It’s not about just being soft on kids,” sighs Tamsin Ford, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Exeter.

As you may have guessed, she is talking about a behaviour intervention. Such is the polarised nature of the debate around behaviour, any intervention that does not start with rules and punishment and work backwards from there is often considered “soft”. The programme Ford is referring to above, primary-age-focused The Incredible Years, would certainly be deemed by some to fit in that category.

It was designed to “prevent and treat young children’s behaviour problems and promote their social, emotional, and academic competence”. It draws on theories of how “coercive cycles of interaction between adults and children reinforce disruptive behaviour; the importance of modelling and self-efficacy; and developmental interactive learning methods”.

And it also uses cognitive behavioural approaches and attachment theory to focus on building positive relationships and enhancing teachers’ skills in promoting social and emotional wellbeing in the classroom.

Across six sessions (one a month for six months), teachers work together in groups of 10 to collaboratively explore and find solutions to issues they have faced, within a framework of encouragement, praise and incentives.

That social and emotional problems are an issue for young people can’t be disputed. The latest government statistics, from 2018, show that one in 10 children aged 5-10 have had at least one recognisable disorder, and one in 30 met the criteria for two or more. More often that not, behaviour that can go against a school’s rules is a symptom of these disorders.

But does The Incredible Years actually work? Ford led a randomised controlled trial of the programme in 80 primary schools across Devon, Plymouth and Torbay, over five years from 2012, to explore whether it could, in her words, “transform the classroom from an environment where many children currently struggle to cope, particularly boys from low socioeconomic backgrounds, into one where many more children can thrive”.

One major part of the programme is shifting the teacher focus from poor behaviour to good behaviour.

“It’s much better to highlight the child who’s sitting quietly and listening, than it is to tell Jonny off for not sitting quietly or listening,” explains Ford. “Because you’re being very clear to everybody about what you expect and you are encouraging the children who are doing it. You show clear expectations, and give lots of praise and encouragement and some tangible rewards for doing what you want. So, as well as encouraging that child, you’re giving a very clear message to that child and everybody else about what they’ve done right.”

Children will naturally need correcting sometimes as they are bound to make mistakes, she continues, but in order for that to be effective, you need what Dr Carolyn Webster-Stratton - professor emeritus at the University of Washington and founder of The Incredible Years - describes as a “piggy bank of goodwill”. That means catching them doing good as often as possible, rather than constantly reinforcing poor behaviour with attention.

“We know teachers’ attention is hugely rewarding for children,” Ford says. “If you are paying attention to disruptive behaviour, that’s what you’re going to get back. So you can have your most disruptive person right in front of you and can keep an eye on them where they’re safe to be ignored, and then as soon as they’re doing what you want, jump on them and praise them for it. That way, they gradually learn that they get attention for doing what the teacher wants and everybody’s life is easier.”

Accentuate the positive

It all sounds very nice, but isn’t it what teachers already learn in behaviour management training? Ford agrees, and says the programme isn’t about trying to reinvent the wheel.

“I don’t think we’re telling teachers anything that they don’t know,” she says. “What we are doing is giving them permission to use it. Our qualitative feedback was that they found the course to be very validating. We’re giving them time and space to think and reflect and tweak the skills they already have.”

Ford explains that the growing trend towards zero-tolerance policies in schools is often resulting in “harsh and punitive” approaches towards behaviour issues and infractions around things like uniform.

“Zero tolerance doesn’t have to be that way, but that is often the way it is applied,” she says.

Instead, the programme trains teachers to be “very clear” with children about what’s expected, and what will happen if they don’t do what’s expected, but to do it within a different context.

“It’s absolutely not about not having sanctions,” Ford emphasises. “It’s just that if you pay a lot of attention to the positive, you don’t need to use sanctions as much.”

She references one of the exercises in the programme in which teachers are instructed to keep a pile of marbles in their pocket while taking a class. Every time they say something positive, they move a marble to the other pocket. Most teachers are “horrified” afterwards, she says, realising that even though they think positive things about their students, they don’t always express them.

So what was the effect of all this positivity on the students in the trial? Though a major part of the programme, it goes hand in hand with a lot of coaching, discussion and other training elements, such as how to redirect and engage children and how teachers can stay calm.

But all this combined appears to have had a very positive effect. Before the study began, the 80 schools received “strength and difficulties” questionnaires to ascertain where pupils were having challenges with behaviour, emotion, attention, concentration and peer relationships. There were also questionnaires on low-level disruption (completed by teachers), and attitudes towards school (completed by students).

Then the schools were randomly divided into two groups: 40 that taught as usual, and 40 that had a teacher train in the Incredible Years method for six months. Researchers revisited the students - from Reception to Year 4 - nine months into the first academic year (before and after the intervention was delivered, while they were with the same teacher), and then at 18 months and 30 months (while they were with two different teachers), in the subsequent academic years.

The results were encouraging. Peer relationships and pro-social behaviour was improved in the children whose teachers were trained in the first year, although this didn’t persist when they moved to a different teacher. This could be a chance finding, Ford speculates, or it could be those particular aspects are “very sensitive to how children are handled, so they went away again when they were being taught by teachers who hadn’t had the training”.

Other areas did show sustained improvement, however. “In the questionnaire, we had six questions about the kind of low-level disruption that really gets in the way of teaching and on that, there was an improvement for the whole 30 months of follow-up across everybody, which I think is massive,” Ford says. “Another of the subsections of the difficulties questionnaire was on attention and concentration, which again is hugely important to school, and was also improved in all children for 30 months.”

Promising findings

But the primary outcome was around pupils’ wellbeing, with interesting results. “We got a signal that possibly there’s a small improvement in children’s mental health,” she says. “It’s tiny. Statistically significant, but tiny. But more excitingly, the children who were in poor mental health at the baseline did better than the control.

“For all children, when you look at them all together, the effect of the intervention seems to wear off after the first year. In other words, these children went from being handled in a certain way in one year, back into ordinary school for the following year.

“But for the children who were struggling at baseline, they maintained an improvement against the children who were struggling in the control group for the whole 30 months that we studied them.”

Ford and her colleagues are now recruiting for a second trial to further explore the impact on mental health. Researchers will again be sticking with primary schools (as the programme is aimed at those aged 3-8) as Ford is dubious about the possibilities of it being adapted for older students, whom she fears may find the approach patronising.

But if the programme takes off in primaries, she says, the positive repercussions could be felt throughout the later stages.

“I do wonder if this was widely practised in primary schools, whether there would be less of a behavioural challenge in secondary school,” she says. “It really improves relationships and behaviour, and therefore reduces the stress level in the classroom. These principles work because these are the underlying principles of how human beings work.”

Zofia Niemtus is deputy commissioning editor at Tes. She tweets @zofcha

This article originally appeared in the 21 June 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…primary behaviour”