 Welcome to Pookie Ponders, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. I'm Pookie Nightsmith and I'm your host. Today's question is, why do some kids misbehave and I'm in conversation with Mike Griffiths? Mike leads the primary and secondary response to behavioural management for the Royal Borough of Greenwich providing assessment, outreach and nurture throughout the primary phase and the main SEMH provision for some of the most vulnerable pupils both within and across boroughs. In this episode, we explore the reasons that underpin distressing and challenging behaviour in children and young people. Well, I'm Mike Griffiths and I have the most ridiculous job title of being the Executive Head Teacher of the Imperium Federation. I run both Waterside with primary for SEMH children which means Social Emotional Mental Health and I also run King's Oak which is the secondary version of Waterside. I run all the exclusion and six-day provision for the borough. I also run a complex ASD unit and I run an outreach service that goes into every primary school within Greenwich and works with children by trying to help them stay within mainstream settings before their behaviours become really interesting and they have to come to one of my buildings. When do you sleep? That's a lot of jobs. I don't. I'm not a big fan but there is some parts of me that are very much like Margaret Hatcher and I survive on about three and a half hours sleep a day. Any longer than that I become quite irritable. Don't do sleep well. Don't look into me for a lie and it doesn't work. And in fairness, I think I've kind of noticed that because I do see sometimes responses to you on Twitter at those silly hours in the morning when I expect only to be speaking to my friends in foreign lands but there you are. Was this the dream? Did you growing up think, do you know what I'd like to do all day, work with really, what do you call them, interesting? Interesting. No. The dream was to go into the arts. My degree was in linguistics originally and I wanted to go and become a translator. I had this giddy notion that being able to speak millions of languages and sit in a box somewhere and talk to high-flying people was interesting and then worked out that talking about the common fisheries policy really wasn't that interesting. So I fell into teaching mainly inspired by my art who had been ridiculously my head teacher when I was in middle school and discovered a love of primary. I really enjoyed early years and this was at a time when foundation phase as it is in Wales was starting and I grabbed that with both hands because at the time male primary teachers were really year five and year six and they didn't have them in early years and I wanted to be different and I really wanted to learn how children began their career in education, how they learned to read because by the time they got to me at the end of their journey most of those things had been done and that started me off and then ridiculously became a deputy head without trying. That is a very long story so we're not going to go into that but I was sent by my then head teacher to go for an interview as a practice. Okay. Way out of the county so if I made a fool of myself nobody would know and they gave me the job and I had to move from North Wales to South Wales so that was not expected and I became the head teacher that school very shortly after becoming deputy not through design but then my career sort of meandered by going into different people's schools and making the work and it was just by chance that I'd seen Waterside advertised a few times so it made me think that they weren't going who they wanted I didn't know what it did I didn't know what it was and I turned up here and the borough won't mind me telling you this but they didn't show me the children and they didn't show me the building and they didn't show me the staff Well when you came to see it, where you came to see it what did they show you? So I was shown the next door school which was a mainstream school and I didn't know and I've been ahead for a long time I know it's difficult to believe looking at this very useful face but I've been ahead for a very long time and I didn't think that was unusual that I did my lesson observations in a mainstream setting and it was only on day one when they allowed me to come in and it was nice that five-year-olds running down the corridor with scissors at me and screaming obscenities was not where I'd come from and I didn't come to this anymore but now I wouldn't change it for the world because in all of my headships I think I've made a difference in the vast majority of the places I've been to but I've been lucky and fortunate enough to see how the work we do here now at the secondary really does impact on not just the child but the family in the community and gives them life chances that I didn't expect them to have before so I'm really proud of that even though I'm tired I am really proud of it So how long have you been there? I came to Waterside in 2015 Waterside was not the building it is now it was very different and children weren't in the best spaces that they could be they were in a position where they weren't really educated very well and there wasn't an expectation for them to do very well but during the first two years we managed to turn the building around we started to return children back to mainstream and they've been very successful they're doing their GCSEs and doing incredibly well or they've gone into vocational training and then two years ago I was given the secondary school it had a different name when I was given it it had been in requiring improvement for a long time and was hovering into special measures and in three and a half turns we turned it into good with that standing features How? By not sleeping that's basically it I think the methodologies that I introduced here at Waterside worked really well which was that you have the same expectation if not higher of what children can do that there is consistency with behaviour and how you deal with behaviour and that you make them believe and feel that you are there for them that they're held in mind with you all the time and the secondary model is exactly the same in stage three it's run like a primary school so they stay mainly in their one classroom with their teacher and the TA they go out to food tech, science and PE but the rest of their day is mainly within their classroom and then key stage four which is year nine upwards they go and do all the options like they would do in the mainstream secondary they have a uniform the expectation is really high we do subjects that our mainstream colleagues have dropped because of league table issues so we still do statistics in maths that's a really complicated thing to get GCSE and we succeed at GCSE Why do you do it? To prove a point more than anything else because the sort of children that I play with are already removed from the system and are not expected to be part of anything they're always going to be on the outskirts of the world and also their families so they'll have found primary schools very interesting and not where they should be if they haven't come to water side they've more than likely been excluded quite a lot if they've managed to go to a mainstream secondary then most of them won't have survived past autumn one in year seven perhaps they will get to the end of year seven just starting year eight and then they fall out of education and they go to alternative providers or they don't go to alternative providers and they end up finding a pathway that you don't really want them to find so bringing them in and giving them the power to choose their learning and tell you this is what I'd like to learn this is what I want to become and then actually providing that for them that gives them a bit of power and a bit of kudos you know in the two years that we've been there my head of school and I have gone from having no data to report at the end of key stage four to now having GCSE grades as an equivalent if not better in some cases than they mainstream counterparts and they're going on to training they're going on to further education and their families are settled and during this entire pandemic I don't know how proud I'm supposed to be of this but I am really proud of it and not one of my families were referred to social care and not one of my families were referred to the MASH process and not one of my families have been in trouble with the police during the entire lockdown I am so proud of them I have no idea how proud that's made me because two years ago they wouldn't have been in that state so yeah we've worked hard you've worked really hard by the sounds of it do you have a kind of typical child or family that ends up with your school or is it very diverse I think most people would like to think that they are white British boys in the main where mam is either a single parent or dad is a single parent and where they may not have training or education to a level that you'd hope or they may not be in employment I do have some of those families I also have families where mainstream have failed them dramatically and that's a mixture of both the mainstream setting and the family not wanting to engage and have been part of that sort of social care being on things and not on things etc but I do have middle class families who've got children who've got interesting behaviours that need to be helped and supported so it is quite diverse the vast majority of the secondary is Bain but that's changing more in the past two years we're going more white British through the door but it's the first time in that school's history where parents are actively choosing them to send their children rather than mainstream and fail they'd rather than come through our system and then succeed and so the thing that the children who are schooled with you have in common is perhaps that mainstream isn't the right place for them for whatever reason tell me more about that in what way you talked about mainstream failing some of these kids what does this look like what state are they in when they get to you it depends so if I try to find a typical child because they're all really interesting they will if they're in primary they usually have got to about year four where school has tried everything so let's presume the school has given full weight behind what this child is displaying so they may be uncooperative, they may have been destructive they may be violent they may be a bit swayery they may have enjoyed tipping tables over all sorts of stuff and they'll have been given short fixed term exclusions of one two three five days and then somebody will have recognised that this isn't settling down and then usual routes for them is usually that they they bring out two magical words so they bring out ADHD or ASD because that covers absolutely everything that explains every child's behaviour oh children ever yeah and actually it doesn't because an ASD child's behaviours are very different from an SCMH behaviour there are some overlaps but you can normally spot when it's linked to their ASD and when it's not and then they usually go on a treadmill for an EHCP and then they usually end up being given either one-to-one support which doesn't work because you shatter that poor TA's life by giving them that one very interesting person for day in day out or they end up coming our way and actually what they need to do is to intervene earlier because that child would have displayed behaviours in reception in nursery and getting professionals involved at an earlier stage the vast majority of them can be settled unless they are really diagnosable behaviours and if it's stuff that's happening at home then you've got a chance to work with social care and work with the family to get things changed but the older they are when they come to us the more complex it takes so we we estimate that it takes between 6 to 9 weeks for us to unpick one type of behaviour and that can change as we unpick it so it can take a year to unpick two behaviours quite easily and to make them settled what kind of behaviour when you say unpick a behaviour what sort of thing so if they are if we go to the extreme so I have behaviours that most people would hope they would never see in a classroom so if you've got children who will go from 0 to 100 for no apparent reason but there is always a reason and they become hyper-violent so that might be that they will bite, kick, punch spit, turn tables throw things through windows attack teachers with scissors or whatever implements they have for us to work out why they do that we have to unpick that behaviour before it starts so we need to see it when somebody tells me that they've got the worst child ever I've got an entire school of the worst children ever allegedly but my children are in at this precise moment and there's a classroom behind this wall and you can't hear them but they're all in and I haven't put them in gauges we then have to unpick it so we watch why they did what they did and the reason we are a success of this is because we consistently methodically track every single element of their day so if for example there's a young man who's next door one of his his tells that let you know that his anxiety level is rising is the fact that he'll go his pen and he will take the lid off and click it but he clicks it only an odd number of times so if he does four nothing's going to happen nothing but three you know that he's starting to feel a little bit anxious if you don't pick that up then then he moves on to tapping something three times and then it goes so you have to look at right here do you click that twice so once you get to twice ooh what can we do to help you now what am I going to do to stop this game to a point that you're going to get interesting and what you need to do is unpick it to the point that they start to feel what they're feeling because a lot of SEMH children can't really differentiate that the good feelings that you want them to have as opposed to the negative ones it all feels exactly the same they're just enjoying that heightened state so you need to look out to get them to understand that that's a point for them and then they get to a point that they can ask you and say I need help before it gets to that bit and so the young man next door has been with us since September he's had a lockdown in between but we've worked with him consistently throughout and his last interesting moment was in January oh wow wow and he's now on a pathway to going back to mainstream in October we would have had him in September but unfortunately we've not been able to throw him into anybody else's schools but he's going back in October because that transition has to be dealt with really carefully yeah it takes seven weeks for us to transfer them in successfully if we go too quick it goes a bit wrong and we have a set plan per child it's very individualised so we work out what their main strengths are and those lessons first so that they feel that they are an expert and remain the things that they're not that comfortable with my staff will go with them for the entire seven weeks and then that school who's been kind enough to take one of mine back both at primary and secondary get my senior leadership and my support for a year free of charge so if that child wobbles before they exclude and that we are contacted and then we arrive we help reset the behaviour we sit in the meetings so that the parent and the child know that there is somebody who understands and listens and isn't against them and then we can normally put it where it should be wow so talk to me a bit more about what is happening with kids who are arriving with you whose behaviour is interesting why does that happen why are some kids naughty I'm going to stop you with that word go on that word is a naughty word naughty is when you've told everybody you're on a diet and you go into the staff room and you eat five biscuits and don't tell anybody really naughty is when you go in the staff room you eat the entire pack and then you go back in later and that's really naughty behaviour isn't naughty because I'm not a big fan of saying that behaviour communicates all the time it can do but sometimes as a grown up I can make myself interesting just because I feel the urge on that day I want to be grumpy because it's giving me that feeling so it's not communicating I'm just making myself feel that way for children there's some research that was done in MSU by Tracy Abram and she came up with a halt method which was that you could categorise behaviour in four ways which was that most people demonstrate behaviour if they're hungry, angry lonely stroke bored or tired and it's quite simplistic because I can be hungry but I will still be quite a nice person I can be bored and I will sit through it and look pleasant because I've learnt social convention so I can understand why that research took flight because it was used quite a lot recently in America because it sort of gave people a rationale for why they were being less tolerant and more irritable but actually in children I think there is that bit doesn't quite work so well because they haven't got the experience level either so a child may be hungry but that doesn't necessarily mean that their behaviours will alter they just may continually nag you for food I think you have to look wider than that and I think that's down to us as a society and I'm not saying that behaviour has changed dramatically since the 1920s 1930s but I think what has changed is how society deals with children so you go from a model where children were seen and not heard to a model where children's opinions are the centre of everybody's world and then there's no crossover there's no Venn Diagram so you're either quite binary on that I think to simplify it when they walk through my door it's quite easy for me to work out what type of parent I'm meeting and where the behaviour may be starting to be ingrained and that's just a very reasonable stuff so if we think of the things like ODD, ASD, ADHD all of that if we take that out of the way just normal misbehaviors sometimes it's down to children not understanding what you've asked and that can be either deliberately not understanding or the fact that they really don't understand so that could be that the parent has made a sentence so complex when they've asked them to do something where they started children are really good at being rewarded for their misbehaviour and I find parents get that really, really wrong so so take the thicker charts out of the way but if I was your child pookie and I wanted a snake for example imagine that I may not be the sort of child that would write a rational argument and present that to you as a sort of child that would nag the knickers off of none of you when you give in and I will have learnt from looking at the world around me that if I continually nag and if I continually request and if I continually whine eventually you give in and give what I want and so you're rewarding that behaviour so once that behaviour has been rewarded once then they know that they can get away with it again and again and again that's why when you see toddlers lying down in supermarkets kicking and screaming they may not really know what they're doing but they do know that by doing this gets the reaction that they're looking for which is I will get full attention and I will get something so that then translates further and further up as they get older and so they learn that they can control and manipulate grown-ups and if they turn that to their parent or their guardian then they can do that in class because a class teacher will have 30 of them and it's not going to be prepared to deal with somebody whining and winching at them all day and why would they not just ask nicely because they haven't learnt that so we would all like to think that children are given clear role models for language and behaviour but actually they're being given so many cues at the moment from both home life, social media gaming systems and I'm not laying the blame at media in any shape or form but children now have far more social cues than we did so if you take back to my generation you know I have four channels on my television and eventually there wasn't a lot of interaction I don't have computers whereas now they are bombarded with this is how you behave this is how you get this, this is how you get that so they've learnt these things and so either you've got a consistent parenting model at home where that parent has a very set guidance for them so you will get this if you do this this will happen if you do this I will not accept this or you'll have parenting that wobbles between it or you'll have parenting at the other end of the scale where they're just giving entirely you've also got that whole top a bit that some children don't grow out of and some grown-ups and I'm certain you've met them as well who test your boundaries on a daily basis and some people really do get off on just testing boundaries they really enjoy that feeling of watching another person have to manage it and deal with it and they are getting feedback on that because they are getting the control back they've made you do that and then they are making you do it even more ridiculously the thing that people either jump to first or they forget so depending where your brain is it's about trauma and a lot of our children have experienced trauma now at a level that they've never experienced in history and I'm very guarded with the word trauma because we're a trauma-informed school but there is a level of where their anxieties have become learned to be behaviour as a response to their anxiety then they will have attachment issues because they are looking for somebody to keep them physically and emotionally safe and they may not be getting that from the people that they live with they may not be getting that from the class teacher they may not have got that from the school that they went to and so that all builds up into a pattern of I can now do this in order to make myself safe I can do this in order to control the world around me and if we're all honest as grown-ups we still all do those things it's just that we've got some level of social convention that makes us realise that we shouldn't really put ourselves on the form of supermarket though sometimes I feel I shouldn't just... It's tempting isn't it? So it sounds like there's a lot here in terms of what we're seeing in children's behaviour that comes back to parents I mean are they the key influence here or what role does early schooling have to play I think parenting is important and it can't be negated because there are some experiences our children will have witnessed at home that I would have hoped nobody would have ever witnessed they will have witnessed domestic violence they will have witnessed drug abuse and substance abuse they may have witnessed self-harm they may have witnessed suicide they may have witnessed not having what their friends have and watching men or the guardian go out to get it in ways that you and I would hope that we would never have to accept that another adult would do and so there are things that you can't control school can be the one place for those sort of children where they can behave and be safe and for them to recognise and to notice that there is a different type of adult and a different model and that's not judging that parenting but that's just thinking that there is a grown-up who is safe, who is secure, who listens who isn't going to hurt them who does what they say they're going to do whether that's a good thing or a bad thing if you've done something wrong then there's a consequence but it will be the same consequence regardless of who you are sometimes school is the saviour for those children and I see currently my outreach service which only has 10 staff we did start off with 23 when I came in 2015 and now due to funding we're down to 10 and we see 174 children a week so we had to reduce to 10 because funding stopped dramatically but the need hasn't changed unfortunately and so we now work with over 174 children a week and I take on the more complex cases along with my head of school of the primary but we are noticing that children need an adult that holds them in mind and so our training now is all about getting them to see nurture not nagging and how they can help these children through these interesting behaviors because if you can unpick them early enough then the vast majority don't need an EHCP and the vast majority don't need to come into specialist provision they will need checking in they'll need people who will pop in and say how are you I notice things are a bit wobbly but they're not going to need that full gamut of specialist intervention which will create the system because at the moment Waterside has a waiting list of over 70 to come through the door and at the secondary for some unknown reason we have a glut of 30 year 11's that are waiting to come through the door and we can't work with them we just don't have the facility but the need is there but actually if we were able to intervene a lot earlier those year 11's wouldn't be where they are now and you talked before about having an interest in what happens from the very early years and how that shapes how a child learns to read and so on but presumably that's very much the case here as well in terms of setting those early behaviours and I think that's done to school you thought some behavioural policy and I think there has to be a shift and I'm hoping out of this ridiculous time that we've been in that people's attitude towards behaviour is going to alter because some people's behavioural policies are very punitive against the child and what you need is a behavioural policy that supports the child it can't be all singing all dancing and fluffy in light with no consequence because people need structure and children have routine children love structure they may kick against it every now and again but they do like to have a structure and I'm hoping that the pandemic has actually unleashed something within most schools planning for this doesn't work a sticker chart isn't working a rewards thing isn't working why am I excluding children because they've voiced why they're unhappy what can we do better and I think what changed at Waterside and at King's Oak was the mindset from the staff so instead of blaming the children for the behaviour that they were seeing we blamed ourselves because we needed to work out why we hadn't spotted it that's our job so as Paul Dix would tell us when the adult changes and it works it sounds really simple and some people come on that journey really readily some don't and some you have to lose but the reality is if you can't sit down and go oh I really made that difficult for you today I know you find maths difficult why have I given you this in this format and now I'm cleaning up a table and having to ring your mother and having to do lots and lots of stuff that I didn't need to have to do if I'd worked this out beforehand which is why our consistency without tracking through each child works and when we go into a mainstream setting we ask them to do it for their interesting child for a fortnight because over the fortnight you will see the behaviour pattern quite quickly you can say to them well when you've told me there were no triggers you've shown me them so how can we unpick it so is that like when you're doing that tracking is it that you're noticing that these are the warning signs that this child's behaviour is going to escalate or is it saying hey do you know what this child tends to go into meltdown in maths because they find that hard so from it's different to the model we use at both the special schools what we'll give out to a mainstream school so in a mainstream school we ask them to show when that child's behaviour escalates because we're not going to expect them to unpick it all in one go and we have to remember they've got 30 children in a classroom so there's a lot for them to deal with rather than just that but we've made it really simple so it's colour coded and it's tapable so they can have it on any device they don't have to do anything complicated the document is shared between the school and myself and my head of school so we monitor it after the first couple of days we will then ring them back and say we've noticed that whatever you're doing at period 3 is when things start to go a little bit interesting and usually they tell you oh well we excluded them after that so you're like oh ok I have worked it out and then we can design our training to help support them so for like primary it can be as basic as how a child goes into a hall you know going into the hall for assembly which they're not going to have to do for a while so that's going to really negate it for some children but going into the hall for assembly can really be a big trigger because they go from being in a small confined space where they feel fairly secure to then go into a larger space where there's a lot of people and they can't level out their anxiety that's not just kids I struggle with that like as an adult who's autistic I mean you've seen me, you've seen at the LGFL conference I was triggering continually doing that because it petrifies me going from being in a small contained space where I feel I'm in control to suddenly having an audience and they're waiting for me but suddenly I can do that in assembly with my children no drama at all you could have everybody in there no problem but put me in front of my peer group it's quite interesting to play with and so we teach them how to role play that and how to rehearse it so that that level of behaviour comes down it won't go away immediately but you lower the anxiety level and do it on days when you haven't got the vicar in because that's usually when things go really wrong what are you trying to say about vicar's Mike nothing at all but it's usually when you've got somebody who doesn't normally deal with children in that way suddenly have and the tension level of every member of staff knowing that that interesting child is in that room who could put out the most beautiful beautiful sentences obscenities to somebody who may be quite shocked that the tension level goes up and the children feed on it and if they're already anxious and they can see you're anxious that just escalates it so you need to real role play that to bring it down it's the same as bringing them in from playtime you know if you know they can't line up then why are you making them line up in that way why haven't you worked this out you know if they can't stand behind somebody then don't let them stand behind somebody bring them to the front so that they are standing in the front or put them next to somebody who you know won't react so quickly so that they can start to lower their expectation and anxiety level and that's not kind of pandering to them or I mean we I get it some people are going to be saying oh well you moved them around to panter to that child I get that but then would you say the same if you were doing it to maths or doing the same for English so if that child couldn't manage number bonds to ten and you've given them solid devices for them to count with are you pandering to them because they couldn't do it you're supporting and scaffolding they're learning so if you're going to support and scaffold why aren't you supporting and scaffolding their behaviour so if that child needs to have a couple of steps taken back so that they can then work forward then that's no difference to doing that with their spelling, their phonics their handwriting, their maths, their science so if you treat behaviour as a normal national curriculum subject then you're not pandering what you're doing is making them realise that this isn't the right way this isn't the right way for you to do it and we're going to keep doing it this way so that you will get used to it and then it'll become normal and your anxiety level will drop so do you think that all children can learn or most children can learn to behave in a socially acceptable way or are there exceptions there are exceptions but the vast majority of us have social interaction quite well most of us are fairly decent at knowing that it's not the time to go in to say selfages and start screening and obscenities of people because you've had to keep most of us are quite good at working out what's socially acceptable we've read those cues well most children's behaviours can be adjusted they can't be fixed because if you've got behaviours that are ingrained if you do certain things a certain way the ACD for example is never going to change you have no idea how calm I am at the moment looking at your box shelf that is lowered my temperature no end there's a funny story about my coloured ordered books and then we'll come back to you it is one of my people mention it a lot and it's a bit of a figment of fun however it is something that's actually thinking about the order in which those colours are does help me and it's a really calming activity for me and when I get a new book then one of the great joys is thinking where does this go and I had one recently where I'd got this book and I was just having quite an anxious day and things were quite tricky and that makes it harder to work this stuff out and I'm going is it bluey green or is it greeny blue I don't know I don't know and the book I can give you a I can give you a download for that there's a lovely app that you can put on your phone but if you scan it it tells you exactly what colour it is unleashed my world unleashed it I colour coded my entire library in the primary I'm going to have to reorder my books again it's a joy to do because you said they're going really that's what this oh it's amazing it's the panatone colour so it's please do actually genuinely send me that anyway back to yes so you were talking about so some behaviours will be triggered and they're there and they're kind of almost endemic and then we've got some behaviours I've done to diagnosable issues and that can be from a mental health perspective that will either not be fixable because you can't really fix behaviour you will always if you're normally a happy person you're normally a happy person if you're normally a sad person you're normally a sad person but if your anxiety levels mean that you do certain things then you will normally fall back into that pattern of behaviour until somebody's cut that cycle but it will happen you're never going to get past that if you would normally get a bit shouty you probably will get a bit shouty when your anxiety level is built up to a point but there are some behaviours that don't alter because of the diagnosis children have got certain ASD traits they can be mimicked to fit in with society a bit more but they will always be there and it's our job as the practitioner to work out how we accommodate for that behaviour and how we make that child feel comfortable about if I'm going to display it today is the day I'm going to display it and I'm not going to be putting in shame for displaying that behaviour you're going to help me fix it when I've got it wrong when it's going to be put back together so it's about adapting the environment rather than kind of trying to change the child sometimes yeah I mean for ASD children my complex ASD kids are probably the most interesting I've worked with in my career so they will present as far as society is concerned they present as average happy-go-lucky-looking children they are hyper-intelligent we have one young man who isn't allowed access to the internet anymore because he reprogrammed his entire school from a kindle crying to me to my building because I could do with that kind of brain he is ridiculously fascinating to play with because he doesn't know that it's wrong okay and he doesn't know that what he's doing has consequences he's intelligent enough to understand that there's a consequence but it's not working in his head that's just not going to work so if you say to him you wanted I don't know to reprogram somebody's lights at home from a distance it would take him about half an hour and he would be able to control everything in that house to the point in his previous primary school he reprogrammed their website to display some imagery of staff that wasn't particularly pleasant and lovely and he changed all their biographies and it took the web company three weeks and then they had to ring him because they couldn't do what he had done I'm sure I shouldn't laugh but wow if I'm honest with you I found it quite hysterical because I kept thinking these are people you've paid a fortune for where I've got an 11 year old child who in four taps and a couple of clicks managed to undo everything he'd done but they couldn't do that and he's going to go into specialist private education because he really does need to have that gift looked at but his behaviors will never alter he is going to always be vulnerable because he doesn't have that filter that we all gain at some point that people may not tell you the truth and that the world isn't in black and white and he will find the world very complicated and so however much I've altered my environment to support him the rest of the world is never going to be able to change and we've tried over the course of a year and a half with him now to try and get him to understand how different the world is going to be but he's always going to find that difficult some of my children will work that out but he will always want to and you talked before about how you think that the current situation, the pandemic is likely to influence on how schools generally approach behavior can you talk a bit about that like why do you think it will change what's happened now that's making people rethink stuff I think I'd like to think I think that's a better start to the sentence I'd like to think that people are going to be more kind and so they're going to understand that children coming back into school are going to have anxiety and are going to feel stressed and it may be their own level of anxiety may be assimilated from what's happening at home and that may alter behavioral patterns so those children who you wouldn't normally expect to be interesting suddenly become interesting I'm hoping that from looking online and seeing what interactions have been going on with other schools we've had a lot of traction from mainstream to ask what can we do what routes would you offer I think people are more inclined to think about the mental health aspect of it and hopefully that will mean that they will hold on to some of these children rather than push them down a pathway that they don't really need to be I'm hoping that they'll engage with services like ours and like yours so that they will manage to see that there is a different route and that route may not work for every child and if it doesn't this is what you do next because you've got to try it first but we've been doing some trauma practice with some of our mainstream colleagues during the pandemic and so far only one school has excluded a child and they had to exclude that child not that I'm a big advocate of exclusion but there was no other option for the school at the time but they've worked hard on changing how their staff deal with behaviour and how their staff are more tolerant of what's coming their way and they've learnt some of the things that we've talked during our Julie Andrews training about how to be more confident how to be more nurturing and not nagging children, how to simplify what your requests are how to give them the expectation that you will still be there things may be difficult but you will still be there this is how it's going to be and that seems to have really lowered that temperature we are offering our training currently free to people who wants it because we believe that if the social emotional mental health special schools are not integral to what the return after a pandemic will look like then what are we for I'm not here for naughty children I'm here for ensuring that children and staff have access to the very best quality mental health practices that they can access and support families and children rather than be punitive because we're going to be in this for a while so you might as well start changing how you are and a lot of schools are overloading services like yourself and they're overloading trauma informed schools and if you look on Twitter I think edgy twitter is swamped with hashtag mental health I'm just hoping that they're not going to do it by playing lip service to it but actually taking on board those trainings and altering their practice a little in their ethos I hope so too I guess only time is going to tell really here isn't it but certainly I've had a lot of really good conversations and much more widely than I would normally expect to I've come into contact with all sorts of people who normally wouldn't cross my path and I think there is much there that's encouraging but then you never quite know because sometimes it feels like you are living in a bit of an echo chamber and maybe that echo chamber got a bit bigger I don't know but we shall see there's a couple of things that have come up a lot of times in this discussion and one is around anxiety and one is around play and I just wanted to pick up on both those points before we kind of wrap up so anxiety seems to come up again and again is that kind of a key reason do you think a key thing underlying a lot of the issues that we see because children children don't know if children's behaviours are interesting they don't know why they're interesting well they know as it gets a reaction and sometimes their behaviours as we said earlier is to get what they want but sometimes it's because they're reacting about a situation around them and that could be within class but that also could be outside of the building as well and what we've noticed over the past five years is that children are more proficient and hyper anxious quite a lot they're worried about change they're worried about what will happen if and it's a bit like that developmental stage that a toddler goes through that when they shut their eyes they believe that the world really does disappear and then when they open them up again it's a surprise well it's a bit like that for the anxiety level for some of my children because I think they believe that it can't be controlled and then it will all go wrong and we have to get them to a space where they believe that school is safe and that school is secure and that nothing has gone wrong just because they're not there everything is fine everything is the same and if there is something that goes wrong there are people who are going to help you put that right and I think that's about the adults taking their role really seriously you know that you are you aren't just there imparting information you are a role model they need to know that you feel anxious about stuff that you are comfortable to tell them when you are scared about things but the world doesn't fall apart because you're scared the world falls apart if you don't tell somebody you're scared you need to share how you're feeling and being emotionally literate is a really complicated phrase for people some people think it's all about sitting on a bean bag and lighting jostics and being all in touch with yourself whereas the people just think it's about recognising that that person is a bit wobbly and I'll ignore them because I'm not going to deal with them today but the vast majority of us are emotionally literate we can tell when somebody is happy we can tell when somebody is sad and it's about showing that to children and showing that to their parents it's going to be an interesting day that you're not blaming them for their behaviour you're not ringing up that parent going your child has done this and it's your fault for why they've done it no you've got to turn that around and say we've made a mistake today it's gone a bit wobbly they're coming home they may not be so chatty with you today but if it comes out why they've done what they've done I'd be really grateful to know because they haven't told me that bit yet and now we know that we can't do that and that takes all the blame out of it it takes all the pressure out of it it deflates that balloon and then people are happier to share so we're inquisitive rather than kind of punitive I guess and just you know as you're talking it's making me think a little bit and I think sometimes when there is that that kind of anxiety or worry going on but whatever reason whatever the genesis is there that in my experience it tends to go one it's either it's out and it's big and it's loud and these are our kids who are throwing stuff and kicking stuff and shouting and the kids who maybe end up with you and then there are the kids who I end up kind of supporting directly or indirectly who are turning it in on themselves and we're seeing our self harm or our eating disorders and that kind of thing does that kind of fit with your understanding of it too or yeah completely because and it's what's been very noticeable is how many boys are changing towards our internalised harm rather than exploding so if you look at behaviour across primary you are more likely to watch a boy's behaviour than a girl's behaviour boys are very good at being loud and boisterous and they're usually physically very big when they lose their temper girls usually contain it more and are usually a bit more sly for want a better word with their behaviours until they get to about year 7 and year 18 then it becomes really big for those girls but what we've noticed is that that although it's still happening that boys are being more noticeable as they get older they are turning that behaviour inside and so instead of demonstrating it by being violent outwardly they are hurting themselves and I've been I've been really shocked over the past five years about the amounts of young men who have real severe difficulties with their eating and self harm and real really difficult conversations to be had about the amount of self harm that they are masking and hiding from the world and when I say this out loud and I'm certain you won't judge me on it but you may do but I've always found it a real honour when they let me in Oh hugely, yeah and I've discovered that that's where they are and there are bits of me that become very humbled that they've allowed this ridiculous human being to be part of that journey and then there's a bigger part of me that is annoyed that I didn't notice it before and it hurts me that I've allowed them to hurt for that long and so as part of our methodology now of the secondary because it's normally around year seven to year eight that we're seeing more of that the way our PSHE curriculum is really delving into those behaviours and making it normalise to talk about it but hiding it anymore saying that we all control aspects of our lives this is a different level for you of control perhaps and not making it that secret and staff have been not all staff I can't blanket it with that but some of my staff have been very open about how their lives were and that's really unpicked quite a lot of it for us because it's again showing you are emotionally open and literate you're not standing there presenting as a robot you're standing there saying I've been through this myself and I'm not telling you that it's wrong that you're doing this I'm not telling you it's right that you're doing this I'm just letting you know that there is somebody else in this room or in this building that have been there and that's been very powerful yeah and I think it's really brave actually as a practitioner to be kind of vulnerable and open in that way but if you're able to do it safely so that you're walking with the child and they're not having to carry your birds but that they realise they're not alone in it and that someone really gets it it can often be that thing that begins to bridge content and then talk to me about play you've used the word play a lot even when thinking about older kids and I'm interested to understand your thinking there I have a big problem I have several to be fair but one of them is that school has become not school and school should be a place of fun and it should be a place where children can express regardless of their age group they should be able to go out and do the things that children should do go and do mini world play do big role play stuff outside go and play games not just kick a ball around a playground and become hypermasculine because you can do that thing encouragement of going out and just doing stuff and so as part of our curriculum at both schools there is an emphasis on play both within the lesson and outside of the lesson and that's about in its broadest sense making things more interesting so for me maths was always a problem which I found ridiculous now because I control a huge budget but I really do find maths a problem so we've made that more exciting so there's a lot more practical stuff that they play with things put it in the real world both at the primary and at the secondary the same for English the same for science the same for food tech so if you come to my secondary school you will be given a menu for your breakfast as a visitor and my children will go and create your breakfast for you and serve it and role play it as if they're in a real restaurant so that it forms part of their curriculum as in they're sitting guilds for cookery and they're sitting guilds for food tech and they're sitting guilds for restaurant work but it also gives them that freedom to go and be a child and experimental stuff at the primary my children are actively encouraged to role play and actively encouraged small world activities outside and allowed to be children the vast majority of mine have been excluded and then kept at home they don't get to go on school visits they don't go on school journey so we make certain they go and do those things that's about growing up and experiencing the world and as a grown up if I can't be stupid if I can't give myself permission to be stupid then I shouldn't really be doing this for children and so our literacy work for example usually there is one book within one class that will require that character to be interviewed and so I will dress up as that character to be interviewed so that they can do their written work and so it demonstrates to them that as a grown up you don't have to stop being fun you can still have fun and as you know if a child comes to the primary they're not actually entering school they're entering a superhero academy and so they're issued with a cape and a mask and they get to be a superhero and by the superpowers that they've used for evil need to be changed for good and that demonstrates to them that school can be fun it's not a punitive place to come to and you should play plays possibly the safest way of you experiencing the world and to work out if that's the right thing for you to be experiencing in that way I role played as a child I was given those experiences and I didn't play with them anymore they sat in front of the screen so yeah play is vital absolutely vital and I love it when I'm invited to go and play with other people's children in their schools because then I get to see how that child isn't being played with and we need to play with them so we need to do some learning around playing I've got a few different people coming on the podcast actually to talk about play because lots of people have asked me about it and it's a real weakness I'm learning how to play as an adult but I never really learnt as a kid and I'm interested in it but I can't teach about it so I'm bringing in other people who know I'd be really interested in that because I'd love a bit of play I mean last Thursday was bubble Thursday and now from the playground all day was just gigantic bubble machines all day it was the most surreal experience for the day but that was at the secondary and at the primary and people laughed at me saying that the secondary boys would not engage with it you have never seen so many of them sitting cross-legged on the floor catching bubbles and watching them change you're your 10 and that's not wrong that you're sat on the floor looking at a bubble that's not wrong I love bubbles I actually carry bubbles with me everywhere because if I'm panicking, if I blow bubbles A, it helps with your breath and it's such a mindful thing bubbles are beautiful but why? Why do we stop? because they don't do that in Europe play is encouraged so why we stock it in the UK I don't know but I'm hearing in Greenwich playing as hard as I possibly can so we need a play revolution I think that could be our mission yeah I'd make a banner I'd be there that yeah what thought would you would you want to end on? I always like to let you close with a thought that you'd like to leave in people's minds as they stop listening tricky because I have lots but I think if I can make people look at their most interesting children and see past the bike-tea, the stabby, the swearing, the spitty and see past the things that they call you that you take to heart and remember that inside that really angry looking person there is a beautiful young person inside who is crying out to you because they think you are the safest adult they've met that they need you that they want you they may not say that they do but they really do want you to get to learn about them you will see what a brilliant impact you could have as a practitioner and as an adult because if you can hold them in mind if you can hold them close if you can remind them that the world does have nice sparkly people in it then you will have done your job as a teacher you will have done your job as an educator and you may have stopped somebody from going down a pathway that they don't really need to and you can go home and say you earned your money that day