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Because here’s the truth nobody puts in the back-to-school INSET slides: you are dysregulated too. You dysregulate in a number of ways, here are some well-known ones!

The Sunday scaries… It’s a well-known and often laughed about phenomenon in teaching! My fellow Substacker Adrian and the lovely people over at Twinkl have talked about them before.

The 2 am scroll through your lesson planning “just to check.” Suddenly bolting up in bed remembering you’ve forgotten to alter a slide or resource.

The dread that has absolutely nothing to do with whether you’re a good teacher, and everything to do with the fact that your nervous system knows what’s coming.

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😰 Anticipatory Anxiety Is Not a Character Flaw

If you’re feeling it, you’re not alone, and you’re not failing before you’ve even started. Anticipatory dread ahead of a demanding, relational job is a completely normal nervous system response, the same polyvagal patterns we teach pupils to recognise (Porges) are running in us too.

Your body is doing exactly what it’s designed to do: preparing you for perceived threat, whether that threat is a difficult class, a packed calendar, or simply the unknown of a new cohort.

The problem isn’t that you feel this. The problem is that we’ve built a profession where naming it out loud still feels like a risk.

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🪞 What “Regulate Before You Educate” Looks Like Turned Inward

We tell staff to co-regulate with pupils before expecting engagement. We rarely extend ourselves the same grace. A few ways to actually do that this week:

• Name it, don’t narrate it. There’s a difference between “I’m anxious because I’m useless and haven’t prepared properly” (narrating a story) and “My body is anticipating a big change” (naming a state). The second is regulating. The first isn’t.

• Borrow the Zones of Regulation, but for you. Which zone are you in right now, and what’s one thing (not ten) that would help you move toward green before Monday?

• Find your own “safe base.” Just as we ask pupils to find a trusted adult, who’s your person this week? A colleague, a friend, a WhatsApp group, someone you can be honest with about how you’re actually feeling.

• Lower the bar for day one. You don’t need the perfect seating plan or a flawless first lesson. You need to walk in regulated enough to be relationally present. That’s the whole job on day one.

A Reflective Question for the Week Ahead

If a pupil walked into your room this anxious, what would you do for them first, before any learning objective?

Now ask yourself: are you willing to do that for yourself?

If this resonated, I’d love for you to share it with a colleague who might need the reminder that regulation isn’t just something we teach; it’s something we’re allowed to need too. And if you want to go deeper on practitioner wellbeing and burnout-proofing your term, that’s exactly the kind of thing I explore on this Substack.

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📬 Did You Miss These?

INSET days tend to fill quickly: data reviews, policy updates, new systems to learn. All of it matters. But the work that will most determine how September actually feels, for you, and for the children you’ll spend the next year with, rarely makes the formal agenda. This post is for that work.

Part One: Before They Arrive 🏫

Here are four things I’d prioritise in the days before pupils return, especially if you work with children and young people with SEMH needs.

1. Think about relationship re-entry, not just a fresh start 🔄

For many pupils, particularly those with SEMH needs, attachment difficulties, or adverse childhood experiences, the summer is not a break. It’s a disruption. Six to eight weeks without the structure, safety, and predictability that school provides can undo significant relational progress.

This isn’t about blaming the holidays. It’s about understanding that some pupils will arrive on Thursday carrying the emotional weight of everything that happened when school wasn’t there. They won’t necessarily be able to tell you that.

They may show you instead, through dysregulation, withdrawal, or what looks, at first glance, like defiance.

Re-entry isn’t just about knowing names and knowing needs. It’s about re-establishing the relational signal: I remember you. I’m glad you’re back. This is still a safe place.

That can be as simple as a warm, unhurried greeting at the door. A quiet check-in with a pupil you know found summer difficult. A Post-it note in a planner. Small signals land big for children whose attachment systems are on high alert.

Research on relational approaches, including Dan Hughes’ PACE model (Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy), consistently points to the same truth: connection before correction. Re-entry week is the best possible moment to practise that.

Digital SEMH Resources

2. Co-regulation before behaviour management 🧠

If you’re heading into September with a new behaviour policy, revised consequence systems, or updated expectations, fine. But please sequence it carefully.

Behaviour management works best, and sometimes only, when it’s built on a regulated nervous system. For pupils who have experienced trauma, chronic stress, or disrupted attachment, asking for compliance before you’ve re-established safety is asking them to perform a cognitive function they may not yet have access to.

Bruce Perry’s neurosequential framework is worth keeping close here: regulate, then relate, then reason. In practice, this means your first priority isn’t rules, it’s settling. Predictable routines. Calm adult presence. Movement and sensory-aware environments. Transitions that are explained rather than rushed.

None of this is soft on expectations. It’s smart sequencing. And it’s increasingly what Ofsted are looking for when they examine SEMH provision, not just what the behaviour policy says, but how it plays out for individual pupils in real moments.

3. Find your TAs before the pupils do 🤝

This one is specifically for teachers who have support staff in their classroom, and it’s consistently one of the most undervalued things I see in schools.

Teaching Assistants are not simply additional adults. For many pupils with SEMH needs, a trusted TA is a primary attachment figure within school. The relationship between class teacher and TA, how well you communicate, how clearly roles are defined, how much you trust each other, will directly shape the quality of support those pupils receive.

Before term starts, carve out even fifteen minutes with your support staff. Talk through the pupils you’re most concerned about. Share what worked last year. Be honest about where things felt hard. Agree a simple communication rhythm, whether that’s a brief end-of-day debrief or a shared notes system.

The EEF’s guidance on maximising TA impact is clear: structured preparation and explicit role clarity are what separates a TA who transforms a pupil’s experience from one who is simply present. That transformation starts with you, before Thursday.

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4. Know who you’re watching for, and tell someone 👀

Go through your register. Think carefully. Who are the three or four pupils whose names make you pause, not because they’re a challenge, but because you’re genuinely worried?

Maybe it’s the pupil who went quiet in the last half term. The one whose home situation felt precarious. The year seven who masked brilliantly but was clearly exhausted by May. The one who mentioned something in passing that you’ve found yourself thinking about across the summer.

Write those names down. Share them, appropriately, with your SENCO, pastoral lead, or SEMH lead before the week is out. Not as a list of problems, but as a professional act of advocacy. These pupils need someone in school who is already thinking about them before they walk in.

This is what the graduated response is built for: early identification, planned support, and shared professional attention. You are the first line of that response. The most important thing you can do this week is make sure your concern doesn’t stay in your head.

Part Two: What I’m Building for You This Year 📬

Now for the second half of this post, which is, really, an invitation.

SEMH Education started as a newsletter. This year, I want it to grow into something more, a genuine professional community for people doing this work in real schools, with real complexity, and not enough support.

Here’s what I’m developing:

🎙️ Substack Lives and Q&A sessions

I’ll be running regular live sessions throughout the year, not rehearsed presentations, but honest conversations about things that are genuinely hard in schools right now. Dates coming soon. If you want to be notified, make sure you’re subscribed and have notifications on.

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🔵 Circle of Adults / Peer Supervision groups

This is the thing I’m most excited about building. Peer supervision, structured, supportive professional thinking about specific pupils and situations, is standard in health and therapeutic settings. In schools, it’s almost non-existent. I want to change that, through small, facilitated groups within the SEMH Education community. If this is something you’d value, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.

📋 INSET and staff development this autumn

I’m available for in-school training this term, on trauma-informed practice, SEMH identification and support, relational behaviour approaches, and working with pupils who experience demand avoidance. If your school is looking for CPD that’s grounded in policy and rooted in what’s actually happening in classrooms, get in touch.

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⭐ Paid subscriber community

Paying subscribers already access deeper-dive posts, exclusive resources, and downloadable tools. This year I want to build on that creating something that functions more like a professional community than a content library. If you’ve been sitting on the fence about subscribing, this is a good moment to step in.

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A Thought to Carry Into September 💭

September is full of beginnings. New classes, new systems, new plans. But the children with the most complex SEMH needs often don’t experience September as a beginning. They experience it as a return to somewhere they’re not yet sure they can trust again.

Your job, in these first few days, is not to achieve. It’s to signal. To show, through your presence, your patience, and your consistency, that this is still a place worth being.

The strategies come later. The relationship comes first.

What’s one thing you’re going to do differently this year with SEMH in mind? I’d love to hear in the comments, or hit reply if you’re reading this by email.

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If this was useful, share it with a colleague heading back this week.

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📬 Did You Miss These?

I’ve been sitting with that feeling this week.

This year has been, by any measure, a significant one for SEMH in education. New guidance. Familiar arguments, resurfacing. Conversations that felt overdue are finally breaking into the open. And through all of it, the same dedicated professionals are doing the same extraordinary, under-recognised work in classrooms, corridors, and phone calls home that no one ever sees.

So before September arrives and sweeps us all forward, I wanted to do something I don’t do enough of: stop. Look back. Be honest about what this year actually showed us.

🔍 The Guidance Said One Thing. The Classrooms Said Another.

This was, by any measure, a big year for policy. It started with the shift in Ofsted’s inspection framework, with inclusion moving closer to the centre of what inspectors are looking for, a change that prompted a lot of schools to have conversations about belonging and accessibility that probably should have happened years ago.

Then came Every Child Achieving and Thriving, the SEND white paper that dominated the national conversation, ambitious in scope, cautious in timelines, and met with a mixture of genuine hope and hard-earned scepticism from those who’ve lived through previous waves of SEND reform.

And towards the end of the year, the updated Suspension and Exclusion statutory guidance added another layer, strengthening expectations around reintegration, SEND consideration, and understanding why a child reaches the point of exclusion.

A LinkedIn post I wrote on the guidance reached over 50,000 people and sparked more conversation than almost anything else I published this year, which told me something significant about where the pressure is sitting in schools right now.

But here’s what I kept coming back to: schools that were already doing this well didn’t need any of it to tell them. And schools where exclusion was still functioning as a pressure valve didn’t substantially change because documents were updated.

Guidance can shift the language. It rarely, on its own, shifts the culture.

That gap, between what policy says and what practice looks like, is one I’m still turning over. Because if we’re serious about SEMH, we have to be honest that updating a document isn’t the same as changing what happens on a Monday morning when a young person walks through the door in crisis.

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😟 What Worried Me

The off-rolling conversation has been rumbling for years, but this year it felt louder, and more uncomfortable.

The stories I heard, both formally and informally, pointed to a pattern that the data has long suggested: children with SEMH needs, children with unmet or unidentified SEND, children who are difficult in ways that are expensive and exhausting, finding themselves edged toward managed moves, part-time timetables, and off-site provision in ways that aren’t always transparent.

I’m not naive about the pressures schools face. I know that a child in persistent dysregulation can have a profound impact on an entire class. I know that teachers are stretched, that SENCOs are overwhelmed, and that the system as a whole isn’t adequately funded to respond to the level of need now presenting in schools.

But I also know, from my work in youth justice, what happens when those children don’t get the right support at the right time. The pipeline from exclusion to crisis isn’t a metaphor. It’s a lived reality for far too many young people. And every time a school manoeuvres a child out of its roll without the right process, the right conversation, or the right alternative in place, we’re writing the next chapter of that story whether we intend to or not.

That worried me. A lot.

📈 The SEMH Identification Problem Is Getting Harder to Ignore

Something else shifted this year: the volume of conversations about SEMH identification. Not diagnosis, identification. The recognition that a child’s behaviour or presentation might be telling us something about their emotional or mental health, long before CAMHS gets involved, long before an EHCP is even considered.

Teachers are being asked to do more of this work than ever before. They’re being asked to spot, to record, to refer, to adapt, often with minimal training, minimal time, and minimal feedback on whether their referrals ever went anywhere.

I’ve spoken with SENCOs this year who described a particular kind of demoralisation: writing detailed Assess-Plan-Do-Review paperwork, making careful referrals, and then watching children wait months, sometimes over a year, for any external support. In the meantime, that child is still in their class. Still struggling. Still, in the absence of anything else, their responsibility.

The identification infrastructure is improving. The response infrastructure has not kept pace. And that mismatch is falling on the people least equipped and least resourced to absorb it.

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💛 What Gave Me Hope

Here’s what I want to be clear about: this year also gave me genuine hope.

I saw schools rethinking their behaviour policies not because Ofsted told them to, but because their staff genuinely asked: is this working for everyone?

I spoke with headteachers who were redesigning their curriculum to create more space for identity, creativity, and pupil voice, not as a bolt-on to their PSHE provision, but as something embedded across the school day.

I read your responses to posts throughout this year and was struck, repeatedly, by how much wisdom exists at every level of the system, teaching assistants who have built trust with a particular child over months; pastoral leads running informal check-ins before register; school librarians creating quiet spaces that have become, without anyone officially designating them as such, genuine sanctuaries.

The work is happening. It’s just not always visible, valued, or scalable in the ways it should be.

And the conversations, here on SEMH Education, in schools, at network meetings, in DMs, feel like they’re shifting.

There’s a growing refusal to accept that children’s mental health is someone else’s job, or that behaviour happens in a vacuum, or that inclusion is only meaningful when it’s convenient.

That gives me a lot to hold onto.

🎒 What I’m Carrying Into September

A few things, if I’m honest.

A renewed commitment to speaking plainly about the system, what it asks of people, where it falls short, and what good actually looks like in practice. Not in a way that’s resigned or cynical, but in a way that’s useful.

A deeper appreciation for the practitioners who stay curious about the children who are hardest to reach. The ones who ask what is this child trying to tell me? when it would be far easier not to.

And a question I’m sitting with: what would it look like if SEMH was genuinely central to school improvement, not a response to crisis, not a compliance exercise, but a thread running through every decision a school makes?

That’s the conversation I want to keep having in the year ahead.

September is almost here. Before it arrives, what are you carrying with you? What moment from this year is staying with you, and what do you want to do differently? I’d love to hear in the comments.

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If this resonated, please share it with a colleague who might need it. And if you’re not yet a subscriber, you can join the SEMH Education community below, free posts like this one, every week.

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✨ Top 5 SEMH Education Digital Resources 👇

• Pre Exclusions Checklist

• Individual Support Plan Template

• Off-Site Direction Checklist

• Graduated Approach Checklist

• SEMH At a Glance

Isp Template

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There’s another child sitting still, looking compliant, who is dysregulating completely on the inside.

We’ve become very good at identifying what behaviour looks like.

We’re less practised at creating the conditions where it doesn’t need to happen in the first place.

Art and movement aren’t just nice extras for children with SEMH needs. They’re powerful, research-backed tools for every single child in your building, and it’s time we treated them that way!

🧠 What’s Actually Happening in the Body

Before we talk about paintbrushes and brain breaks, it helps to understand why this matters neurologically. So lets dive into it!

When children experience stress, such as anxiety about a test, a difficult morning at home, or a fallout with a friend at lunch, their nervous system responds.

Cortisol and adrenaline rise, the prefrontal cortex (the bit of the brain responsible for reasoning, focus, and self-regulation) becomes less accessible, and the body enters a state of alert.

You can’t teach a child who is in that state. Not really. You can tell them information, but learning, in any meaningful sense, requires a regulated nervous system.

This is where movement and art become less about enrichment and more about readiness to learn.

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🏃 The Case for Movement Breaks, For Everyone

Movement breaks have sometimes been filed under “strategies for children with ADHD.” That framing undersells them enormously!

Research from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has consistently highlighted the link between physical activity and improved cognitive outcomes. This includes attention, working memory, and academic attainment.

A landmark review by Hillman et al. (2008) found that even a single bout of aerobic exercise can produce immediate improvements in attention and processing speed in children, regardless of any identified need.

The DfE’s own guidance has acknowledged the role of physical activity in supporting mental health and wellbeing in schools, and Ofsted’s updated framework increasingly expects schools to demonstrate how they support the whole child, not just their academic progress.

Movement breaks don’t need to be elaborate at all!

They might look like:

🟢 Brain breaks between lessons - two minutes of stretching, shaking out hands, or a quick movement sequence before sitting back down.

🟢 Walking meetings or outdoor check-ins - particularly powerful for pastoral conversations that feel less confrontational side-by-side than face-to-face.

🟢 Corridor movement opportunities - intentional transitions that allow children to reset between contexts, rather than rushing from one demand to the next.

🟢 Structured movement within lessons - carousel activities, standing tasks, or hands-on learning that incorporates physical engagement as standard.

The key insight here is this: when movement is embedded into the school day as a universal feature, it stops being something that marks certain children out, and starts being something that regulates all children.

🎨 Art-Based Approaches: More Than Expression

Art therapy, in its clinical form, is a specialist intervention, and an important one. But art-based approaches (sometimes called expressive arts or creative arts strategies) sit on a broader spectrum, and they have a great deal to offer in whole-school SEMH support.

Research by Malchiodi (2011) and others in the field of trauma-informed practice has shown that creative activity engages different neural pathways to verbal processing, which is precisely why it can reach children who struggle to articulate their inner world through words. This isn’t unique to children with SEND. Children across the attainment spectrum benefit from learning environments that invite diverse forms of expression.

But the benefits don’t stop at emotional regulation. There’s compelling evidence that engagement with the arts is associated with:

📌 Improved academic outcomes - A meta-analysis by Winner, Goldstein & Vincent-Lancrin (2013) for the OECD found that arts education can develop transferable skills including critical thinking, creativity, and persistence, all of which have a direct impact on academic engagement.

📌 Increased intrinsic motivation - Creative tasks that allow for personal interpretation give children a sense of agency that more prescriptive learning can sometimes remove. Where agency exists, motivation tends to follow.

📌 Reduced anxiety and improved emotional vocabulary - Regular engagement with arts-based activities has been associated with reductions in anxiety symptoms and improvements in children’s ability to name and manage their emotions, a key protective factor for positive behaviour.

📌 Stronger peer relationships - Collaborative creative projects build social skills, shared purpose, and a sense of belonging, all of which are foundational to a positive school climate.

If you’re interested in more research in this area. Please take a look at my friend’s systematic review below!

Dr Dixon’s Review

🏫 What This Looks Like in Schools

You don’t need an art therapist on staff or a dedicated movement suite to begin embedding these approaches. Schools doing this well tend to share a few common features.

They normalise regulation as part of the curriculum. Rather than treating calm-down strategies as something children need to earn or access discretely, they build them into the rhythm of the day. A five-minute sketch at the start of tutor time. A movement wake-up before literacy. A reflective doodle alongside an exit ticket.

When teachers understand the neurological rationale behind these strategies, they’re far more likely to implement them consistently, and far less likely to deprioritise them when under time pressure. This is a CPD conversation worth having.

They apply these approaches universally, then adjust. The graduated response framework (Assess-Plan-Do-Review) remains essential for children with identified SEMH needs, but the universal layer matters just as much. Tier 1 support that genuinely works reduces the pressure on Tier 2 and 3 provision.

📋 A Note on Policy Alignment

If you’re building a case internally for embedding these approaches more formally, it’s worth noting that they align clearly with several current policy directions:

The Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper (DfE, February 2026) places renewed emphasis on holistic development and early intervention, including non-clinical, school-based approaches to supporting mental health and wellbeing. Schools that can demonstrate proactive, evidence-informed universal provision are increasingly well-positioned for Ofsted scrutiny, particularly around behaviour, personal development, and SEMH support.

Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs) and school-based counselling provision are expanding, but they cannot substitute for a school culture that embeds regulation and expression into daily life. Art and movement are part of that culture.

💬 The Bigger Picture

We talk a lot in education about the children who “can’t sit still” or who “won’t engage.” Less often do we ask what sitting still is costing them, or what we might unlock if we stopped treating physical and creative expression as a privilege for compliant children.

Every child benefits from a body that feels safe enough to learn. Every child benefits from a classroom that invites them to make meaning in more than one way.

The research is clear. The policy direction supports it. What’s needed now is the professional courage to build it into the school day, not as a reward, not as a niche intervention, but as a right.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with a colleague who might find it useful. And if you’re not yet subscribed to SEMH Education, hit the button below, there’s a new post in your inbox every week. 📩

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💭 Reflective question: Think about the last time a child in your school was described as a “behaviour problem.” How much of their day included an opportunity to move, create, or express themselves in a way that wasn’t assessed?

📬 Did You Miss These?

Before we start, I want to be honest: I don’t love the term marginalised pupils. It can feel reductive, a label that risks defining children by what they lack rather than what they bring. If you feel the same, you’re in good company.

Other phrases are used in research and policy circles, such as underrepresented pupils, minoritised children, pupils from equity-deserving groups, or simply children whose identities, cultures, or experiences aren’t reflected in the mainstream.

These terms are arguably more precise and more dignified. But they’re not yet widely recognised in everyday school conversations, and if I used them without explanation, I’d risk losing the people who need this content most.

So I’m using marginalised pupils here as a bridge term, a shared language that opens the door to a better conversation. With that said, let’s walk through it.

Who are we talking about? 🌍

When we talk about marginalised pupils in a school context, we’re talking about children whose identities, backgrounds, or experiences place them at greater risk of feeling unseen, excluded, or misunderstood within the school environment. This can include, but is not limited to:

• Children from ethnic minority backgrounds, particularly those whose cultures are rarely represented in the curriculum or classroom environment

• Pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, including those experiencing poverty, housing instability, or food insecurity

• LGBTQ+ young people, or children with LGBTQ+ family members

• Children with SEND, including those with SEMH needs

• Pupils who are looked after or previously looked after (CLA/PLAC)

• Children from Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) communities

• Young people with English as an additional language (EAL)

• Pupils with religious or cultural identities that differ significantly from the school’s dominant culture

• Children who are young carers, refugees, or asylum seekers

Research from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) consistently highlights that pupils from disadvantaged and underrepresented groups face significant attainment gaps, but attainment gaps rarely exist in isolation. They sit on top of belonging gaps: a persistent, quiet experience of not quite fitting in.

SEMH Support For Schools

Why it matters: belonging and the brain 🧠

There’s a strong evidence base connecting a sense of belonging to academic outcomes, emotional regulation, and long-term wellbeing. A landmark study by Goodenow and Grady (1993) found that belonging to a school community was one of the most powerful predictors of pupil motivation, more so than prior attainment. More recently, Roffey (2013) and others have emphasised that relational safety, the felt sense that you are known, valued, and accepted, is a prerequisite for learning, not a nice-to-have.

When children feel marginalised, their nervous systems are more likely to be operating in a state of low-level threat. That means more cortisol, less working memory, reduced capacity for risk-taking, and, critically, a reduced likelihood of engaging authentically with peers or adults. Safe spaces aren’t a pastoral luxury. They’re a neurological necessity.

Theme One: The Physical Space 🛋️

The environment sends a message before anyone opens their mouth. Walk into a room and ask yourself: whose stories are on these walls? Whose faces? Whose languages?

Creating a physically safe and welcoming space doesn’t require a full refurbishment. It requires intention.

What does a physically inclusive space look like?

🔆 Lighting matters more than we think. Harsh fluorescent lighting is overstimulating for many children, particularly those with sensory sensitivities or trauma histories. Where possible, introduce warmer lighting options, a lamp in a reading corner, natural light, or adjustable brightness. It’s a small change with a disproportionate impact on how safe a space feels.

🛋️ Soft furnishings signal safety. Bean bags, cushions, rugs, and comfortable seating areas communicate that this is a space for human beings, not just learners. For children who spend significant time in environments that feel harsh or unpredictable, including some home environments, the physical softness of a space matters emotionally.

🍎 Food and drink availability. For pupils experiencing food poverty, hunger is a real and daily barrier to engagement. But beyond nutrition, the act of offering a snack or a drink is a co-regulatory gesture, it communicates care before a single word is spoken. Many trauma-informed schools have a small snack station available during pastoral time or form periods. It needn’t be elaborate. Crackers, fruit, and water are enough to change the dynamic.

📚 Representation on shelves and walls. Audit your classroom bookshelves, displays, and resources. Are the families, skin tones, cultures, languages, and experiences reflected there representative of your pupils, and of the wider world? Research by Bishop (1990) introduced the concept of mirrors and windows in children’s literature: children need to see themselves reflected (mirrors) and be given views into lives unlike their own (windows). The same principle applies to your whole environment.

🌐 Multilingual environments. For EAL pupils, seeing their home language acknowledged, even in a small display, a welcome sign, or a dual-language book, a powerful signal that their identity has a place here. It costs almost nothing and communicates everything.

Theme Two: The Mental Space 💬

Physical safety is essential. But it’s not sufficient. Alongside it, we need to build a culture, an emotional and relational environment where children feel safe enough to exist as themselves: to talk openly about their beliefs, values, experiences, and identities without fear of judgement, ridicule, or exclusion.

This doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be designed, modelled, and maintained by the adults in the room.

Building a culture of curiosity, not judgement

The goal here isn’t tolerance, tolerance is a low bar. The goal is genuine curiosity: a classroom culture where difference is interesting rather than threatening, where a child talking about Eid, Diwali, a same-sex household, or life on the road is met with questions, not silence or laughs.

This starts with you as the adult. When you model curiosity, “That sounds really interesting, tell us more”, you set the tone. When you correct casual exclusionary language without shaming the child who used it, you hold the standard without creating shame. When you check in individually with pupils who belong to marginalised groups, not to single them out, but to signal I see you, you build the relational trust that makes authentic participation possible.

A few more ideas worth considering 💡

🤝 Pupil voice on environment and culture. Involve pupils, particularly those from underrepresented groups, in decisions about how their space looks and feels. A brief pupil survey, a suggestion box, or a small working group sends a clear message: your experience shapes this place.

📖 Diverse curriculum integration. Safe spaces aren’t just physical rooms, they’re also the stories we tell and the history we teach. Where possible, embed representation across subjects, not just during awareness months. Black history isn’t just for October. LGBTQ+ history isn’t just for February. A genuinely inclusive curriculum normalises diversity rather than spotlighting it.

👩‍🏫 Staff development. Adults can’t build a culture they haven’t experienced themselves. Brief, regular CPD on unconscious bias, cultural competence, and inclusive language goes a long way. Even a 15-minute staff briefing discussion, “What does belonging look like in our school for X group of pupils?”, begins to shift the collective lens.

A final thought 🌱

There’s a child somewhere in your school who has never once seen their family reflected in a display, their celebration acknowledged in a morning meeting, or their identity treated as something worth knowing about. They’ve learned to make themselves small, not because they are small, but because the space never got big enough to hold them.

Creating safe spaces for these pupils isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about the accumulation of small signals, a warm lamp, a book on a shelf, a Friday afternoon where their weekend actually matters.

The question worth sitting with this week: Whose experience am I not currently designing for, and what’s one thing I could change by Monday?

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📬 Did You Miss These?

This is what it looks like when a behaviour policy is written for one kind of child, and applied to all of them.

Why This Conversation Can’t Wait 🕐

The data has been telling us this for years. Black Caribbean pupils in England are around 1.7 times more likely to receive a fixed-term exclusion than their white British peers. Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller pupils face some of the highest rates of persistent absence and school-led removal of any group.

Children with English as an additional language have been frequently placed in low-ability sets not because of cognitive need, but because communicative difference is misread as intellectual limitation.

These patterns are not random. They are, at least in part, the result of behaviour systems that were never designed to account for the ways cultural identity shapes how children communicate, relate to authority, express distress, and seek connection.

The DfE’s Every Child Achieving and Thriving (February 2026) places inclusive practice and reducing disproportionality at the centre of its SEND and wider school improvement agenda. Ofsted’s inspection framework asks schools to demonstrate how their culture supports all pupils, not just those who fit most easily into existing systems.

Yet many schools are still operating with behaviour frameworks that treat cultural difference as an inconvenience to be managed, rather than a lens through which behaviour must be understood.

This post is for the practitioners who want to do better, and who are ready to think harder.

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What Do We Mean by Cultural Identity? 🧩

Before we go further, it’s worth being precise. Cultural identity is not simply about ethnicity or nationality, though those are part of it. It encompasses:

Heritage and family background - the values, norms, stories, and practices passed down through generations.

Religious and spiritual belief - including how faith shapes routines, relationships, expressions of emotion, and responses to authority.

Language and communication style - not just which language a child speaks at home, but how communication is conducted: directly or indirectly, verbally or relationally, with expressive volume or quiet restraint.

Collectivist vs. individualist orientation - whether a child has been raised to prioritise the group (family, community, faith) over the self, or to value individual achievement, autonomy, and self-expression.

Relationship with authority - whether adults outside the family are to be questioned, deferred to, engaged with as equals, or respected through formal distance.

Expressions of distress and regulation - whether emotional pain is externalised loudly, internalised privately, expressed through the body, or channelled through community and ritual.

Erikson’s framework of identity development reminds us that adolescence in particular is a period of active identity formation, a process he called identity vs. role confusion. For children navigating multiple cultural identities simultaneously (the values of home, the norms of school, the pressures of peer community), this process can be significantly more complex and more fragile. Understanding that complexity is part of our SEMH responsibility.

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The Default Lens, and Why It’s a Problem 🔍

Most UK schools operate with a default cultural lens. It’s rarely named, because it doesn’t need to be, it simply is the water in which the institution swims. That default tends to be: white, middle-class, British, individualist, verbally expressive, and deferential to adult authority in ways that look cooperative rather than withdrawn.

Behaviours that fall within this norm are read as neutral, or positive. Behaviours that fall outside it are read as problematic, even when, within the child’s cultural frame, they are entirely appropriate.

The psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory is useful here. He argued that a child’s development cannot be understood without understanding the systems they are embedded in, family (microsystem), school (mesosystem), community (exosystem), and the broader cultural values of society (macrosystem).

When a child moves between systems with very different values and expectations, as many children from minority cultures do every day, the friction is not a sign of the child’s dysfunction. It is a sign of systemic incompatibility.

The question we need to sit with is this: whose cultural norms does our behaviour policy actually reflect, and who pays the price when children don’t share them?

Four Case Examples: When Cultural Identity is Misread 📋

The following are composite, fictionalised examples drawn from common patterns in school-based practice. They are intended for reflective use in CPD, not as diagnostic tools.

📑 Case Example 1 — Averted Eyes, Assumed Defiance

Ama, Year 9. British-Ghanaian. Referred for “passive aggression and lack of engagement with staff.”

During behaviour conversations, Ama consistently looks down or away from the adult speaking to her. Staff have noted this in multiple reports: “refuses to make eye contact,” “disengaged,” “shows no remorse.”

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This week I'm handing over to Claire Steele, Education Adviser at Services For Education, who brings over 20 years of primary school experience, including roles as SENCo, DSL, and Senior Mental Health and Wellbeing Lead. Claire shares her practical thinking on how teachers and TAs can work together more deliberately to support pupils with SEMH needs, from building key relationships to creating early warning systems that actually work in the classroom. It's a really grounded read, I hope you find it useful!

Where would we teachers be without our trusty teaching assistants?

A lifeline for all teachers who are lucky enough to have one, a partner in crime and a critical friend. But how do we best use these ‘extra adults’ to ensure pupils with SEMH needs are well supported in the classroom?

Far more important than an iPad or a working whiteboard pen, (although they are useful too), another actual human being in the classroom is a blessing. The importance of real human communication, particularly in the age of ever-increasing reliance on digital technology, is vital. For pupils with Social, Emotional or Mental Health needs this human touch is even more important. But how do we ensure that our TAs are used effectively to help our most vulnerable pupils to engage and thrive in our classrooms?

Too often in a primary school, a teaching assistant is assigned to work with the lower-attaining group to ‘keep them on task’, while in secondary they are used mainly for behaviour support.

Yet this does not make the most effective use of teaching assistants in developing pupils’ independence, as highlighted in the Education Endowment Foundation’s Deployment of Teaching Assistants Guidance Report.

SEMH School Support

Recommendation 2 says that ‘TAs are prepared to engage in scaffolding practices that support pupils’ learning and ability to learn independently.’ This gives clear support to the idea that a teaching assistant’s role is to work with all pupils to support and foster independence. For those learners with SEMH conditions, there may be barriers to learning that need to be scaled even before this, just to help them come in to school happily and be in a suitable mental state to begin to learn.

Knowing our pupils is essential

Key to offering any support is knowing our learners well. Teaching assistants, by the nature of their role, often have some of the strongest relationships with our children. 

This means they are well placed to observe and spot early signs of any SEMH issues before they become more pronounced – whether they be passive SEMH needs such as anxiety where characteristics like withdrawal and isolation are observed, or the more active varieties which show disruptiveness by physical and verbal aggression.

We should be training our teaching assistants to be our eyes and ears to spot these signs early on and then arming them with the skills and resources needed to intervene and reroute the learners to find a more comfortable way to learn.

Class teachers should ensure they take the time to sit down with support staff and share a clear, unbiased picture of each of the pupils in the classroom, including their strengths and challenges.

Without this teachers can often ‘presume’ that TAs know all about the children in our class – but that knowledge is often only imparted to class teachers on transition days each year, or by a diligent Designated Safeguarding Lead if there are broader safeguarding concerns.

How can we expect these versatile, dedicated staff to ‘just know’ the specific issues and triggers that each learner faces? Time is precious and so often these important conversations are had ‘on the fly’ whilst doing other jobs – but I would argue that making time for them will reap long term benefits.

During safeguarding training we teach about ACEs – adverse childhood experiences – and how these affect pupils, and ensuring our teaching assistants share this understanding will help to give them scope to think beyond the classroom to find the root cause of a pupil’s SEMH issue and then implement appropriate support. We need to empower our teaching assistants to be proactive with SEMH children by ensuring they have the knowledge and resources to react to each child’s differing needs.

What does this look like in practice?

• Encourage TAs to develop a 1:1 relationship with the child – really understanding what makes them tick, what their favourite parts of the school day are – and what causes them concern.

• Look for triggers, record these and work over time to spot patterns and plan to avoid them.

• Intervene early when they spot a trigger – and before the pupil reaches crisis point.

• Create signals between themselves and the child that mean when time out is needed this is done with the least disruption to the class.

• Create an ‘early warning system’ that can be used by the pupil to alert the support staff if they feel things are going badly and they need some support.

• Build predictability – create a consistent routine together to ensure that the pupil trust that things will be as expected in each lesson, helping them to feel secure in the environment.

• Build a sense of control by working together – creating an agreed plan of what they need to do in school such as registering on time, attending agreed lessons or behaving in a safe manner, and support the child to stick to this plan.

• Once good relationships with one key person are established and trust built, work to broaden the ‘team’ of support staff working with the pupil to stop a child becoming reliant solely on one teaching assistant.

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Where do we start?

Use the principles of trauma informed practice in its purist from – safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, empowerment and cultural consideration.

If this is something your teaching assistants are not familiar with, give them time to read up on it – making sure everyone involved with the child understands their specific background and the source of their SEMH need. Make sure these staff have time to research SEMH interventions, what they offer and how they impact on the child, and then choose wisely which ones to use with which pupils.

Consider carefully the use of small, nurture-based groups. For some pupils they fill a need and can be very successful, for others they can further build on a sense of ‘differentness’ and can be counterproductive. Where support staff have developed clear and personalised regulation strategies to support pupils and have learned which de-escalation routes work best for that child ensure these are shared between teams in school as good practice to ensure everyone is aware of what works for that pupil.

Key takeaways

• Make time to talk about individual pupils as a teacher/teaching assistant team

• Build bonds between TAs and pupils

• Record what works for each pupil – the teaching assistant could create a class list

• Share these lists with the wider school staff so anyone can access and know what works for any given pupil straight away

• Widen the team to avoid overreliance on one staff member

Will it work?

The overwhelming answer to this is yes! We need to remember that many young people, with the right support, will develop coping strategies and self-regulation techniques to support their social, emotional and mental health needs that will allow them to overcome many of the difficulties they are currently experiencing. Our job at school is to help them learn these strategies in a safe and secure environment, where it is ok to make mistakes and change your approach. The careful and deliberate use of a skilled teaching assistant to help explore these strategies and find what works is a vital part of a child’s development, helping them find coping strategies that work for them to take beyond the school gates. This is what meaningful support should achieve: helping pupils develop approaches that sustain them both in school and in life beyond it.

At Services For Education, we have developed a series of short, specialism-focused, self-paced online courses designed specifically to upskill teaching assistants or ECTs working with pupils with a range of SEND needs. Browse our SEND CPD offer here – a first step towards ensuring staff are skilled to best support the vulnerable pupils they work with on a daily basis.

A huge thank you to Claire for such a thoughtful and practical contribution.

The key message I'm taking away is this: teaching assistants are one of our most valuable, and often underused, supports when it comes to helping pupils with SEMH needs. When TAs are given the knowledge, time, and trust to build genuine relationships with children, spot early warning signs, and intervene before crisis point, the impact can be profound. As Claire highlights, it starts with teachers making time to share what they know about individual pupils, and it grows from there, into consistent routines, shared strategies, and a widening team of support around the child.

Let me know your thoughts below!

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The moment I started genuinely asking children how they were, and actually waiting for the answer, something shifted. Not just in them. In the whole room.

🧠 Belonging Isn’t a Soft Extra, It’s the Foundation

There’s a phrase that’s become something of a cliché in education: children can’t learn if they don’t feel safe. But we rarely pause to interrogate what safe actually looks like in a classroom on a Monday morning when one child hasn’t slept and another has just had a rough weekend.

Safety, in the relational sense, isn’t just the absence of threat. It’s the presence of connection. And for children with social, emotional, and mental health (SEMH) needs, that distinction is everything.

Research by Goodenow (1993) established that school belonging, the degree to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported, is one of the strongest predictors of academic motivation and emotional wellbeing.

More recently, Allen and Kern’s (2017) extensive work on adolescent belonging confirmed that weak school connectedness is associated with increased anxiety, disengagement, and challenging behaviour.

Put simply: when children don’t feel they belong to a class, they find other ways to exist within it. Sometimes those ways are loud. Sometimes they’re invisible. Either way, they cost everyone.

This is where structured Circle Time, call it what you like to make it work for your context, becomes one of the most powerful, low-cost, high-impact tools available to any classroom. Not as a PSHE add-on. Not as a nice Friday afternoon filler. As a deliberate, recurring act of relational investment.

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🔄 What Is Circle Time, And Why Does the Name Matter?

Jenny Mosley’s Quality Circle Time model has been in UK schools for decades, and for good reason. At its core, Circle Time is a structured group approach where every child has an equal voice, a guaranteed turn, and a safe space to be heard, without judgement, without hierarchy.

But here’s the thing about naming: what we call something tells children what it’s for.

In a secondary setting or with older KS2 pupils, “Circle Time” can land as babyish. In a specialist provision, it might carry baggage from previous settings. Renaming it, Reflection Time, The Check-In, Our Morning Moment, Form Circle, The Reset, doesn’t dilute its value. It protects the psychological safety it depends on.

The name should feel normal for your class. What matters is the structure, the consistency, and the genuine intent behind it.

🧬 Why Structured Reflection Actually Works: The Science

When a child walks into a classroom, their nervous system is already mid-story. Whether that story involves a chaotic home morning, a social media conflict the night before, a sibling altercation in the car, or simply a low mood they can’t name, they arrive as a whole person, not a blank slate.

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory gives us a useful lens here. His work on the social engagement system tells us that the nervous system is scanning for safety before it can access higher-order learning. Eye contact, tone of voice, and, crucially, being asked about and listened to are powerful co-regulatory cues.

They signal: you are safe here. You matter here.

Dan Hughes’ PACE framework (Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy) reinforces this. When adults approach children with genuine curiosity, not interrogation, but wondering, it strengthens the attachment-informed relationship that underpins all relational behaviour support.

A structured check-in isn’t just kind. It is neurologically purposeful.

Ofsted’s current Education Inspection Framework (EIF) also asks inspectors to evaluate how well schools support pupils’ personal development, including their ability to understand and manage their feelings, and how schools contribute to pupils’ sense of belonging and wellbeing. A consistent, embedded reflective practice is exactly the kind of provision that speaks to this.

Not as a tick-box, but as genuine evidence of a relational, responsive school culture.

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📅 The Check-In, Check-Up, Check-Out Framework

This is the part that changed how my weeks feel.

Best practice, and what I’ve found to work most effectively in the classroom, is a three-point weekly rhythm:

Session When Purpose

✅ Check-In Monday morning, re-establish belonging after the weekend break; identify who may need additional support

🔁 Check-Up Wednesday morning Mid-week recalibration; notice who’s slipping; reinforce relational safety

🌅 Check-Out Friday afternoon Close the week with connection; build positive anticipation; reduce Sunday anxiety

These three touchpoints are not arbitrary. The transitions in and out of the school week are the most emotionally risky moments for many children, particularly those with SEMH needs, those in complex home environments, or those who experience school as a place of safety they have to repeatedly return to and leave.

Monday mornings can be disorienting. Friday afternoons, for some children, signal the end of the safest part of their week.

The framework gives them, and you, a predictable, relational anchor at each of those hinge points.

🗣️ What Each Session Looks Like in Practice

Let’s get into the detail.

These sessions don’t need to be long. Ten to fifteen minutes is sufficient. What they need is structure, consistency, and an adult who is genuinely present, not half-planning the next lesson while asking “how was your weekend?”

✅ Monday Morning Check-In

Purpose: Reconnect. Identify hidden distress. Set the tone for the week.

Many children, especially those with anxious attachment, trauma histories, or chaotic home environments, experience the weekend as an emotional wilderness. Monday morning isn’t just the start of a new week. For some, it’s the first moment of regulated adult contact in 60+ hours.

Suggested structure (10–12 minutes):

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We spend a lot of time in schools asking children to articulate how they feel, to explain their behaviour, to name the thing that’s driving the chaos. But for many children, particularly those with SEMH needs, language isn’t the bridge to self-understanding. It’s the barrier.

Creative expression changes that equation entirely.

🎭 Why Identity Matters So Much Right Now

Before we get into the how, it’s worth pausing on the why.

Identity, a child’s sense of who they are, where they belong, and what they’re worth, is not a soft, peripheral concern. It sits at the very heart of emotional regulation, behaviour, and learning. Erik Erikson’s foundational work on psychosocial development identified identity formation as the central task of adolescence, but we know from practice (and increasingly from neuroscience) that the groundwork is laid far earlier, in primary schools, in early relationships, in the moments where a child feels seen or invisible.

For children with SEMH needs, identity is often fragile territory. Many carry narratives about themselves that were written for them, by exclusion, by comparison, by the accumulating weight of adults who responded to their behaviour rather than their person. A child who has been told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are too much, too difficult, or not enough will organise their sense of self around those messages unless something interrupts the story.

Creative expression can be that interruption.

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🧠 What the Research Tells Us

The link between creative expression and identity development is well-evidenced and spans multiple disciplines.

Psychologist Dan McAdams, whose work on narrative identity has been widely influential, argues that we are, fundamentally, storytelling creatures. We construct our sense of self through the stories we tell, about our past, our present, and the future we imagine. For children who haven’t yet developed the metacognitive capacity to articulate that story in words, creative modalities, art, drama, music, movement, storytelling, offer an alternative language.

Donald Winnicott’s concept of potential space is particularly useful here. Winnicott described creativity as emerging in the space between inner experience and external reality, a transitional zone where exploration is safe because it is neither entirely real nor entirely pretend. Drama, roleplay, and visual art all operate in this space. A child playing a character, painting an abstract feeling, or writing a fictional alter-ego is doing identity work at a safe remove, testing out who they might be without the full weight of consequence.

Research by Cathy Malchiodi in the field of expressive arts therapy consistently demonstrates that creative modalities support emotional processing, self-concept development, and trauma integration, particularly for children who struggle with verbal disclosure. Her work is a reminder that the arts are not decorative enrichment; they are, for many children, a primary mode of meaning-making.

In the UK context, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has highlighted the positive impact of arts engagement on social and emotional outcomes, and the DfE’s guidance on mental health and wellbeing in schools explicitly names PSHE and expressive arts as key vehicles for building pupil resilience and self-awareness. The government’s February 2026 white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, further reinforces the case for whole-child approaches, recognising that academic attainment is inseparable from emotional and social development.

🎨 What Creative Expression Actually Looks Like in School

This doesn’t require a drama studio or an art therapy qualification. Some of the most powerful creative identity work happens in ordinary classrooms, with ordinary resources, in the hands of adults who are intentional about why they’re doing it.

Here are some approaches worth exploring:

🖊️ Identity Mapping and Self-Portrait Work Not just “draw yourself,” but guided visual exploration: Who am I at school? Who am I at home? Who do I want to be? Adding layers, values, strengths, fears, hopes, creates a richer self-portrait that children can return to and revise. This works well in PSHE sessions, nurture groups, or as part of a graduated response intervention.

🎭 Drama and Role Play Robert Landy’s role theory in drama therapy suggests that playing characters allows individuals to access parts of themselves that are otherwise inaccessible, including strengths, fears, and unmet needs. In school settings, structured drama doesn’t need to be theatrical. Roleplay scenarios, hot-seating, and character-based storytelling all invite children to project, explore, and reflect. The crucial element is the debrief, the moment of stepping out of the role and naming what it surfaced.

📖 Narrative and Creative Writing Giving children permission to write about characters who feel, struggle, or triumph in ways that mirror their own experience is powerful precisely because of the fictional distance it provides. Techniques from narrative therapy, like externalising the problem (writing about “the Worry Monster” rather than “my anxiety”), have strong theoretical grounding and are easily adapted for classroom use.

🎵 Music and Movement For younger children, or those with speech, language, and communication needs, music and movement offer non-verbal routes into emotional expression and self-recognition. Research published in the British Journal of Music Education has noted significant benefits for children with SEMH needs engaging in rhythm-based activities, including improved self-regulation and sense of belonging.

🏫 Creating the Conditions That Make It Work

Creative expression doesn’t automatically unlock identity exploration. The conditions matter enormously.

Psychological safety is non-negotiable. Children will not use creative modalities authentically in environments where their expression will be judged, mocked, or ignored. This means adults modelling vulnerability, normalising multiple forms of expression, and responding to creative output with curiosity rather than evaluation.

Adult attunement amplifies the impact. When a trusted adult notices, names, and reflects back what they observe in a child’s creative work, “I noticed you gave your character a lot of courage. I wonder if that’s something you recognise in yourself?”, they are co-authoring the child’s emerging story. This is relational work at its most potent.

Consistency and ritual help. Creative identity work done once, in a one-off session, has limited impact. Built into a weekly nurture group, a form-time routine, or a structured PSHE programme, it accumulates, and children begin to develop the habit of self-reflection that underpins long-term emotional literacy.

📋 A Note on SEMH Identification and Support

If creative expression is revealing things that concern you, persistent themes of hopelessness, isolation, violence, or self-harm in a child’s work, this is important information. It’s not a reason to stop the work; it’s a prompt to escalate appropriately through your school’s safeguarding and SEMH support pathways, and to consider whether an Early Help referral or CAMHS involvement is warranted. The graduated response framework, Assess, Plan, Do, Review, provides the structure within which this kind of concern can be properly documented and acted upon.

Creative expression surfaces what is often invisible. That’s its value, and it’s also what makes thoughtful adult oversight so important.

💬 Reflective Takeaway

Identity is not formed in isolation. It is shaped in relationship, through experience, and through the stories we are given space to tell. For children with SEMH needs especially, the creative arts are not a luxury, they are a lifeline.

The question isn’t whether we have time for this work. It’s whether we can afford not to make space for it.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to know, drop a comment below or share with a colleague who’s doing this work in their school. And if you’re not yet a subscriber, joining the SEMH Education community means posts like this land directly in your inbox every week. 🙌

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📬Did You Miss These?

That’s the gap most schools never close. The policy gets updated, the staff get briefed, and the children the people most directly affected, are consulted last, if at all. Yet the research is consistent: when pupils have a genuine voice in how their school is run, behaviour improves, belonging increases, and the adults around them work with better information.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: when did you last ask your pupils what it actually feels like to be a child in your school?

🏫 What We Mean By Pupil Voice, And What We Don’t

Pupil voice isn’t a suggestion box in the corridor or a school council that votes on the colour of the new benches. Done well, it’s a structured, purposeful process for gathering children’s honest perspectives on their experiences, including the parts that are uncomfortable to hear.

In the context of behaviour and SEMH, this means asking children directly: Do you understand the rules? Do they feel fair? What happens when you’re having a hard day? Who do you go to? What helps, and what doesn’t?

This isn’t about handing over control of the policy to Year 4. It’s about making sure the adults writing the rules have the information they need to make those rules work.

📚 What the Research Tells Us

The evidence base here is strong and growing.

Michael Rutter’s work on school ethos, carried forward by later researchers including those behind the Learning Behaviour report (Steer, 2005), consistently found that pupils who feel respected and heard are more likely to engage positively with school expectations. The quality of relationships between staff and pupils was identified as a key determinant of behaviour outcomes.

More recently, the EEF’s guidance on improving behaviour in schools highlights the importance of understanding the lived experience of pupils, particularly those at risk of exclusion. It notes that interventions are far more likely to be effective when they account for the perspectives of children themselves.

The Timpson Review of School Exclusion (2019) made this point with particular force. It found that pupils, especially those with SEND, those living in poverty, and those from certain ethnic groups, often felt that behaviour systems were applied inconsistently and without understanding of their context. Timpson called on schools to embed more compassionate, relational approaches, and listening to pupils is foundational to that.

Pupil voice, when it’s real, isn’t just good ethics. It’s good evidence.

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🧩 Why Behaviour Policy Specifically?

Behaviour policies are often written from the top down. A senior leader (or a small group of staff) drafts the framework, it goes to governors, it gets published on the website, and that’s broadly the end of the consultation process.

But behaviour doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in corridors at transition time, in classrooms before a supply teacher has established trust, in the lunch hall when sensory overwhelm is peaking, in the five minutes before a child goes home to a chaotic or unsafe environment.

Children know where the flashpoints are. They know which rules feel arbitrary. They know when a consequence feels humiliating rather than corrective. They know which members of staff make them feel safe, and which ones escalate things without meaning to.

That knowledge is not incidental. It is policy-relevant intelligence, and most schools are leaving it on the table.

Capturing pupil voice before you redraft your behaviour policy means you’re not writing in the dark. You’re writing with a map.

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🛠️ How to Run a Pupil Panel That Actually Works

This doesn’t need to be complex. A focused, well-facilitated pupil panel, run once or twice a year, can give you insight that no amount of data analysis will provide.

Here are the key principles:

Make it purposeful, not performative. Tell pupils why you’re asking, what you’re going to do with what they say, and follow up with them on what changed (and what didn’t, and why). Children very quickly learn whether adults are genuinely listening or just going through the motions.

Use structured prompts, not open-ended surveys. Vague questions get vague answers. Instead, try: “Tell me about a time you got in trouble at school. What happened next? How did it feel? What would have helped?” Scenario-based questions often work well with primary-aged children.

Diversify your panel. Your most confident pupils will answer if you ask the whole class. But the children whose voices matter most, those with SEMH needs, those at risk of exclusion, those who feel least connected to school, often won’t put their hands up. Actively seek those perspectives out.

Involve a trusted adult. For children with SEMH needs especially, having a key adult present (not as a note-taker, but as a familiar, safe presence) can make the difference between surface-level responses and genuine reflection.

Keep it small. Groups of four to six pupils tend to generate richer conversations than whole-class activities. You’re looking for depth, not breadth.

📋 Questions Worth Asking

If you’re planning a pupil panel around behaviour and wellbeing, here are some prompts to get you started:

• What are the rules in school that you think are really important? Why?

• Is there anything about the rules that you find confusing or unfair?

• When you’re having a really hard day, what do you do? Who helps?

• If you got into trouble, what would make you feel better afterwards?

• Do you feel like the adults in school understand you?

• Is there anything about school you’d change if you could?

These aren’t trick questions. They’re the kinds of questions that, if we’re honest, adults rarely ask, and children rarely forget being asked.

🔁 Closing the Loop: From Listening to Changing

The most powerful part of this process isn’t the listening. It’s what happens next.

If pupils tell you that isolation rooms feel frightening and shame-inducing, and your policy continues to rely heavily on internal exclusion with no adjustment, you’ve gathered voice without acting on it. That’s arguably worse than not asking at all.

The follow-through doesn’t have to be wholesale policy change. It might be a conversation with the pastoral team. A tweak to how a particular consequence is delivered. A change to how you support re-entry after a sanction. Small shifts, made visible to pupils, signal something important: your experience matters here.

That signal, more than any policy document, is what builds the school belonging that underpins positive behaviour.

💬 A Final Thought

The DfE’s Every Child Achieving and Thriving (February 2026) places inclusion, belonging, and relational practice at the heart of the direction of travel for schools. Pupil voice isn’t a bolt-on to that agenda, it’s integral to it.

Once or twice a year, pull a small group of pupils into a room. Make them feel safe. Ask the questions most adults don’t think to ask. And then, crucially, let their answers change something.

That’s not just good practice. That’s what it looks like when a school truly believes every child’s experience matters.

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it with a colleague who’s currently reviewing their behaviour policy. And if you’re not already subscribed, join the SEMH Education community for weekly insights like this one.

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📬 Did You Miss These?

That’s the reality of ADHD burnout. And most of the time, we call it something else entirely.

🧠 What Is ADHD Burnout, And Why Does It Matter?

ADHD burnout isn’t laziness. It isn’t defiance. And it isn’t a phase.

It’s the cumulative result of a nervous system that has been pushed beyond its capacity, usually by the relentless demands of masking, concentrating, regulating impulses, and navigating a school environment that was largely not designed with neurodivergent children in mind.

For children with ADHD, the cognitive load of a standard school day is enormous. Executive function challenges mean that tasks like following multi-step instructions, transitioning between activities, and managing sensory input require far more mental energy than they do for neurotypical peers. Over time, sometimes over the course of a single morning, that energy runs out.

What follows is what many of us have seen in classrooms: the shutdown, the outburst, the under-the-desk moment, the total refusal to engage. These are burnout behaviours. They’re not behavioural choices in the traditional sense, they’re the end point of an exhausted nervous system.

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🔥 What Burnout Behaviours Can Look Like

It’s worth being specific here, because burnout doesn’t always look dramatic. Teachers and support staff often miss the early signs because they don’t match the picture of “meltdown” they expect. Look out for:

Early warning signs:

• Increased fidgeting or restlessness that goes beyond baseline

• Shutting down, going unusually quiet or disengaged

• Becoming rigid or distressed about minor changes

• Irritability, low frustration tolerance, or snapping at peers

• Asking to go to the toilet repeatedly, or trying to leave the room

• Staring blankly, seemingly “switched off”

Later stage / Crisis behaviours:

• Crying, shouting, or emotional outbursts that seem disproportionate

• Refusing all tasks, sometimes including those they usually enjoy

• Physical agitation: knocking things over, pushing chairs, pacing

• Complete withdrawal, head down, non-verbal, unresponsive

• Running from the classroom

The key thing to understand is this: by the time you’re seeing the crisis behaviour, the burnout has already happened. The window for prevention was earlier. Which is exactly why early identification matters so much.

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✂️ Tip 1: Chunk Your Instructions

One of the most powerful, and most underused, strategies for reducing cognitive overload in children with ADHD is chunking instructions.

Multi-step instructions delivered verbally, all at once, are one of the fastest routes to dysregulation for a child with ADHD. Working memory difficulties mean that by step three, steps one and two may already be lost. The child either freezes, guesses, or asks again, and any of those options can quickly spiral into frustration.

Instead, try:

🔹 Give one instruction at a time. Wait for the child to complete it before offering the next step.

🔹 Use visual supports alongside verbal instructions, a mini task card on the desk, a brief list on the board, or a whiteboard with the three steps written clearly.

🔹 Check for understanding before moving on. Not “did you hear me?”, but “can you tell me what you’re going to do first?”

🔹 Keep language simple and concrete. Avoid embedded clauses and assumptions. “Open your book to page 12, find the question at the top, and write your answer in full sentences” is too many tasks. Break it down.

This isn’t about lowering expectations, it’s about creating the conditions in which a child with ADHD can actually meet them.

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⏸️ Tip 2: Pause the Lesson and Check In

This one requires confidence, and trust in your own professional instincts. But it might be the most impactful thing on this list.

When you notice a child showing early warning signs of burnout, the lesson can wait. A two-minute check-in costs far less than a 40-minute fallout.

What this can look like in practice:

🔹 A quiet, non-intrusive approach. Crouch down, lower your voice, make it feel private. “I’ve noticed you seem a bit tired/overwhelmed, do you need a minute?”

🔹 Offer a simple, low-demand choice. “Do you want to keep going with this or have a two-minute break?” Restoring a sense of agency is often enough to bring a child back from the edge.

🔹 Use a pre-agreed signal system. Some children respond brilliantly to a discreet card system, a green/amber/red card on the desk, or a non-verbal signal that tells you they’re struggling without them having to say it out loud in front of peers.

🔹 Have a calm-down plan ready. If the child needs to step back, where do they go? A designated calm corner, a trusted adult, a co-regulation routine, whatever works for that child, have it ready before you need it.

The Graduated Response framework, central to both the SEND Code of Practice (2015) and the DfE’s more recent direction of travel in Every Child Achieving and Thriving (2026), is clear that early, targeted support, not reactive crisis management, is the goal. Pausing to check in is early support in action.

🧩 Tip 3: Build in Predictability and Release Valves

Children with ADHD often experience heightened anxiety around uncertainty. Predictable routines, clear lesson structures, and regular movement breaks don’t just support behaviour management, they actively reduce the likelihood of burnout occurring in the first place.

Quick wins:

🔹 Share the lesson plan at the start. A brief outline on the board (”Today we’ll: 1. Recap. 2. New learning. 3. Task. 4. Share.”) reduces the cognitive load of not knowing what’s coming.

🔹 Build in legitimate movement. This doesn’t mean chaos, it means intentional, structured opportunities to move. Handing out books. A brief stand-and-stretch. A quick paired task standing at a desk. Movement is regulatory, not disruptive.

🔹 Acknowledge effort, not just output. For a child with ADHD who has worked enormously hard to stay regulated all morning, “I noticed how focused you were during that task” lands very differently to a grade or a house point. It tells them the right things are being seen.

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📋 A Note on What the Evidence Says

Research consistently tells us that children with ADHD experience significantly higher rates of emotional dysregulation than their neurotypical peers, and that this dysregulation is a core feature of the condition, not a separate behavioural issue. The work of Russell Barkley on executive function and ADHD is particularly instructive here: ADHD is not, at its heart, a problem of knowing what to do. It’s a problem of doing what you know, in the moment, under pressure.

That reframing matters for every teacher in every classroom. When a child with ADHD dysregulates, they haven’t forgotten the rules. They’ve run out of the regulatory fuel needed to act on them.

Understanding that distinction is the beginning of a genuinely SEMH-informed response.

💡 Reflective Takeaway

When I see a child in my class becoming dysregulated, what’s my first instinct, and is it focused on behaviour management, or on what that child might need in that moment?

There’s no wrong answer. But the question itself might open something useful.

If you found this post helpful, share it with a colleague who supports children with ADHD, and consider subscribing if you aren’t already. Every week I share evidence-informed content designed to help you do your job with more confidence, more clarity, and a little more compassion, for the children in your care and for yourself.

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That’s what makes them so difficult to challenge.

This week’s paid post takes a critical lens to some of the most persistent behaviour strategies still operating in classrooms and corridors across the UK, not to shame individual teachers, but to honestly examine what these approaches actually do to children. Particularly to children who are already carrying the weight of difficult lives outside school.

Because here’s the truth that doesn’t get said clearly enough: many of our most common behaviour strategies are, at their core, strategies of exclusion. They send a message, sometimes subtle, sometimes anything but, that a child’s place in this school is conditional. That they are tolerated, not welcomed. That belonging must be earned, not given.

And for children with SEMH needs, that message can be catastrophic.

Let’s get into it! In this posts we’ll go through the following behaviour strategies:

We’ll look at what to do instead for each strategy, and there are four free resources at the bottom of this post!

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❄️ “Don’t Smile Until Christmas”

If you’ve spent time in schools, you’ve heard some version of this. It might not always be said so explicitly anymore, but the philosophy lives on, in the tightly folded arms, the deliberately flat tone, the refusal to let warmth into the room until “respect has been established.”

The logic, if you can call it that, is control. The idea is that children will only follow boundaries if there is an emotional distance that signals authority. That warmth equals weakness. That liking your class is something you have to earn the right to show.

Let’s be clear about what this strategy actually does…

It builds a classroom culture grounded in fear and unpredictability. And for children who already experience fear and unpredictability at home, children who have learnt to read adult moods as a survival skill, who have been let down by adults who were sometimes kind and sometimes terrifying, this is not just unhelpful. It is genuinely dangerous.

The “cold teacher turning warm after Christmas” arc isn’t a positive character development for these children. It’s a re-enactment of relational trauma. The adult in their life who was distant and unpredictable suddenly becoming warm and approachable? That pattern doesn’t build trust. It confirms it as normal.

Dan Hughes’ PACE model (Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy), widely referenced in trauma-informed practice, is built on the premise that therapeutic and educational relationships must begin with warmth and safety. Not as a reward for good behaviour. From day one.

Research by Bruce Perry consistently demonstrates that a child cannot access learning when their nervous system is in a state of threat. The “don’t smile” classroom is, neurologically, a threat environment. You are not teaching children to behave. You are teaching their nervous systems to stay on high alert.

🔄 What to do instead: Start with warmth. Not permissiveness, warmth. Greet children at the door. Learn something about them in the first week. Let them see that you are a safe, consistent, trustworthy adult. High expectations and genuine warmth are not in conflict. They are most powerful when they exist together.

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🔁 Repeating the Same Sanction. Again. And Again. And Again.

Ten detentions in a term. Fifteen. Twenty. Each one given faithfully, each one ignored, each one repeated with the same weary resolve.

There is a version of this that gets framed as consistency. As not giving up. As “holding the line.” But if we’re honest, there’s something else happening too, and it’s worth naming. When a sanction clearly isn’t working, continuing to apply it isn’t professional persistence. It’s behaviour management on autopilot. And it leaves the child entirely out of the equation.

The question that needs to be asked, urgently, when a child has accumulated repeated sanctions for the same behaviour, is not “how do we escalate the consequence?” It is: “What is this behaviour communicating, and have we listened?”

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That gap, between the girl you see at school and the child her parents are raising, isn’t a parenting problem. It’s one of the most important things we’re currently getting wrong in education.

🧩 The Invisible Profile

Autism in girls is one of the most under-recognised presentations in school settings, and the research is unambiguous about why. The diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum conditions were largely developed through studies of male participants. For decades, the “standard” picture of autism has been built around a profile that doesn’t fit many autistic girls.

Lorna Wing’s foundational work identified what she termed the “female autism phenotype”, a distinct presentation often characterised by stronger social motivation, higher levels of imitation, and an intense focus on fitting in rather than withdrawing. Sarah Hendrickx, in Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder (2015), describes how autistic girls are frequently better at navigating social rules on the surface, not because those rules come naturally, but because they’ve studied them relentlessly and practised them like a script.

This is not a minor distinction. It means the very things we associate with autism in school settings, visible social difficulties, rigid routines, obvious communication differences, may simply not present in the same way for many girls.

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🎭 Masking: The Performance Nobody Asked For

“Masking”, sometimes called camouflaging, refers to the conscious and unconscious strategies autistic people use to suppress or disguise their autistic traits in social settings. For autistic girls, masking is often extraordinarily sophisticated.

Research by Dr Felicity Sedgewick and colleagues (2019) found that autistic girls reported significantly higher levels of camouflaging than autistic boys, and that this masking was closely tied to the desire for peer acceptance and fear of social exclusion. They weren’t masking to deceive anyone. They were masking to survive the school day.

At school, this might look like:

• Carefully observing friendship groups and mimicking language, interests, and body language

• Using enormous cognitive effort to follow conversations that feel confusing or overwhelming

• Suppressing sensory discomfort, stimming behaviour, or emotional responses until they’re somewhere “safe”

• Preparing scripts for interactions that peers navigate instinctively

The critical point here is that masking is exhausting. The mental and emotional energy required to perform neurotypicality all day depletes a young person’s capacity to regulate when they get home. By 3:30pm, the mask comes off, and there’s nothing left.

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🏠 The After-School Explosion

Parents often describe a phenomenon that professionals have started calling “after-school restraint collapse”, a term popularised by occupational therapist Amanda Dockrill. After spending an entire school day suppressing dysregulation, a child arrives home and the emotional floodgates open. Meltdowns, shutdowns, crying, refusal, aggression, or complete withdrawal.

This is not bad parenting. This is not a child playing up at home. This is a young person who has spent six hours in a neurologically demanding environment, maintaining a performance that costs them everything, and has finally found a space where they don’t have to pretend.

Crucially, when schools receive these reports from parents and don’t see corresponding behaviour in school, the response is too often scepticism. “She’s fine here.” That single phrase has done enormous damage. Because “fine here” is precisely the problem.

📊 The Numbers Behind the Gap

The disparity in diagnosis rates tells its own story. Autistic girls are diagnosed, on average, four to five years later than boys (Loomes et al., 2017). Many receive misdiagnoses of anxiety, depression, or personality disorders first, conditions that are real, but may be downstream consequences of unrecognised autism and years of unsupported masking.

NHS data and research by the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge consistently shows that girls with autism score higher on social motivation scales, making them less likely to be referred in the first place. Teachers’ referral decisions are, understandably, shaped by what they see, and what they see, in many cases, is a quiet, well-behaved girl who appears to be coping.

Under the SEND Code of Practice (2015), schools have a clear duty to identify and assess pupils with SEND needs at the earliest opportunity, using their best endeavours to meet those needs. Ofsted’s inspection framework similarly expects schools to identify vulnerable learners accurately, including those whose needs are not immediately visible. A profile that doesn’t fit the “typical” presentation is not a reason to wait. It’s a reason to look harder.

👁️ What Schools Can Do Differently

The good news is that awareness alone creates significant change. Here’s where to start:

1. 🔍 Widen your referral lens

If a girl is described as anxious, a perfectionist, a rule-follower, or someone who “copies” peers closely, that profile warrants curiosity, not reassurance. Talk to parents. Ask about the evenings and weekends, not just the school day.

2. 📋 Take parental reports seriously

A parent describing meltdowns at home is providing clinical-level information. Build this into your Assess-Plan-Do-Review cycle. If there’s a significant gap between school and home presentation, that gap is the data.

3. ⚙️ Audit your observation tools

Many school-based observation frameworks were designed with male autism profiles in mind. Consider whether your school’s referral and monitoring tools are capable of capturing a masking presentation. The Autism Education Trust and NAS both offer resources that address the female profile specifically.

4. 🧘 Create low-demand recovery spaces

If a young person is using significant energy to regulate throughout the day, proactive decompression opportunities, a quiet space at lunch, a check-in before a transition, permission to stim, can meaningfully reduce the load they carry home.

5. 🧠 Train staff on the female autism phenotype

This isn’t optional anymore. If your SENCO CPD doesn’t include gender-specific autism presentation, it has a gap. The difference between a missed diagnosis and a supported student can be a single informed teacher who knows what to look for.

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💬 A Reflection to Take Into This Week

Think about the girls in your school who are described as anxious, socially eager but sometimes awkward, or rule-following to the point of rigidity. Think about the ones whose parents seem more worried than their school profile would suggest.

Not all of them are autistic. But some of them are, and they’re working incredibly hard to make sure you don’t notice.

The question isn’t whether they need support. It’s whether we’ve built systems capable of seeing them.

If this resonated with you, I’d love to know, drop a comment below or share it with a colleague who works with girls in SEND or pastoral roles. And if you’re not yet subscribed, you can join the SEMH Education community for free below 👇

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📬 Did You Miss These?

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🧠 What We’re Actually Talking About

Demand avoidance as a profile, often discussed under the umbrella of Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), sits in a genuinely contested space in UK education. It isn’t a standalone diagnosis. It doesn’t appear as a named condition in the DSM-5 or ICD-11. Many children who present with this profile will never receive a formal assessment, and some families wait years navigating CAMHS thresholds and EHCP processes before anyone uses the language with any confidence.

But here’s the thing: the behaviour is in the room right now. It doesn’t wait for a label.

The child who enters crisis when asked to line up. The young person who deflects every direct instruction with humour, negotiation, or a sudden headache. The student who, on a good day, seems so capable, and on a hard day, can’t sit in the same room as a learning objective. These children exist in every school. They are exhausted, frequently misunderstood, and often on the receiving end of consequence systems built for a profile they don’t have.

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🔍 What Demand Avoidance Can Look Like in School

It’s worth naming what staff might actually observe, not as a diagnostic checklist, but as a lens for understanding:

• Resistance or refusal of everyday tasks and routines, even enjoyable ones

• Strategies to negotiate, delay, or avoid: distraction, fantasy, physical complaints

• Apparent social understanding used to manipulate or deflect

• Volatility that seems disproportionate to the trigger

• Comfort with self-directed activity vs. anxiety around adult-directed tasks

• Masking in some contexts and complete dysregulation in others

These aren’t signs of a child who needs firmer boundaries. They’re signs of a child whose nervous system experiences demands, including seemingly low-stakes ones, as a threat.

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🗣️ Why Language Is Everything

This is the part I want to sit with for a moment, because it matters enormously.

The language adults use around demand avoidance shapes what happens next. When we describe a child as “refusing”, “defiant”, or “manipulative”, we locate the problem in the child. We position the adult as the authority being undermined, and the natural response becomes correction, more pressure, more consequence, more rigidity.

When we shift the language to “struggling with demands”, “overwhelmed by expectations”, or “communicating through avoidance”, we locate the problem in the interaction. Suddenly, the adult has agency. There’s something to respond to, not punish.

This isn’t about being soft. It’s about being accurate. And accuracy leads to better outcomes.

Ofsted’s updated inspection framework increasingly asks schools to demonstrate that they understand the individual needs behind behaviour, not just that they have a behaviour policy. The language staff use in conversations, planning meetings, and handovers is a direct indicator of whether that understanding is embedded in practice.

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💬 Scripts That Actually Help: What to Say (and What to Avoid)

Staff don’t need a diagnosis to shift their language. They need accessible alternatives to the phrases that escalate rather than regulate.

Here are some practical scripts, grounded in low-demand, collaborative approaches, that can be used across a range of school situations.

🔁 Instead of: “You need to do this now.”

Try:

“I wonder if you could help me with this. I’d love your thoughts on it.”

Why it works: Framing tasks as invitations or choices reduces the sense of demand. Autonomy is built in from the start.

🔁 Instead of: “Stop ignoring me. I’m talking to you.”

Try:

“I can see this isn’t a great time. I’ll check back in with you in five minutes.” “No pressure right now, I just want you to know I’m here.”

Why it works: Direct pursuit of eye contact or acknowledgement often escalates anxiety. Giving space, and naming that the adult will return, removes the confrontation dynamic without abandoning the relationship.

🔁 Instead of: “You were fine five minutes ago. What’s the problem?”

Try:

“Something’s shifted for you, let’s not worry about why right now. What do you need?” “You don’t have to explain it. Let’s just figure out what would help.”

Why it works: Demand avoidant profiles often include rapid emotional state changes that children themselves can’t explain. Asking for justification mid-dysregulation adds a cognitive demand on top of an emotional one. Remove the question.

🔁 Instead of: “This is not a choice.”

Try:

“I get that this feels like a lot. What’s the smallest step that feels okay right now?” “We don’t have to do all of it. Where would you like to start?”

Why it works: Breaking tasks into micro-steps lowers the threshold for entry. Completing one small thing often creates enough momentum for more, without the battle.

🔁 During a full refusal, instead of escalating:

Try:

“That’s okay. I’m not going to push you on this. Let’s just be here for a bit.” “You don’t have to do anything right now. I just wanted you to know I’m not going anywhere.”

Why it works: Presence without pressure is a powerful co-regulatory tool. The relationship remains intact. Trust is preserved. The moment passes without a consequence that damages the next interaction.

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📋 A Note on Whole-School Language

Individual scripts matter. But they work best when they sit inside a shared language framework across a school. If one member of staff is using collaborative, low-demand approaches while another is defaulting to ultimatums, the child’s nervous system gets mixed messages, and the inconsistency itself becomes dysregulating.

Think about where your school’s shared language lives. Is it in your behaviour policy? In your SEND provision mapping? In how staff describe children in transition meetings? The graduated response, Assess, Plan, Do, Review, gives us the framework. But the quality of the language we use within that framework determines whether it’s genuinely inclusive or just procedurally compliant.

🌱 A Thought to Take With You

You don’t need a label to respond well to a child in front of you. What you need is curiosity, the willingness to ask why before what now.

If a child in your school is triggering frustration, concern, or confusion in the adults around them, that’s information. It’s worth slowing down long enough to hear what it’s telling you.

What might change in your school this week if demand avoidance was understood as anxiety rather than attitude?

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There’s an important difference between a school that has neurodiversity-friendly policies and a school that is neurodiversity-affirming. One sits in a folder on the computer system. The other lives in the culture, the classroom, the way staff speak to children, and crucially, the way they think about them.

This week, I want to unpack what neurodiversity-affirming practice actually looks like in a school context, why it matters more now than ever, and why building this kind of environment doesn’t just support neurodiverse learners, it transforms outcomes for every child in the room.

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🧠 So, What Does “Neurodiversity-Affirming” Actually Mean?

The term and movement of neurodiversity has been around since 1990s, there’s some disagreement about who originally coined the term, which you can read about here, here and here.

However, it has since evolved into a widely used framework for understanding the natural variation in how human brains are wired. It encompasses conditions including ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and Tourette’s syndrome, among others.

But affirming neurodiversity is more than just acknowledging it exists. It means:

• Viewing neurological difference as a natural variation of the human experience, not a deficit to be corrected

• Designing learning environments and approaches around the needs of neurodiverse pupils rather than expecting them to mask or comply with systems built for neurotypical brains

• Using language that is respectful, empowering, and identity-affirming

• Recognising and actively building on the strengths that often accompany neurodivergent profiles

In practice, this is the difference between a school that says “we support children with ADHD” and a school that asks “how do we design our environment so that a child with ADHD doesn’t have to spend all their energy just surviving the school day?”

📋 Why This Matters Right Now: The Policy Context

The DfE’s white paper Every Child Achieving and Thriving (February 2026) is explicit about the need for a more inclusive mainstream system. It introduces the concept of Individual Support Plans (ISPs), a £1.6 billion Inclusive Mainstream Fund, and the Experts at Hand service, all designed to bring specialist knowledge and support closer to the classroom.

At the same time, the SEND reform consultation Putting Children and Young People First sets out a vision for support that is (hopefully) early, local, fair, effective, and shared. Crucially, the white paper states that high-quality, adaptive teaching should be “woven into everything that schools do” not reserved for children with EHCPs.

This policy direction is, at its heart, a call for neurodiversity-affirming practice to become the norm, not the exception. Ofsted’s updated inspection framework now grades inclusion as a distinct area for the first time, meaning schools that have not yet embedded this thinking into their everyday culture will increasingly feel that gap.

🔄 The Trauma Connection: When Behaviour Looks Like Neurodiversity

This is one of the most important, and most overlooked, aspects of this conversation, so I want to give it the space it deserves.

Children who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, developmental trauma, or chronic stress can present in ways that look strikingly similar to neurodivergent profiles. A hypervigilant child may appear to have ADHD, constantly scanning the room, struggling to settle, and being impulsive in their responses. A child in a state of emotional shutdown may present with what looks like autistic withdrawal. A child who has learnt that unpredictability means danger may resist transitions, need rigid routines, or become dysregulated by seemingly small changes, behaviours we might associate with autism or PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance).

The risk of misidentification runs in both directions. Some children who are experiencing the neurological effects of trauma are assessed and labelled as neurodiverse when what they primarily need is trauma-informed relational support. And some children who are genuinely neurodiverse are instead described as “attention-seeking,” “defiant,” or “emotionally dysregulated,” when what they need is an environment designed to reduce the cognitive and sensory load they carry every single day.

The good news? A neurodiversity-affirming classroom, one that is predictable, sensory-aware, relationally warm, and free from unnecessary demand and shame, is also a trauma-informed classroom. These approaches are not in competition. They are complementary, and in many cases, they are the same thing.

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✅ What Does Neurodiversity-Affirming Practice Look Like in School?

Here are some of the key principles, translated into everyday classroom and whole-school practice:

🏫 Environment design Reduce unnecessary sensory input where possible, cluttered displays, flickering strip lighting, unpredictable noise levels, and cramped seating all create cognitive load that neurodiverse learners (and traumatised learners) experience more acutely than their peers. Small adjustments, a calmer corner, flexible seating, clear visual structure, can make a significant difference.

🗣️ Language matters Move away from deficit language. Rather than “Sam struggles to stay on task,” try “Sam works best with clear time markers and visual checkpoints.” This isn’t just semantics, it changes how staff see children, and how children see themselves. Identity-affirming language communicates that the child is not the problem. The mismatch between the environment and the child’s needs is.

📚 Flexible pedagogy Adaptive teaching, referenced extensively in both the white paper and Ofsted’s framework, means offering multiple ways to access, process, and demonstrate learning. This isn’t about lower expectations. It’s about removing the barriers that prevent some children from showing what they know. Movement breaks, visual schedules, chunked instructions, pre-teaching vocabulary, and choice within tasks all fall under this umbrella.

👥 Relational consistency For neurodiverse children and those affected by trauma, the predictability of an adult is often more regulating than any strategy or resource. Key adult relationships, co-regulation before self-regulation, and an unconditional positive regard in how staff approach these children, these are the foundations everything else sits on.

📣 Pupil voice Neurodiversity-affirming practice includes asking children what helps. Not assuming. A brief, low-stakes conversation with a child about what makes learning easier for them is both empowering and highly practical. Children often know exactly what they need, they’ve just rarely been asked.

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🌍 The Universal Benefit: Why This Raises the Floor for Everyone

Here is the truth that sometimes gets lost in this conversation: what we build for our most vulnerable learners raises the experience for all of them.

When we reduce unnecessary cognitive load, every child thinks more clearly. When we offer flexible ways to access learning, every child finds an entry point. When we build calm, predictable, relationally warm classrooms, every child feels safer, and children who feel safe are children who can learn.

The EEF’s research consistently shows that the strategies with the highest impact for disadvantaged and SEND learners, metacognition, explicit instruction, oral language development, high-quality feedback, are also the highest-impact strategies for the general population. Designing for the edges doesn’t narrow the experience for the middle. It widens it.

For children who carry the weight of adverse experiences, a neurodiversity-affirming classroom provides something they may have rarely encountered: an environment that didn’t require them to pretend to be someone they aren’t just to get through the day.

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💬 A Thought to Sit With

Neurodiversity-affirming practice isn’t a programme you buy or a policy you adopt. It’s a lens through which you look at every child and ask: what does this environment ask of them, and is it a fair ask?

That question, applied consistently, with genuine curiosity rather than judgement, is where real inclusion begins.

As you head into your next week, I’d invite you to notice one moment where a child appears to be “the problem.” Then flip it. What might the environment be asking of that child that it isn’t asking of the others?

The answer might surprise you.

📬 Did You Miss These?

But here’s what those meetings rarely discuss: what happens next. Not next week. Not next term. Next decade.

The research on the long-term outcomes of exclusion is some of the most uncomfortable reading in UK education. Not because it’s surprising, most of us who’ve worked in SEMH or pastoral roles already suspect the picture isn’t good. But because the data makes it impossible to keep treating exclusion as a neutral act. As a necessary tool. As the end of a story rather than the beginning of a much harder one.

This post is about that data. It’s also about what it means for how we think, talk about, and ultimately practice exclusion in schools. Because if we’re serious about outcomes for children, all children, we have to be willing to follow them beyond the school gates.

🏫 First, Let’s Be Honest About What Exclusion Is

Exclusion, whether fixed-term or permanent, is a legally sanctioned removal of a child from their learning environment. The DfE statutory guidance Suspension and Permanent Exclusion from maintained schools, academies and pupil referral units in England (updated 2024) is clear that it should only be used as a last resort, and never as a first response to SEMH-related behaviour.

And yet, the children most likely to be excluded are also the children least equipped to absorb the consequences.

According to the DfE’s own exclusions data for 2022/23:

Direct quote from the DfE: “The gap in suspensions rates between pupils with SEN (EHC plans and SEN support combined) and those with no identified SEN has been widening since the pandemic and continued to increase compared to the previous autumn term.”

• Pupils with SEND are around seven times more likely to receive a permanent exclusion than their peers without SEND

• Pupils known to be eligible for free school meals are excluded at significantly higher rates

• Black Caribbean pupils are excluded at two to three times the rate of their white British peers

• Children in care, children with an EHCP, and those with a social worker are disproportionately represented across all exclusion categories

These aren’t incidental findings. They’re a pattern. And when you hold that pattern up against the research on long-term outcomes, the implications become profound.

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📉 The Academic Cliff Edge

Let’s start with grades, because this is often where the conversation is most easily had with school leaders who remain unconvinced by the welfare argument.

The evidence here is stark. A 2019 study by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) found that pupils who had been permanently excluded were significantly less likely to achieve any GCSEs at all, let alone the grades required for further education or employment. The attainment gap between excluded pupils and their peers is not a minor variance, it is a chasm.

Suspensions, too, carry an academic cost that compounds over time. Each day out of school is a day of missed instruction, missed social learning, and, crucially, missed connection with the adults who might otherwise have supported the child’s regulation and engagement. When a child is dysregulated, they are not learning. When they are isolated at home with no structured support, the dysregulation typically deepens rather than resolves.

The Timpson Review of School Exclusion (2019), arguably the most significant government-commissioned look at this issue in a generation, acknowledged directly that exclusion, even in its fixed-term form, rarely produces the behavioural change it is intended to create.

Edward Timpson’s team found that too many exclusions were avoidable, with the right support in place. They also found that the quality of education received by permanently excluded pupils in alternative provision was highly variable, and that many children simply fell through the gaps entirely.

The DfE’s Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper (February 2026) reinforces this further, framing inclusion not as a values position but as an outcomes imperative. Exclusion, it argues, should be understood in the context of its downstream costs, to the child, to services, and to society.

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🧠 Mental Health & Wellbeing: The Compounding Wound

If the academic argument doesn’t land, the mental health evidence should.

Exclusion is, by its very nature, a rejection. And for children who already carry significant adverse childhood experiences, trauma histories, or unmet attachment needs, that rejection does not land neutrally. It lands in a nervous system already primed for threat. It confirms what many of these children already believe about themselves: that they are too much, too broken, too unwanted to belong.

Research has consistently shown that excluded young people report significantly higher levels of anxiety, depression, and trauma-related presentations. The Anna Freud Centre has highlighted the intersection between exclusion and deteriorating mental health outcomes, noting that children who are excluded are more likely to disengage from CAMHS referrals, be harder to reach through conventional mental health pathways, and go on to develop more entrenched difficulties.

This matters because we often discuss exclusion and mental health as parallel concerns. They are not parallel. They are directly linked. Exclusion can both result from unmet SEMH need and create new and compounding SEMH need. It is, in this sense, both a symptom and a cause.

Dan Hughes’ model of PACE (Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy), widely used in trauma-informed and attachment-aware schools, is built on the principle that children need felt safety and relational consistency to regulate, learn, and grow. Exclusion, by design, removes both of those things. For the most vulnerable children, the message sent by exclusion is not “your behaviour is unacceptable.” It is “you are unacceptable.”

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🤝 Social Development: When the Scaffolding Is Removed

School is not just an academic institution. For many children, particularly those with limited support at home, it is their primary site of social learning. It’s where they practise conversation, navigating conflict, managing disappointment, developing friendships, and learning to exist alongside people who are different from them.

Research on sense of belonging in schools, a growing and important strand of the SEMH evidence base, consistently finds that children who feel they belong at school have better outcomes across every measurable domain: attendance, attainment, emotional wellbeing, and social competence. Belonging is not a soft outcome but a structural precondition for learning.

When a child is suspended or permanently excluded, that sense of belonging, already often fragile for the children most at risk, is actively disrupted. In the case of permanent exclusion, it may be severed entirely.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has highlighted that excluded young people face acute difficulties in forming and maintaining peer relationships, partly because of the disruption to their social world, and partly because of the stigma that attaches to exclusion. The child who has been excluded is marked. Their peers know. Their new classmates in alternative provision know. The story follows them.

For children with SEMH needs, who may already struggle with emotional literacy, peer interpretation, and managing relational rupture, this additional social complexity can be genuinely overwhelming. The scaffolding of school, imperfect as it is, has been removed, and for many, nothing adequate replaces it.

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They didn't call them suspensions, they didn't feel like suspensions.

When a place came up at a local PRU, they moved quickly, everyone agreed it felt like a good fit, and Jordan did genuinely well there. By Christmas, his name was on the PRU's roll and off theirs.

The school considered it a positive outcome. What they had actually created was a paper trail, or rather, the total absence of one, that showed three informal exclusions with no written notification, an AP placement with no formal plan or documented best interests assessment, and a roll deletion with no permanent exclusion ever issued.

Under the 2026 guidance, every stage was unlawful. And because nothing was ever written down, Jordan's parents had no record, no rights, and no recourse.

2024 & 2026 Guidance

What schools CAN do instead

There are three lawful routes available to schools who need to manage a child’s behaviour through off-site provision or adjusted arrangements. None of them require the child’s name to leave the register.

1. Off-site direction under Section 29A of the Education Act 2002

This is probably the most underused lawful tool in the behaviour toolkit, and it is explicitly referenced in the 2026 guidance as a legitimate short-term measure.

Under Section 29A, a headteacher can direct a pupil to attend a site other than the school, including an AP setting, to improve their behaviour. The child remains on the school roll throughout. The school retains responsibility for their education and their attendance is still recorded against the school.

This is emphatically not off-rolling. The child has not been excluded, formally or informally. Their name has not been removed. The school is using an educational tool to support a behaviour intervention, not to manage the child out.

For this to be lawful and clearly defensible, it should be documented with a specific purpose and duration, agreed with parents, and subject to a review.

It should not be open-ended and it should not be used as a default whenever a child is difficult to manage in school. It is a short-term behaviour improvement measure, not a permanent placement by another name.

🔒 Your off-site direction proforma - exclusively for paid subscribers

Most schools using off-site direction have nothing in writing. No documented purpose, no end date, no parental agreement on paper, no review plan. That’s not a minor admin gap, under the 2026 exclusions guidance, it’s the difference between a lawful behaviour intervention and a practice that could be challenged as unlawful exclusion.

This proforma walks you through every step the guidance requires before, during, and after an off-site direction, in one single document. Print it, save it to your shared drive, and use it every time, so that if anyone ever questions a placement, your paper trail is already there.

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2. Formal AP placement, child remaining on roll

Schools can also refer a child to off-site AP on a longer-term basis while keeping their name on the school register, provided the placement is made in the child’s best interests, parents are involved and in agreement, and the LA is engaged where appropriate (particularly where the child has an EHCP). This is not off-rolling. It is only off-rolling if that placement then leads to deletion from the register.

The critical thing the 2026 guidance adds is the best interests test. If the placement is clearly in the child’s educational and welfare interests, documented, agreed, and reviewed, then the school is using AP as it is intended to be used. If it is being used because the school cannot manage the child and wants them gone, that is where the guidance says the practice becomes unlawful.

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3. The formal suspension process, done properly

If the behaviour is serious enough to warrant removal from school on disciplinary grounds, the answer is always to follow the formal suspension process rather than to find a softer route around it. The formal process exists to protect both the child and the school. Following it correctly is not a burden, it is the thing that makes a school’s decision legally defensible.

The formal suspension process, step by step

This is what schools must do every time a child is suspended, including for short periods and including lunchtime suspensions.

Step 1 - The decision Only the headteacher can suspend a pupil on disciplinary grounds. The decision must be lawful, reasonable, fair, and proportionate. The headteacher must apply the civil standard of proof, on the balance of probabilities, is it more likely than not that this happened? Not beyond reasonable doubt. The pupil’s views must be taken into account, with appropriate consideration of their age and understanding, before the decision is made wherever possible.

Step 2 - Notify parents without delay The headteacher must notify parents without delay, this means the same day. The notification must include the reason for the suspension, the length, and information about the parents’ right to make representations to the governing board. It must be in writing and confirmed in writing even if initially given verbally.

Step 3 - Notify the LA without delay Regardless of the length of the suspension, the LA must also be notified without delay. This applies even for a one-day suspension. This is a requirement that predates the 2026 guidance but is still widely missed in practice.

Step 4 - Notify the governing board The governing board must be notified of every suspension. The timing and nature of the governing board’s involvement then depends on the length:

• Suspensions of five school days or fewer in a term: the governing board must consider any representations from parents but is not required to hold a formal meeting.

• Suspensions of more than five but fewer than 16 school days in a term: the governing board must meet if the parents request it.

• Suspensions that would result in the pupil missing a public examination or more than 15 school days in a term: the governing board must meet, regardless of whether parents request it.

• Permanent exclusions: the governing board must always meet.

Step 5 - Notify the social worker and VSH if applicable If the child has a social worker, or is looked after, the headteacher must notify the social worker and/or Virtual School Head without delay. This is a duty that runs alongside, not after, the parent notification.

Step 6 - Set work for the first five school days For the first five school days of a suspension, the school is responsible for ensuring work is set and marked. This can include online pathways. The school’s SEND duties remain in force during this period, reasonable adjustments must still be made for pupils with disabilities.

Step 7 - Arrange AP from day six If a suspension exceeds five school days, the LA is responsible for arranging suitable full-time alternative education from the sixth school day. However, the guidance makes clear that schools should work proactively with the LA to ensure this is in place, not assume it will simply happen.

Step 8 - Reintegration When the suspension ends, the school should have a reintegration plan in place. The guidance is clear that simply returning a child to the same environment without any support or planning is not good practice. A reintegration meeting, though it cannot be made a condition of return, is recommended. The governing board’s duty to support the child’s future behaviour begins here.

The practical upshot for schools

The 2026 guidance has not removed schools’ ability to use off-site provision or to manage behaviour through a range of tools. What it has done is close the routes by which those tools were being used unlawfully, specifically where they were being used to avoid formal process and, in the worst cases, to delete children from rolls without accountability.

If a child is in off-site AP and remains on roll, with documented best interests, parental agreement, and LA involvement where required, that is lawful.

If a child is being directed off-site short-term under Section 29A for behaviour improvement, with clear purpose and review, that is lawful.

If a child is suspended and the full formal process above is followed, that is lawful.

The unlawfulness begins when any of these routes are used to avoid documentation, avoid process, or remove the child from the roll without formal permanent exclusion. That is the line. And the 2026 guidance has made it considerably harder to stand on the wrong side of it and claim ignorance.

Was this post helpful? What are your concerns about the new guidance? Let me know in the comments!

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Resources Below 👇

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Here’s what I found, what it means in practice, and what you can do about it before September.

2024 & 2026 Guidance

🗓️ The part-time timetable clause

Let’s start with the one that stopped me cold.

The 2026 guidance now explicitly lists placing a pupil on a part-time timetable for behavioural reasons as an example of off-rolling. Not a note in the margins. Not ambiguous guidance. A named example, sitting alongside pressuring parents into Elective Home Education and sending children home without a formal suspension.

For anyone working in SEMH education, you’ll know how widespread this practice is. I’ve seen it used with genuine care, as a way of slowly reintegrating a dysregulated child, of building a positive experience of school before increasing hours. And I’ve seen it used as a way of managing a school’s exclusion data without going through the formal process.

The guidance doesn’t distinguish between these uses. It calls it off-rolling.

This matters because the children most often placed on part-time timetables are the same children who already have the least access to a full education, sometimes those with EHCPs, those known to social care and/or youth justice, those with complex trauma histories.

If your setting is using reduced timetables right now, this is the moment to look hard at whether that practice is genuinely in the child’s interests, properly documented, and agreed with parents and the Local Authority.

If it isn’t, the guidance is now very clear about what it’s called.

⌛ What to do before September:

Pull a list of every pupil currently on a reduced timetable. For each one, ask three questions: Is there a written agreement from parents and the Local Authority (if applicable)? Is there a clear, time-limited plan with a review date? And is the reduction explicitly linked to the childs best interest E.G. educational benefit for that child, not school convenience?

If the answer to any of those is no, you need to act now rather than in September. In the short term, that means a conversation with parents to explain the arrangement formally, a written record of the rationale, and a named date by which you will review whether hours should increase.

If the reduced timetable is being used because a child’s behaviour is difficult to manage, the honest next step is to treat it as what the guidance says it is, a behaviour intervention, and apply the formal processes that come with that.

For children with EHCPs, a part-time timetable almost certainly requires involvement from the LA. If you’re not sure, contact your SEND Local Authority officer now. Don’t wait for an Ofsted visit to surface it.

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❤️‍🩹 A new tool for safeguarding: separation without exclusion

One of the most practically useful additions in the 2026 update is the new section on keeping pupils apart for safeguarding purposes. The guidance now explicitly states that a school can temporarily forbid a pupil from attending premises for safeguarding reasons, and that this is distinct from a disciplinary exclusion.

For DSLs navigating live investigations, particularly those involving child-on-child harm, this has been a grey area for years. Schools have sometimes defaulted to suspension because it was the only named mechanism available, even when the removal was protective rather than punitive. That conflation has always felt wrong, and in practice it creates records that can follow children in ways that affect their futures.

The 2026 guidance gives this a clearer legal basis. It’s not a suspension. It doesn’t count as one. But it must be handled correctly, documented clearly, and not used as a workaround for avoiding the formal exclusion process.

The corresponding terminology update matters here too: the guidance now explicitly clarifies that exclusion means exclusion on disciplinary grounds, and does not include situations where a pupil is sent home for non-disciplinary reasons. The distinction matters, for the child’s record, for their rights to a governing board review, and for how a situation is understood by all the agencies who may be involved.'

⌛ What to do before September:

Brief your DSL on this now, not during a live incident. The worst time to understand a new legal provision is when you’re in the middle of a safeguarding investigation and under pressure to make a quick decision.

Practically, the separation provision needs its own paper trail, separate from suspension records. When a safeguarding separation is used, there should be a written record that names it as such, gives the reason, states the expected duration, and confirms that parents have been informed. It should sit in the safeguarding file, not the behaviour file.

It is also worth having a brief conversation with your governing board before September to make sure they understand the distinction. A governor who sees a child has been kept off-site and assumes it was a suspension, without understanding the safeguarding separation route, could create confusion in a later review.

One thing to be clear about: this provision cannot be used as a softer alternative to the formal exclusion process when the reason is actually disciplinary. The guidance is explicit that exclusion on disciplinary grounds must follow the formal process regardless of how it is framed. Using the safeguarding separation route to avoid recording a suspension would itself constitute unlawful exclusion practice.

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🎒 Off-site AP: tightening the net

The expanded off-rolling definition also brings off-site AP placements into scope for the first time in explicit terms. Moving a pupil to off-site provision when it’s not in their best interests is now named as off-rolling.

This is significant. AP referrals have long been used, consciously or not, as a way of managing behaviour without the formal accountability that comes with a permanent exclusion. A child disappears from the school roll into a PRU or an independent AP, no exclusion is recorded, no governing board meets, no IRP is available to the family.

The 2026 guidance is signalling that this is increasingly in scope. For those of us who work in or alongside AP, this is actually welcome, it pushes back against the idea that AP is a dustbin for children schools can’t manage, and towards AP as a purposeful, best-interests placement.

⌛ What to do before September:

Audit every current off-site AP placement before the new academic year. For each child, you should be able to answer: What is the educational rationale for this placement? Has the child and their family been meaningfully involved in the decision? Is there a reintegration plan, or if the placement is intended to be longer term, is that explicitly agreed with all parties including the LA?

The “best interests” test in the guidance is doing a lot of work here. Best interests means the child’s educational and welfare interests, not the interests of the school’s behaviour data. If you cannot articulate why this placement benefits this child specifically, that is a problem under the 2026 guidance.

For any new AP referrals from September, it would be sensible to build a short best interests record into your referral process, a brief written rationale, signed off by the headteacher, that sits alongside the referral paperwork. It doesn’t need to be lengthy. It needs to be honest and child-specific.

📝 Clearer rules around further suspensions

This one is easy to miss but worth flagging for headteachers. The 2026 guidance adds more specific language around when a second suspension can immediately follow a first. Previously, the guidance said this was possible “usually where further evidence has come to light.” The 2026 version clarifies that a further suspension is appropriate where there has been further investigation of the pupil’s misconduct during the initial suspension and the headteacher has determined the initial suspension was not a sufficient sanction.

In practice, this closes a gap that some schools were using loosely, extending the time a child was out of school by issuing a second suspension without a clear evidential basis for doing so.

⌛ What to do before September:

Review your internal process for issuing a second suspension. There should be a clear record of what new information or investigation occurred during the initial suspension period that justified the additional sanction. If your current process doesn’t capture that, add it. This is also worth covering briefly in any staff CPD around exclusions before the new year, particularly for senior leaders who may not be across the updated wording.

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🏫 Post-16 students: an often-overlooked group

The 2026 guidance explicitly includes discouraging a post-16 student from continuing their course when that is against their best interests as a form of off-rolling. This is a meaningful extension of scope that many sixth form leads and college liaison staff will not be aware of.

Pupils in sixth form, or in post-16 AP, have historically sat in a grey area in terms of exclusion protections. The guidance is now unambiguous: if a school steers a post-16 student away from their course for reasons that serve the school’s interests rather than the student’s, that is off-rolling.

⌛ What to do before September:

If your school has a sixth form, make sure whoever manages post-16 retention is aware of this change. It is also worth reviewing any conversations that took place this year where students were advised to leave their course or transfer elsewhere. If those decisions were not clearly in the student’s educational best interests and properly documented as such, they may now be challengeable.

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🔍 The Ofsted shift, don’t be lulled

One change worth noting, and interpreting carefully, is that the Ofsted language around off-rolling has softened slightly. The 2024 guidance said schools engaged in off-rolling were “likely to be judged as inadequate.” The 2026 version says it “may negatively affect the school’s leadership and governance evaluation.”

I wouldn’t read this as the DfE relaxing scrutiny. I’d read it as reflecting the new Ofsted inspection framework, which has moved away from single-word judgements in some areas and towards evaluation of leadership and governance as a more nuanced domain. The accountability is still there. The mechanism has changed. And importantly, leadership and governance is one of the areas inspectors dig into most carefully when inclusion concerns are already on their radar.

If your school has high suspension rates, a significant number of pupils in off-site AP, or a pattern of pupils leaving the roll without formal exclusions, those data patterns will still attract attention. The threshold for “inadequate” being automatic may have shifted, the underlying scrutiny has not.

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✏️ The through-line

Reading this guidance alongside the SEND white paper and the direction of travel on inclusion, there is a consistent message: the children most likely to be informally managed out of school are also the children the system is being held most accountable for. Part-time timetables, informal exclusions, off-site AP used as a default, post-16 pushouts, these practices have disproportionately affected children with SEMH needs, children with EHCPs, and children known to social care.

The guidance doesn’t ask schools to manage the unmanageable without support. It does ask schools to be honest, in their records, their processes, and their decision-making, about what they are actually doing with their most vulnerable pupils.

Before September is the right time to look at that honestly. Not because Ofsted might be coming. Because these are children.

📬 Did You Miss These?

That’s exactly why this feels worth sharing.

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On Monday 8th June, I’m joining four other education Substack writers for a free, informal webinar built around one simple idea: teachers deserve better support, and there are people out there working hard to provide it.

Each of us will take 10 minutes to share an overview of what we write about, highlight posts that have resonated with readers, and offer a glimpse at what’s coming next. It’s not a lecture series or a CPD tick-box, it’s a conversation, and we want you in it.

The session closes with an open Q&A, giving you the chance to ask questions and hear us reflect together on what’s working, what isn’t, and what the profession needs more of.

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Mary Myatt - Curriculum 101

Mary is an education adviser, writer and speaker, and a former local authority adviser and inspector. Widely regarded as the UK’s leading expert on curriculum, she is the founder of Myatt & Co and the Huh Academy, and has written extensively on school improvement and leadership. Her Substack, Curriculum 101, has over 12,000 subscribers and focuses on building an ambitious curriculum from primary through Key Stage 3.

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Anna is a values-driven educator and Lead Practitioner for Reading, with a passion for teaching and learning, curriculum design, and reading. Her Substack, Get Them Reading, is a newer voice in the education writing space, focused, purposeful, and well worth following as it grows!

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Laura is an experienced, international educator with a deep commitment to raising the profile of teaching and learning, and a particular passion for empowering children and adults alike to see themselves as volitional readers and writers. Her Substack, Glimmers in Education, reflects that spirit, looking for the bright spots in education and sharing them with nearly 1,000 subscribers.

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If your school is navigating SEMH, SEND, or behaviour issues and you want training that goes beyond theory. My practical, honest CPD is for you. My training provides actionable strategies that staff will actually use on Monday morning. I’d love to hear from you!

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Somewhere in your school’s shared drive, there’s a PDF that hasn’t been meaningfully updated in years. It has seven phases of escalating sanctions, a section on supervised isolation, and a detailed uniform policy. It references the correct DfE guidance. It was approved at a full governors’ meeting. It looks, on paper, entirely legitimate.

It may be quietly failing your most complex children every single day.

I’ve read a lot of behaviour policies. And if I’m honest, most of them share the same fundamental flaw: they are written around the majority to manage the minority. They create systems designed for children who are already regulated, already attached, already able to respond to consequence-based logic, and then apply those same systems, with minor adjustments, to the children who are none of those things.

The result? A predictable cycle. A child with unmet SEMH needs disrupts a lesson. They move through the phases. They land in isolation. They return to the same environment, with the same unmet needs, and the cycle starts again. Except now there’s a little more shame attached to their name on the system. A few more negative comments logged. A relationship with school that feels a fraction more adversarial.

This isn’t a criticism of the staff who wrote the policy, or those trying to implement it. It’s a critique of the model itself, and today, I want to make the case that it’s time for a fundamental rethink. Not just a rebrand or a light edit. A genuine, values-led rewrite.

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🔬 What the Evidence, and the Government, Are Now Telling Us

The DfE’s February 2026 white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, is unambiguous about the direction of travel. It signals a shift away from punitive, reactive approaches and toward what it calls a “support-first” model, one where understanding the root causes of behaviour, and building genuine belonging, comes before consequence.

The white paper explicitly states that calm, inclusive learning environments are inclusive environments for all children, including those with SEND. It goes further, committing to refreshed Behaviour in Schools guidance, new statutory Suspension and Permanent Exclusion guidance, and, crucially, a new Reintegration Support Partnership framework that places structured, family-involved planning at the centre of what happens after a suspension. Not just a letter home. Not just a meet-and-greet on the doorstep. A proper, documented plan built around the child.

The white paper also highlights something that should concern every school leader: rising exclusions, rising behaviour-related suspensions, and a parallel rise in staff reporting abuse. These three things are not unconnected. When we respond to behaviour with only escalation, we rarely reduce it, we often displace it.

Meanwhile, Ofsted’s new inspection framework has changed the landscape significantly. For the first time, inclusion is explicitly graded. Inspectors now evaluate how well leaders set high expectations for all children, including those with SEND, and whether the right support is in place to meet their needs. A behaviour policy built around phased sanctions and isolation rooms is not, in 2026, evidence of a strong inclusion culture. It may, in fact, raise questions about it.

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🏗️ The Problem Isn’t Just the Language, It’s the Architecture

Let me show you what I mean with a real example.

I’ve been looking at a behaviour policy from a secondary academy in the north of England. It’s well-intentioned, professionally written, and clearly the product of significant thought. The school’s motto is about creating a climate for great learning, success and opportunity, and you can see that aspiration woven through the document. There’s a genuinely impressive GROWTH model underpinning the Attitude to Learning grades: Goals, Reality, Organisation, Will, Tactics, Habits. That’s good stuff. That’s the kind of framework that recognises learning as a disposition, not just a performance.

But then you look at the sanctions framework, and the architecture tells a very different story.

There are seven escalating phases, from verbal warning through to fixed-term and permanent exclusion. Phase Five is called “Supervised Study”, a full day of isolation from 08:30 to 16:00, during which students eat alone, have a shortened break, and are “isolated in the fullest sense of the word.” Three detentions in a half-term triggers this automatically. Forgetting your planner three times triggers it too.

Phase Six introduces a Contract, colour-coded, individually tailored, but fundamentally a conditional relationship with school. Behave within these terms, or you’re excluded.

I understand why these systems exist. Leaders and teachers need structure. Consistency protects children who would otherwise bear the brunt of other pupils’ dysregulation. None of this is malicious. But here’s the question I want to sit with for a moment:

We’re teaching them that school responds to their hardest moments with isolation. That relationships are conditional. That, when things go wrong, the school and adults remove themselves from the child, rather than moving toward them. And then we wonder why some of the most vulnerable children in our schools disengage entirely, or why they never really connect with school in the first place.

This is the architecture problem. It’s not solved by adding the words “reasonable adjustments” in a paragraph near the end. It requires a redesign from the values up.

🤷 What Should a Behaviour Policy Actually Be Called?

Here’s a small change with significant implications: it shouldn’t be called a behaviour policy at all.

The name sets the frame. “Behaviour policy” positions the document as a response to behaviour, specifically, behaviour that deviates from a norm. It situates the institution as the authority that defines and enforces that norm. And it places the child, particularly the child whose behaviour is most complex, as the subject to be managed.

What if we called it an Inclusion and Relationships Policy instead?

Or a Belonging and Support Policy?

Or even a Learning Environment Policy?

The name isn’t cosmetic. It signals intent. It tells parents, carers, students, and staff what the document is for. And when Ofsted’s inspectors are now explicitly looking at how your school fosters inclusion and belonging, not just how it manages behaviour, the language of your policy matters more than it ever has.

Schools that are ahead of the curve on this are already making the shift. They’re writing policies that lead with values, embed relational approaches before sanctions, and position understanding behaviour as communication as a core professional expectation, not an optional add-on for the pastoral team.

The Five Shifts Every Behaviour Policy Rewrite Needs

Before we get into the detail, here’s the framework I use when auditing a behaviour policy for a rewrite. Every policy I’ve seen that genuinely supports complex children has moved, to varying degrees, across these five dimensions:

1. From Rules to Relationships The policy should open with a relational commitment: how staff build and repair connections with students, not just how students are expected to behave.

2. From Consequence to Curiosity Before any sanction is applied, there should be a structured expectation that staff have asked why, and documented it. What was happening for this child before the incident? What need does this behaviour communicate?

3. From Isolation to Regulation If a child needs to leave the classroom, the goal should be co-regulation and return, not punishment. The space they go to should have a therapeutic purpose, not a punitive one.

4. From Compliance to Understanding The GROWTH model in the example policy is actually a brilliant foundation for this. But it needs to permeate the whole document, not sit in an appendix while the sanctions system operates on different principles. The aim is for children to truly understand why they have been given a consequence.

5. From Uniformity to Adaptive Practice SEND reasonable adjustments cannot be a footnote. They need to be embedded throughout, with specific examples of how the policy adapts for children with trauma histories, attachment difficulties, autism, ADHD, and anxiety.

SEMH School-Ready Resources

These five shifts sound straightforward. But turning them into actual policy language, in a way that’s Ofsted-ready, legally sound, and practically usable for frontline staff, is where most rewrites stall. 🛑

Which brings me to what I want to share with you as a paying subscriber today.

In the full post below, I’m taking you through a detailed, annotated line-by-line analysis of the policy I referenced above, showing exactly what to change, what to keep, and how to rewrite it. I’ve included before-and-after language for the most critical sections, a set of drafting tips you can apply directly to your own school’s policy, and a guide to aligning your rewritten document with both the DfE’s 2026 behaviour guidance and Ofsted’s new inclusion grading framework.

If you’ve been tasked with a policy rewrite, or you’ve been wanting to push for one, this is the resource to start with.

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