The following scenario will be a familiar to the majority of teachers: a student who is significantly disrupting teaching and learning is banished to an isolation room - or “inclusion room” - a few times. Soon, that student has fallen into a habit of missing lessons and is falling behind in their learning. Any aspirations they may have had vanish. Their resentment towards school and staff (who, in the student’s mind’s eye, “all hate me”), steadily builds.
There is a better way. You could give the student an opportunity to reflect on their behaviour and provide them with counselling to manage future behaviour choices. You could provide a proactive intervention to close any gaps in their learning, and build their aspirations by offering support to join community projects and plan opportunities to help them make sense of the curriculum.
At the end of the academic year 2015-16, I presented the latter idea to The Magna Carta School in Surrey as a means of developing behaviour for learning as we aim to become an “outstanding” school.
The vision was to move away from the inclusion-room format to a new environment - what we’ve called the Growth Mindset Centre. An analysis showed that 16 per cent of the school had been referred to the inclusion room over the year, with one in four of those referred five times or more. I aimed to lower referrals and re-referrals.
The seeds of the Growth Mindset Centre were sown in 2014, when I read Professor Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset. A school growth mindset drive began that September, with innovative projects driven by both staff and students - one of which is the centre.
You could say that our old inclusion room had been a “dumping ground” for challenging students. Rather than one room, we now have three zones: the “learn-and-achieve zone”, the “respect zone” and the “aspire zone”. Any student referred begins their day in the learn-and-achieve zone. Here, a reflective piece of work is completed. The student identifies the reasons for their referral - critical to help their understanding. The rest of the morning is spent on targeted academic work to help close gaps in learning, aligning with the classroom sessions missed.
In the afternoon, students (as individuals or groups) move to the respect zone. They work with a staff member to review their initial reflective exercise, then explore strategies they could adopt to avoid repeat referral.
The final part of the day (45 minutes beyond the school timetable) is in the aspire zone. The idea here is to offer students access to peer-to-peer academic support, information on community support, details on further education and careers advice. What an individual engages in is very much down to their academic profile.
We’re two terms in: what has the impact been and what challenges have we faced?
Some staff were initially concerned that the non-punitive nature of the space meant pupils would prefer it to the classroom. I think we have found the right balance. The centre is not the final step on the behaviour journey. Continued poor behaviour is dealt with.
Staffing the centre, with a minimal budget beyond the one set out for the old inclusion room, has proved most challenging, specifically in terms of bringing to fruition the respect zone and the aspire zone. We need to increase staffing, but the quandary has been how to achieve this with zero spend. The answer to complementing our inclusion staff has, in part, come from two sources: our students and child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs) youth advisers.
The former are part of a project adjacent to the centre, where we develop our student growth mindset ambassadors: committed, aspirational students dedicated to supporting the progress and achievement of students. They have been really valuable.
The youth advisers are a group of young people who access Camhs in Surrey, meet to give a voice to young people using these services and undertake support work. One youth adviser employee, Sommer Harvey, took mentoring work with us, and was a linchpin in bringing youth advisers in to work in the Growth Mindset Centre.
‘There are no quick fixes’
This has obviously not been enough, however. When developing such a centre, it is key to avoid over-reliance on a small group of staff to solve behaviour challenges. It should go without saying that young people who display regular negative behaviour have very complex back stories, often originating from challenging home circumstances.
Our pastoral team work hard to unpick these, but in the summer term the school will change the staffing of the centre. We have recruited a trainee child counsellor whose remit will, in part, be to develop programmes of support in the respect zone, using their skills and existing resources in and outside of school. We will be tapping into the growing Early Help Programme, run by Runneymede Borough Youth Support Service.
Will it work? We shall see. I would love to say the centre has more than halved referrals and no student has been re-referred. But the moral is not one of quick fixes. For any school planning on reshaping how they manage their most challenging students, the first step is to gain agreement with your SLT that it is a long-term project: changing the culture over years, not weeks or months.
Staff need to know that this culture shift doesn’t produce instant results. I was asked after just one term why “student X” was still behaving negatively after a referral.
I believe we are making progress, but there is no magic solution to handling behaviour. With time and investment, we can work more closely with challenging students to build resilience and work ethic, and eradicate values poverty. However you do it, there is a better way than an inclusion room.
David Rice is head of the Growth Mindset Centre at The Magna Carta School in Surrey
