to hold so much information in his head at once. We're not removing the expectation that Jack writes. We're changing the conditions and the scaffolding and the support so he has a better chance of getting started and finishing his work. The second thing I think about is his emotional experience of writing. If he's expecting to fail, we might need to help him experience some genuine success with his writing. So rather than putting the whole task in front of him and saying, come on Jack, you know what to do. We might say, you've got some good ideas about this, let's just pick one of them and work out how we get that down on the paper. So that sounds achievable then. And once he's started, we can give him some feedback about what he's done, what he's achieved. Not exaggerated over-the-top praise for like writing three words, but genuine recognition of the skills he's used and the progress he's made. And over time, those successful experiences can help change what Jack expects to happen and expects to feel when he's asked to write. And the third thing which I think is really important is that we still need Jack to experience some manageable challenge. We're not trying to protect him from ever finding writing difficult. If we did that, we'd risk reinforcing the idea that writing is something he can't cope with, that he needs protecting from. And that is the tyranny of low expectations for our learners. We're presenting him with writing as if it were a plate of broken glass rather than a plate of Instead, we want to help him develop the skills and the confidence and the tolerance to tackle increasingly difficult tasks. So we might gradually increase the amount he writes independently or ask him to attempt the first sentence before he gets any help. But we make those decisions based on how he's actually coping, you know, over the midterm, rather than simply deciding he ought to be able to do more by now at this age. And some pupils will continue to need adjustments because of their SEND, their special educational needs and disabilities. Building independence is an ongoing process that requires lots of course corrections along the way. It's not a one and done. Now, I should be clear that this doesn't mean all avoidance is needs led or caused by stress, not by a long shot. Sometimes pupils avoid work because something else is more rewarding to them in the moment, like talking to their friend or secretly looking at their phone. It does happen. Sometimes they've developed habits of putting things off. Sometimes they simply don't see the point of an activity. And sometimes a pupil is capable of completing the work and needs clear expectations and appropriate boundaries. The PAIN framework isn't intended to explain away every example of reluctance or refusal as if it's a complex condition. It isn't a way of excusing behaviour that comes down to poor choices. And we all make poor choices from time to time. Kids included. Adults included. You. Me. When my wife, by the way, edits this podcast, here's how I've described her summer meal prep. I think we're all going to describe my repeatedly coming back to it and referring to it over and over in this episode as a bad choice. The PAIN framework isn't about making poor choices look like deep emotionally led behaviour. It's a way of checking whether underlying needs might be contributing to long term behaviour needs before we decide how to respond. And although we focused on Jack's writing, this applies to other Think about a pupil who always finds a reason to avoid group work because navigating social situations is difficult for them. Or a child who becomes reluctant to move between activities because they struggle with transitions. Or a pupil who regularly asks to miss PE because the noise, the physical demands or the fear of being watched makes the lesson feel uncomfortable for them. At the surface level, we might describe all those three students as avoiding instructions or avoiding work. But the reasons behind that avoidance could be completely different and the support they need might be completely different too. If you'd like some help identifying the needs that might be contributing to the behaviour of the students in your classroom, I've got a free resource you can download that can help called the SEND Behaviour Handbook. It includes practical information about common SEND and SEMH needs together with a behaviour analysis grid to help you start to connect what you're seeing in class with possible underlying difficulties. It's not there to help teachers try and make a diagnosis, that's not our role, we're not diagnostic professionals but it is to help you link what you're seeing in classroom with possible needs. You can download it completely free from beaconschoolsupport.co.uk Visit the website, click on the free resources tab at the top and you'll see the SEND handbook there. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the free resources tab and you'll see the SEND handbook near the top. Or I'll put a link in the episode description as well so you can tap straight through. So let's bring everything together. The next time you work with a pupil who's constantly avoiding a particular task or activity, I want you to think about three things. First, what are they avoiding? Is it all schoolwork or is there a particular kind of task or situation or demand where the problem keeps appearing? Secondly, what might be making that situation feel uncomfortable for them? Could there be issues with mental processing, anxiety and emotion, sensory needs, social relationships or something else we're overlooking? And thirdly, what could you change to make engagement more achievable without removing an appropriate level of challenge? It might be a small adjustment to the task, the environment or even the way you introduce the activity. But the point is to match the support to what's actually driving the behaviour. Because there's a world of difference between a pupil who finds something difficult but manageable and a pupil who's genuinely overwhelmed by what we're asking them to do. We need children to experience challenge, which brings us finally back to the salmon. Because while I'm still not convinced it has any business appearing on my dinner plate, I'm prepared to accept that eating it occasionally might be good for me and perhaps over time I could even develop a taste for it. Although I think we'd all agree there's a limit to the amount of personal growth a man should be expected to achieve in his early 50s through the consumption of oily fish alone. If you've managed to tolerate the discomfort of listening to me complain about salmon throughout this episode, perhaps you could demonstrate your resilience by leaving us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I would be very grateful if you did. And if you haven't subscribed yet, come on! I've eaten the salmon. Surely you can press one little button and subscribe. Do it! It'll make you a stronger, more likeable person. Anyway, I hope you have a brilliant week and I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.