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Against a background of rising primary school exclusions, work to help children improve their behaviour is more important than ever. Frances Rickford reports.

School exclusions among primary aged children are creeping up, and last year represented 16 per cent of all permanent exclusions. Just as shockingly, less than a third of excluded primary aged children are receiving full-time education anywhere else. But the consequences for the children involved are not confined to missing school in the short term. Most people recognise that "poor behaviour" in young children is usually the result of emotional difficulties which will probably worsen if a child is rejected by the education system. The government recognises that it is worth investing in effective early interventions to keep children out of trouble, and primary schools are being urged to find better ways to help children integrate.

Indeed there is already a bewildering range of services to support children’s behaviour.¹ "Whole school" approaches recognise that behaviour issues are partly a function of more general relationships in the school. So they use techniques such as circle time - when games and exercises are used to foster trusting and caring feelings between the children in a class, or within the staff group - and lunchtime policies which introduce organised activities during playtime.

Other interventions targeted on individual children range from local initiatives run from within the voluntary sector such as Chance UK (see below), through local education authorities’ own behaviour support services, to national initiatives such as the Behaviour and Education Support Teams (Bests) which are currently being piloted in 33 local authorities across the UK. Bests are multi-agency teams working with selected clusters of schools to support teachers and to provide supportive services to pupils with emotional and behaviour difficulties.

So how effective are these interventions? The evidence is mixed. Circle time was found by one evaluation to be beneficial for all pupils, but especially for those with socialisation problems. A Cambridge university study has revealed that schools with nurture groups have significantly higher gains for pupils with behavioural and emotional difficulties, both in the nurture group and in the mainstream class than schools without. Children in the nurture group also showed "impressive rates of improvement" in the nurture group and in their mainstream class.

Interventions targeted on individuals are more likely to work in schools with a supportive ethos. A recent study from Kings College London into an initiative very similar to Best reports, "Schools were positioned on a continuum: at one end, the ‘excluding’ school isolated the ‘difficult’ child and treated the child and family as the problem. At the other end, the school worked hard to promote a positive environment, anchoring the whole process of promoting mental, emotional and social health in their work and ethos."²

Local education authorities have been providing in-house services to support pupil behaviour in schools for decades, although they vary widely. Special educational needs teachers, education psychology services and behaviour support teams based in pupil referral units are among the staples, and these too are now in the spotlight.

Lilian Vickery is head of the Minerva Centre, one of three pupil referral units for primary school children in Birmingham. The nine staff spend about half their time supporting pupils attending the centre, and the other half helping the 110 primary schools in its catchment area to prevent exclusions.

"We’re trying to shift the balance away from dealing with individual referrals towards working with the school, setting up programmes to empower them to anticipate problems and stop them developing." The unit has selected the 16 schools that refer the most pupils for this approach which, says Vickery, is working well.

The centre works mostly with boys, a growing number of whom have a diagnosis either of attention deficit disorder or autistic spectrum disorders. Where a child is at serious risk of being excluded they can be brought to the centre for one session a week for one small group session per week teaching them classroom skills. The six-week course includes classes on rules and why they are needed, anger management and how to be a good friend. Vickery says two or three sessions a week would be more effective, but the resources are not available. There are currently 11 of these "shared" children plus 11 permanently excluded children at the centre.

Vickery claims the evidence of the centre’s success is in the exclusion statistics, and the feedback from schools. "I would like it if we were able to do more preventive work using shared programmes because we know they work. The permanently excluded children we get are the ones we’ve never heard of before."

¹ Intervening Early, DfES and Coram Family, 2002

² Sheila Macrae and Meg Maguire, Starting Young: Challenging Exclusion in the Primary School, Economic and Social Research Council, 2003

- For more information about nurture groups see www.nurturegroups.org

Early interventions

Nurture groups

The rationale of nurture groups is that adequate early nurturing is a prerequisite for satisfactory emotional, social and cognitive development, and that without it children cannot respond to school demands. The group aims to give children the chance to experience the early care they have missed.

Classes of 10 to 12 children in a mainstream primary school have their own teacher and teaching assistant and their own classroom containing soft furniture and cooking facilities. The children also remain part of their mainstream class and are collected from it each day after registration. Relationships are warm and affirming with an emphasis on talking and listening, including about feelings and behaviour. Children have breakfast together in the group. Staff model considerate behaviour towards each other, and rules are discussed with children. Transgressors are "made aware of the consequences of behaviour choices" rather than punished.

Chance UK

Started by a Hackney policeman in 1996, Chance UK now works in three London boroughs training and supervising volunteer adult mentors to give one-to-one support to primary school children with significant behaviour difficulties. Children and their families are visited and assessed by Chance, then introduced to their mentor. Mentors spend a few hours a week with the child for a year, outside school hours, often in activities chosen by the child. They set goals, both relating to their behaviour at school and their chosen activity, such as swimming or skating.

Four out of five referred children are boys and after a big campaign last year, 30 per cent of Chance’s mentors are now men. Director Gracia McGrath explains: "Most of our boys have no positive male role model, and if you don’t know any men who haven’t gone to prison, or sold drugs it really does make a difference."

Chance is now recruiting mentors for referred children’s parents too - normally older, experienced parents. McGrath reports: "A lot of the parents have said ‘what about a mentor for me?’ It’s about the parent saying what they want to change and what they feel is wrong."

National Pyramid Trust

Aimed at children who find it difficult to make friends or gain acceptance within their peer group and based on the belief that once they are integrated they will be better able to learn. Children are invited to join an after-school club, run by a professional Pyramid Club co-ordinator supported by trained volunteers. The ethos of the club is that it is a special, select and desirable place to be, and activities are designed to raise self-esteem and develop interaction and loyalty between the children.