In a school of almost 2,000 pupils, situated on a sprawling site, it used to be a common occurrence that a small minority of students would take the least direct route to lessons and arrive late for their next class. Alongside this internal truancy, we had persistent issues with low-level disruption.

Early efforts to tackle the issues were not as successful as we’d hoped. The 95 per cent of students getting it right continued to get it right. For the 5 per cent who struggled with behaviour, they became trapped in a cycle of being sent to isolation, reflecting on their behaviour, returning to lessons and then being sent back to isolation.

The 20 students in this group made up 36 per cent of all behaviour logs across the whole school (2017-18). Some of these identified students were very withdrawn, others demanded your attention constantly and the rest were often very erratic in their behaviour. We quickly recognised that, for these children, we were going to have to take a different approach.

The solution came after two colleagues and I attended a year-long course on how to support vulnerable students, particularly those with attachment and trauma issues. The trainers sympathetically explained the impact that insecure attachments can have on children and adults. As they talked, we had a lightbulb moment: what if our group of 20 had insecure attachments? The majority of them were demonstrating the triggers our course was identifying, but had any of our pupils been formally assessed for attachment and did we have any support in place for children with insecure attachment? The answers were “no” and “nothing”, so we set about changing that.

How did we approach it?

We started by seeking out research on how attachment issues impact behaviour in the classroom. We struggled, though, to find anything as specific as that. What we did delve into instead was the extensive literature around early childhood trauma.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are a list of 10 factors made up of five personal experiences (physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect), and five family factors (witnessing domestic violence, family member in jail, family member with mental illness, disappearance of a parent through divorce, death or abandonment) (Felitti et al, 1998).

Research in Wales suggests that if a child has four or more ACEs, it can result in an increased likelihood of high-risk drinking in adulthood (four times more likely), being a smoker (six times more likely) and being involved in violence in the past year (15 times more likely) (Bellis, 2016).

Further research suggests that children with four or more ACEs are statistically more likely to have moderate to severe ADHD, and the study advises that there should be routine assessment of ACEs in children with ADHD (Brown et al, 2014).

With the risks clear, we wanted to get a good idea whether any of our group of 20 children might need further support.

Using the book Inside I’m Hurting by Louise Bomber (2007), and liaising with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, an educational psychologist and other external agencies, we created a small questionnaire to get an idea of whether any of the students could be identified as having the following attachment styles.

• Avoidant-type behaviour will often present with a student being highly anxious or withdrawn. They may be reluctant to ask for help and can have short outbursts or tantrums.
• Ambivalent-type behaviour will often present as a student wanting their needs met by staff members, constantly wanting attention (in any form, good or bad), lacking resilience, being quick to blame others, and often resentful and holding grudges.
• Disorganised behaviours will often present as a student being erratic in their responses and unpredictable, with strategies that work one week but may not work the following week. They often want to have control over everything - including friends and classroom decisions.

The pupils filled in the questionnaire and we discovered that five students identified as avoidant, eight as ambivalent and seven as disorganised. That’s right - all 20 appeared to have attachment challenges.

What did we do about it?

Using our research, external services and the special educational needs and disability teacher guidelines, we created a document for each child outlining support advice. Each document contains general advice in supporting students with attachment issues, alongside specific guidance written for each child.

For example, it pinpointed specific strategies to reduce the pupil’s anxiety that we believed would work, and also the visual clues that a student might present with that would indicate the pupil was feeling anxious. Additionally, each student was provided with a key member of staff who would be their go-to person if things got too difficult for them.

Students were given access to these guidelines and were able to critique them. They added bits and asked for some elements to be changed. Having ownership of this document was a first step in developing self-regulation for these students.

In addition to this, staff were provided with continuing professional development opportunities to further their understanding of trauma and becoming attachment aware. And time was used in staff meetings and morning briefings to discuss case studies to ensure every teacher knew our students and the daily challenges they faced.

Finally, we ensured support from external agencies was in place where needed.

As we were going through this process, we had a number of mid-year transfers into the school: some of these were excluded students who had been allocated to us while others wanted a fresh start at another school.

The vast majority of these students also had complex needs and demonstrated similar behaviours to our group of 20 pupils. Although too late to be included in the project, these additional 10 students were also screened and provided with our bespoke teacher “Aware” guidelines.

What impact did it have?

I was pleased to see that, by the end of the academic year, following the Aware interventions, behaviour logs had reduced for our identified 20 students, with 248 fewer recorded incidents (year on year).

What we hadn’t expected, though, was that we also saw a reduction in behaviour logs for pupil premium students (557 fewer recorded incidents year on year) and a reduction of behaviour logs across the whole school (2,030 fewer recorded incidents year on year).

The impact on attainment was less clear, with the majority of the key stage 3 students in the group improving their target grade (6 out of 9) students, but most of the key stage 4 students in the group not doing so.

Staff and student feedback suggested that behaviour was much improved this academic year, and a recent multi-academy trust review found that “corridors were quieter and lessons less disrupted” than they were a year ago.

Next steps

Our next steps as a school have been to further embed our current practice, continuing to work with our most vulnerable students to support them further. Learner profiles were reissued to staff during the September Inset days, and time was been allocated to review and support our new cohort of Year 7 students, with the head of Year 7 and the SEND coordinator.

Next year, we also intend to work with our local feeder primary schools to support them to be more attachment aware. Beyond that, we want to establish attachment-aware hubs across the local education authority, ensuring all secondary students are provided with equal support for their attachment and trauma needs, particularly mid-year transfers and excluded students moving from one school to another.

Progress has already been made this year, with three local secondary schools recently contacting us to request details of our Aware programme and resources to implement into their schools’ pastoral support. Just as a student with SEND needs additional support that follows them through their education, we would like to do the same for those with attachment and trauma issues.

Chris Jackson was assistant principal at Winterbourne Academy at the time of writing. He has since moved to be vice-principal at Broadlands Academy, part of the Academies Enterprise Trust. He tweets @ChrisjacksonBA

This article originally appeared in the 4 OCTOBER 2019 issue under the headline “Be aware of the underlying causes of poor behaviour”