BEHAVIOUR AND ATTENDANCE

School life as a prelude

The aim is for the links between behaviour policy, moral development and citizenship education as strong as possible in order to highlight the importance of social inclusion and equal opportunities.

The ethos of the school is the main driver for a good behaviour and a high level of attendance. Straight from Primary School, the students know the school expectation (e.g. support one another) and everything is done to ensure that they comply with them.

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The electronic personalized development plans is the main mean of tracking pupils’ behaviour and attendance. Indeed, the plan will also be linked to an electronic behaviour management system.
Such an open way of using learning and teaching technologies gives a great deal of responsibilities to the learners. As a consequence, a structured, consistent and systematic approach to behaviour management is most important.

An emphasis is put on prevention and encouragement of positive behaviour and attitude.  However, a “no excuses” policy coupled with the electronic flagging system mentioned previously will be there to ensure a strong discipline.

Indeed, the flagging system would automatically alert the relevant members of staff to act promptly on pupils that are not achieving the expected standard or for whom there are discipline issues. Then the inclusion team can take over to work with the “home class” teacher, the parents and the equivalent of the Children Action Teams (in the Reading Local Authority) to make sure that the issue is resolved as smoothly and quickly as possible.

The Electronic personalised development plan is a workable solution thanks to the organization of the teaching time. The number of hours the “home class” teacher spends with the pupils and the size of the classes is what guarantee a deep knowledge of individual pupils and a personalized learning experience.

It also offers more opportunities to review the development plan on regular basis and to encourage learners to be more responsible for their learning. As a result of all these effort, most of the learners if not all of them, are expected to achieve one level above their expected target level at the very least, or be in line with their target grade at worst.

A first draft of the school behaviour policy will be drafted after the appointment of the acting principal, as he or she will be expected to work on it with the relevant member of the Connected School set up team, following the principle set throughout this document. The policy will promote good behaviour and deter all forms of bad behaviour. In addition to making it available to every member of the school community, the behaviour policy will be closely linked to the electronic behaviour management system.

The importance of the policy will be reminded every year, at the same time as the tri party home school agreement (parent/carer-school-learner). It will be reviewed every year as well to ensure that it is up-to-date with the development of technology for instance and take into consideration the characteristics of learners such as SEN and with disabilities. One of the aims is to make it clear, who should be able to impose which sanctions and under which circumstances.

Staff members are expected to make use of their statutory power to regulate the behaviour of pupils when off school premises even when they are not under their supervision. The behaviour policy will make clear the factors that will be taken into account in deciding whether a rule or sanction is reasonable.

The electronic behaviour management system will support the teacher in consistently applying the right balance between rewards and sanction (including lawful use of confiscation of pupils’ property, detention after school and on some Saturdays, and so on), as it will be described in the behaviour policy. It will also help the school monitor the distribution of rewards by age, ethnicity, gender, special educational needs (SEN) and disability.