“They’re just doing it for attention.” This is the most unhelpful sentence in the behaviour lexicon.

I do appreciate where it comes from. It arises in situations, I suspect, where a child is being disruptive and there seems to be little reason behind it. Therefore, gaining attention is assumed to be the child’s sole aim.

But there’s nothing underpinning this. During my teacher training, I recall thinking that I had no idea if my job was to give a disruptive pupil my attention or to do everything in my power to ignore them. Or something else.

Intuitively, I wanted to ignore them, but I was worried about legitimising poor behaviour or - if I gave in to them - indulging the child. Neither strategy felt like it was going to be effective.

That is why looking at a behaviour problem in terms of gaining attention is generally unhelpful. It doesn’t help you to work out what you need to do. What could be termed “gaining attention” may be a premeditated or reflexive attempt at work avoidance. For some, it is safer to cause disruption to avoid a test, say, than to have to endure the cast-iron certainty of failure.

As far as the child is concerned, they may be doing well - it just might not fit your definition of doing well. If their aim is to do everything in their power to avoid work or get out of your class, then there are ways of achieving that.

If we viewed a child’s attempts to “gain attention” instead as attempts to influence their environment in order to have their needs met more successfully, we might be in with a better chance of working out how to improve the situation.

Jarlath O’Brien is the author of Better Behaviour: a guide for teachers and works in special education in London