A lot of the guidance from the government was updated at the beginning of September this year, and it applies obviously to the local authority schools, to academies and to pupil referral units. And it tends to refer to exclusions as either suspensions, which are the temporary exclusions, or as a permanent exclusion. So I’m going to use the word ‘suspension’ for the temporary exclusions and the word ‘exclusions’ for permanent exclusion.

So the guidance suggests that it’s about improving behaviours in school and that the schools and the headteachers need to determine the appropriate measures they need to take to promote the self-discipline and proper regard for authority in children. It’s very strange that this is the language around the exclusion, particularly given that children who are black, children who have special educational needs, children who are eligible for free school meals, and children who are looked after and adopted are far more likely to be included in those exclusion situations than children who are not from those different groupings.

There has been a massive increase in suspensions across the UK, up by 40,000 suspensions. The rate has jumped from 3.7% up to about 4.25% in the last year. And the most common reason children are suspended or excluded is for persistent disruptive behaviour. Not violence, not bullying, not homophobic behaviours, but persistent disruption in class. So a child can be suspended for up to 45 days in a school year, which, given that kids are at school for 190 days, is a fairly significant chunk of their education. And although you are meant to set and mark work for children while they are offsite, that obviously isn’t going to be to the same level of quality as children receive within the school situation.

Headteachers can choose to exclude or suspend children because of their behaviour outside of school, which creates a bit of difficulty in terms of how far the authority of the headteacher can reach. But also they only need to do it on the balance of probabilities. If the head teacher thinks it’s likely that the child in question did something, that’s sufficient proof, the burden of proof is sufficient for them to suspend a child without necessarily having to investigate any further. So the system is already skewed if you’ve got senior leaders who are not in a position to understand where your child’s behaviour is coming from or why they’re behaving or what’s triggering that behaviour, to put the child in a position where they’re not going to be fully understood and in a position where they’re going to likely be suspended or excluded more.

So the government talk about the use of suspensions and exclusions as an essential behaviour management tool. And the question I would have is, how does it help? Our behaviour management tools all apply because they need to help. They need to help the children. We need to help them settle into school. We need to teach them the appropriate social behaviours that they should be adhering to. It’s meant to help children move away from anti-social behaviours that we don’t expect in society or for their age or developmental level. And there are a lot of schools that kind of use the exclusions and suspensions, whether internal or external, as a means of removing the difficulty from the classroom. They’re not necessarily dealing with the difficulties in the classroom.

There was a TV programme about, Please don’t exclude me, I think it was called, with a child in a school was excluded something like ridiculous, he was 20 or 25 days already out of the classroom. And it was from him standing up or not listening to the teacher or having a need that needed to be met that was being unmet.

So, I’m not going to say whether it’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, but I am going to ask a question about how it helps. So from a school perspective, an exclusion or suspension can provide the breathing space or the recovery time that the class of children or staff need. But that time also needs to be used purposefully because it’s about giving the school the time to make sure that you don’t have to do that again. So if a child is being suspended, the question I would ask the school is, okay, this child is now being suspended for this persistent behaviour, disruption or whatever reason. What is being put into place? How are things going to be different when they come back to school after the one or five days that they’ve been kicked out? What will have changed to put them in a position where this will be unlikely to happen again?

It’s not a case of just expecting the child at their age and stage of development to understand that this is actually a punishment being sent home and that that should be sufficient to deter them from doing it. You need to use that time as a school to put things in place to support the child and the staff and the children around them to make sure that you don’t have to then use it as a deterrent again.

From a parent perspective, there’s obviously a massive impact on parents when their child is excluded or suspended. A lot of the parents work and they are not paid for the time that they’re out of school. They can’t just stop what they’re doing. A lot of parents are not in a position to be able to keep the child at home, and it has created a great deal of hardship for those parents, especially if, as they said in the data, that the children who are on free school meals are far more likely to be excluded. Those parents are far more likely to be in a position where they have work or jobs or things that they need to do that they don’t get paid for any absenteeism from. It can provide respite for the school, but the school might also be in the position of providing respite to that parent. If that child has a great deal of need, by taking that child to school every day, that may be the only time the parents have to do any of the things that they need to do. I have had parents in my school where they use the time the children are at school to sleep because they don’t get to sleep any other time. All nights their children are up or struggling or having nightmares or running away or all of those things. And so those parents need that 6 hours to stay sane, because they know their child is safe, looked after, and they can relax for that 6 hours. So you’ve got to consider the impact it has on the wider family.

And it looks at putting the responsibility for the behaviour management of the child back on to the parents. Now, you always need the support of the parent. You always need the relationship with the parent and you definitely need the parent to understand the behaviour that’s going on. But as a school, you are responsible for managing the behaviour of the children in your school while they are in your school. You cannot tell a parent that because their child has not coped with something in their school that they are responsible. Because the parent speaking to a child when they come and fetch them 45 minutes later or an hour later or whenever is not going to have the correct amount of impact on the child, because if the child wasn’t coping, nothing you say is going to help them cope in that situation.

You have to be aware that it can be a necessary shock for parents. If parents are in denial about the difficulties the children are facing, having an exclusion can sometimes be the wake-up call that those parents need to realise that this is very serious situation, that the child is hurting and that we need to work together to build on it and move forward. That also can lead to damaging the parents’ relationship with the school further rather than building it up. So it depends very much on how it’s handled and obviously it would work better if the school is using that exclusion or that suspension to put things into place to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Parents are in a better position then to accept what’s being said and what’s being done.

For the child, the question you have to ask yourself is how is this exclusion or suspension helping the child? What is their home life like? Why would being at home for a day help them? How would it help them? Or five days, or however long you choose to suspend them. Would it help them or not? Is there a safeguarding concern? Would sending the child, if they are a traumatised child because of their home circumstances, would sending them into the home away from the safe place of school actually help or hinder the progress? Would this allow them to be further entrenched in the trauma that they’re experiencing?

Do the children actually understand the impact of having that suspension? They don’t particularly care or have the long term recognition of their school records as showing their exclusion rates. What they can look at is think, ‘Well, if I thump a teacher, I get to go home and I can have a whole day, and because my mum needs to work or she’s whatever she’s doing, I will do the minimum amount and spend a day on my Xbox or watch telly or sleep late.’

And that’s not a punishment. That’s not going to help a child change their behaviour. What the child in control of what they were doing? Were they thumping that teacher so they could get the day off? At which point, what you can do about it as a school? How are you going to deal with that as a parent? Because if your opinion is that every time a child hurts an adult, they get sent home, that child is going to learn, “Well, I’m having a bad day, I’m going to thump and adult and I’m going to go home.” They don’t have that long term consequence, that understanding of long term consequences.

If the child is not in control of themselves, what point is an exclusion going to have? Because if the child can’t control themselves in that situation, they’re not going to be in a position to think, “Hang on a second. I know I’m really anxious. I know I’m really scared. I know I’ve lost complete control of my rational thought. I don’t really want to be sent home because that’s going to make my mum and dad feel mad or I’m going to miss my friends.” That thought process can’t happen when a child is in a panic mode. When they’ve reached the point where they cannot control their actions anymore, they haven’t got the capacity for that rational thought or reason behind things, they are fully engaged in their lizard brain, in their survival, in their coping. They’re not going to be able to consider the impact of being sent home.

So as a school, you need to look at that and you need to decide what the reasoning is behind the child behaving the way they are. Are they doing it because they are actually in control and there’s a reason behind why they want to be sent home? Or are they out of control? And at which point, what can you do to stop it from getting to that point in the future? So if you do, you need to have that question in your mind, who is this helping? How is this supporting the child? Because the child will come back. You can’t just breathe and say, “Oh, that’s it. We’ve got 24 hours or 48 hours without this particular child in the classroom. That’s great, let’s get our work done.” It’s not going to work that way. You have to make sure that it’s useful and that the child doesn’t get put in that position again. The definition of madness is repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result. So you have to consider how or why that behaviour is happening and what is causing it.

And the best way to deal with that is through something I will call behaviour mapping. That’s the science behind the monitoring of the behaviour where you build up a body of very, very precise evidence about that child’s behaviour. And it does take a lot of time. But it’s a lot of time that you’re gifting that child, which would save an enormous amount of time later on in their schooling careers for years and years and years afterwards.

There are many different ways of doing it, obviously. You can do ABC charts, which are called ABC because of the antecedent, the leading up to the behaviour, B the behaviour, and C the consequences thereof. That gives you a good idea if a child is one of those direct responders. When something happens, they build up, show a behaviour, and then the consequences thereafter.

Sometimes you can track and monitor behaviour through tick sheets. You can look at how many times they engage in verbally abusive behaviour, physically abusive behaviour, negative self-esteem links or behaviour. And that can kind of sometimes give you a picture of the child’s process. They may start feeling negative about themselves, and it builds up to physically, I mean verbally abusive behaviour before going on to physical abuse. And so you can see the build-up of behaviours and how that morphs over time. Or you can do what I call place charts, which is when you look at where the child is, when the child explodes or melts down or whatever word you choose to use, and who is around them at this point. There can be a lot of trauma triggers for a child. It could be the teacher. Not what the teacher is doing, it could be the way they look. Maybe that the child has trauma around very tall women with dark hair, and it just so happens that that’s your science teacher. It could be that actually the content of what’s being taught can be triggering for a child, or the teaching style, or the language that a person uses.

It could also be, like it was one of the children in my school, a case of they were sitting in a group for maths and the child in the group for maths was very, very good at winding them up, very slowly, just poking and poking and poking and poking and building up this anger in the child. And they would do this the whole of the maths lesson. And then when they went out to play, that child would be so built up and so heightened from what had happened in the maths lesson that they would then become physically aggressive on the playground. And so when we looked at our ABC charts, we couldn’t see a trigger for the behaviour on the playground. We could see nothing. The child was on the playground, they’d be sitting there, and then they would go off and whack somebody. And they’d always be sorry afterwards, but they could never explain why they picked to hit somebody or kick somebody or bite somebody. And it was only when we did the ‘where, when, who’ that we could see actually it only every happened when they were in this maths group with the other particular group of kids. And we slowly but surely managed to whittle it down to the fact that, ah right, this child should never, ever, ever be in a group with that child. And once we’d managed to separate them, we managed to lower the problems and we reduced the amount of playtime difficulties that we had.

A lot of that happened because of the type of children. You’ll find that with children who’ve experienced trauma, they tend to be attracted to each other like moths to a flame, especially when they’ve come from very chaotic backgrounds. They kind of get drawn to each other and then try and recreate that chaos. It’s a very toxic relationship that they develop, that they can almost recognise in each other that they have this need for chaos and physical aggression and verbal abuse around them because they know that well and they know how to operate within that. But by the same token, if they hadn’t had that other person with them, they wouldn’t spiral to the same heights as they would be.

So, knowing your children in your class, knowing who’s around them and where, knowing who the safe adults are for that child. You might find that actually, Monday, Wednesday, Thursdays and Fridays are brilliant days, but Tuesdays are terrible. It could be the PE teacher, that they don’t feel safe with the PE teacher and actually, they’ve got the PE teacher followed by the science teacher, who’s very tall and dark-haired and scares them. And then Tuesday’s just a write-off day for them. And actually, you might find that things will happen on Monday in an effort to be suspended for Tuesday because that way they can avoid the difficult situations that they’re in. So having an idea of place around the school, mapping properly, ‘who’s where, when is this happening, what’s happened before that?’ gives you a scientific kind of way of making sure that you consider all avenues for that child before you just respond to what you see. It’s very easy to respond to behaviours you see without doing the detective work behind it.

And obviously the older children become, the more they can try and make up a reason as to why something happened or verbalise how they’re feeling about things. With younger children, sometimes they don’t know. And you’ve got to bear in mind that with traumatised children, developmentally speaking, they’re still younger. They spent the first few years of their lives learning survival instead of learning emotions and social interactions and things like that. So you might be looking at the body of a 14 year old, which is when exclusions and suspensions peak for children, but they may have the emotional capacity of a six year old and they’re not going to be able to say, “Well, actually, I felt triggered by this that happened here, or the content of that was all about loss. We’re reading this book where this horrible thing happens, and I got very upset about that.” They’re not going to have the emotional capacity to recognise that and to reason their way through it. And so you will have to take that position as a detective to look into what the background is behind the child that’s leading to this behaviour.

Obviously, you need to have a relationship with home. As much as you can, knowing the parents, knowing the carers, knowing the child. Having that relationship means that you can talk. So if the parents say, actually, they’ve had 3 hours sleep. They went online last night and you caught them in their room and they were still awake at 3 a.m. and they were engaged in a dodgy chat or something else that happened. Maybe they’ve seen a movie they shouldn’t have seen or they were doing something they shouldn’t have done. If you know that, then you know the child is going to be super tired and emotionally wrung out and unable to focus properly. And if you put more pressure on them, they’re more likely to explode. So if you know the background of what’s going on in the child’s life, and you’ve got the relationship with the parents that they can discuss this with you, they can give you the trigger warnings.

They can also let you know, because a lot of our children will mask through the school day, go home and explode. It’s like shaking a bottle of coke. And what you do is every lesson you have, you’re giving it a shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake. It’s building up, building up, building up. And then the poor parents, once you pick it up, they collect their child at the end of the day and they open the lid and it all comes spraying out. But in that explosion, the parents often hear the truth of how the day has gone and what’s wrong and where they’re worried and what happened to those children. So if you can speak to the parents and believe them and trust them that they want the best for their child, and not take anything that’s said personally as a school, then you will be in a position to support the child moving forward with the behaviour that they’ve got or that they’re showing.

The other thing you need to do is monitor your staff and the language they use. Because you can throw as much training at someone as you like, but if they haven’t bought into the attachment approach, they may yet still use language that’s inappropriate for the child. They may say to the child, “You’re being naughty, stop it, You’re being bad, sit down. I don’t want to talk to naughty boys.” Or whatever they say. And it may be that that’s what’s spiralling the child’s behaviour up. And then, unsurprisingly, if you’ve got a child who’s being triggered, who’s being told that they’re naughty their whole life, and then if they’re being bad, they don’t get food and they don’t get fed or they get beaten or something horrible is going to happen to them, of course they’re going to be in that position where fight and flight is going to kick in. And then it kind of makes a logical sense that they’re going to hit that teacher, because if the teacher’s in a position that they’ve said something that precedes a violent attack on them, sometimes fight or flight will get into that. They might shut down, they might run away, they might hit you. And then that’s the disruptive behaviour that that child will then get suspended for. And yet, if you look at the causes of it, it makes perfect, logical sense to the child in their survival mode for what they’ve done.

So you need to look at the staff. Do they need training, further training? Do they need to understand more about the child’s background so that they can recognise the impact they’re having on them? And if it’s the case of the teacher who is a trigger just by virtue of what they look like, consider changing them. Consider changing the adults. If you’ve got capacity to put the child in a different class for that lesson or to have a trusted adult attend that session with them, so that they’ve got a key adult with them that they know they can rely on and who will protect them from the untrustworthy adults, do that, because that will lower the anxiety around that child and it will definitely mean that they’re not in a position where they need to fight or flee what’s going on around them. And that also will reduce the behaviours that lead to system disruption.

The other question you need to ask is what children are there? So I spoke about the child in maths was winding up one of my little ones, but it doesn’t always seem, it can’t always be the obvious child. Sometimes you will have a person who sits back and who has other children do their bidding for them, or they wind other children up, who then go on to wind up the child that you’re monitoring. You have to be aware of the quite complicated social status that children assign themselves in a class. It’s almost like a class pecking order. And you can ask any teacher, if you’ve got one child who’s absent the whole class dynamic changes. And it doesn’t have to be a troublesome child. It doesn’t have to be a child who’s struggling with things. It doesn’t have to be a child who needs additional support all the time. It could be any one of your children. If you have that child out of class, the dynamic within the class changes and you need to be aware of that. And sometimes you will have a child who doesn’t appear to be causing any trouble, but they are definitely stirring the pot from their lofty position in the pecking order. And that can obviously impact very much on the child’s emotional state in class and in school. So it’s always worth monitoring the behaviour. It’s always worth mapping the behaviour, especially if you build up a file on that child where you can look at behaviour. Sometimes patterns don’t emerge for a fair while. But once they do, they make such a difference to the rest of that child’s education.

But additionally, if you need extra support, if you have an outreach program from your local pupil referral unit, if you have outreach from specialist schools, if you need support from social services, family workers, or learning support, or anything like that, if you’ve got that evidence, you can boil it down to the data. And you can say, look, because of this, this child is only able to attend 65% of the classes, or this child can only engage with the curriculum in 45% of this area. Then you have unarguable proof of what needs to happen to support that child. People can’t argue with the fact that if the child is running out of the classroom and they’re actually only spending 20% of the school day in a classroom in front of the teacher, and the rest of the time they’re basically playing hide and seek around the school, you can show that this child is in need of additional support or extra care.

The other thing you need to do with exclusions and suspensions is consider it from the outside perspective. So very much dealing with the, who is this helping? How are we going to use it with the parents, the school, the child? That’s very internal. That’s the ground level way of dealing with it. But from an external kind of perspective, you need to make sure that as the senior leader, your governing body or your board are on side. They need to have an understanding of attachment and trauma because they need to understand why you are handling things the way you are.

So you will always have parents who will hear from their children that little Johnny smacked the teacher today. “Oh, well, what happened? Is little Johnny in school today? He wasn’t suspended! Whoa!” And they get very upset and cross because they feel that child should be punished and they have to learn. And what actually happens is little Johnny may well have been triggered, or something else has happened, and it’s not going to help them by being sent home. What you need to do is work with the staff and the child together in the school, but you need your governing body because they’re going to complain. That parent’s going to complain that that child is in the same class as their little precious, and they need to know that their little precious is only surrounded by children who are complete regulated at all times, and they don’t need to learn how to handle anyone in the world who’s not exactly the same as they are. And that complaint will always go forward. And if you’ve got a governing body who understand the trauma and attachment difficulties that children have, and that the way you’re handling it is far better for the child and the school in the whole, then you have the support of the governing body and the board, and that means that they will be able to support you in not excluding children when outside agencies expect you to.

The other thing to consider with is the governing body or the board is to have those people come into school to see it, so that they can witness what’s actually happening and the work around the child that you’re putting into place to support them. So that they as a governing board or body can support you emotionally, if you’re the senior leader trying to put this in place, but also that they can recognise that sometimes it costs a bit of extra money and it has an impact on your budget. Or that you’re moving staff around and why one class looks like it’s got more adults than it needs, and actually your process behind supporting the children and the rest of the school, that they can then see the reasoning and the logic behind that and the support you need.

But most importantly, when dealing with suspensions and exclusions, you have to look after your staff wellbeing. And it’s not easy because you will have staff who come from the schools and you need to manage their expectations about this, where they will go, ‘But that child hit me. They shouldn’t be in class. I don’t want to teach them anymore.’ And as a leader you would be in a position to say to them, ‘Okay, let’s think about this. That child hit you because you told him he was bad. And in his life, when he gets told he’s bad, he’s going to get beaten. And he thought he’d get there first. Because if he started, then he knows at least he’s going to get beaten now and he’s not going to get beaten later when he’s least expecting it. So he’s kind of popping the balloon as soon as he can. And the reasoning behind that is because of this trauma in this child’s life. So actually sending him home is not going to make any difference to him. However, I appreciate that you’ve been hit by somebody and that’s not a good thing, and that doesn’t make you feel good and that gives you anxiety, or you worry about it.’ You need to put in place to then support that member of staff. Do they need to just have a break? Do they need to go to the staff room, have a cup of tea, calm down, get their head around the fact, come back.

Do you need an additional adult? Do you need that trusted adults in place for that child? To make sure that there’s somebody there to support and that when something happens like that, that key adult can interpret for that child and say, ‘Ah, now I know Mrs. So-And-So has just said that’s naughty. You do know that she doesn’t mean that you are a naughty boy. She just means that she doesn’t want you to put your pencils there anymore or flick that and so-and-so, and kind of interpret for a child. And through that organisational structure, you can provide that support for that member of staff.

Obviously, you can then provide additional training because the more you understand about trauma and behaviour, the more you realise that what you need to do is build relationships, not exclude children from relationships, not move them outside. They need belonging, they need to be a part of what they’re doing.

But most importantly, as a senior leader, you need to have presence. And it’s not a case of looming through the classroom door every 5 minutes to make sure everything’s okay and little Johnny sitting down. It’s about being there on call when things go pear shaped. Being calm, keeping calm, helping the child calm, helping the adult calm, helping everyone to regulate. And that’s why when I talked about the governing board, you need to have someone you can vent to. Because as a senior leader, you have to keep that calm, but you need to keep that calm by being able to vent to somebody else later.

So the staff wellbeing is one of the hardest things to organise and a lot of the time, before you can properly manage the expectations, which takes time to change, the staff may feel you’re being soft. They may feel that you haven’t got their back, that you haven’t balanced it correctly, and that they will still want that child out of their class or away. “I don’t want to deal with them anymore.” And you have to build that relationship. And it does take time. So you need to consider how you can support the staff, what each individual needs. Don’t forget that many adults will have their own triggers too, and that some adults will be triggered by a child being defiant or saying certain things. And you need to try and manage that too, to try and bring down their expectations of suspending or excluding that child. Because we all know that the children who need the most help ask for it in the most difficult of ways. And you have to help that child to belong in order to make any progress moving forward.

So change is hard. How can you do it? How can you reduce those exclusions and suspensions? You’ve got to start early. It’s about being as proactive as possible. Talk to your staff when you come into your school. Find out who those children are. They all have a particular child in their clad that they’ll be able to mention off the top of their head straight away that they find tricky to deal with. And it’s about being proactive with that discipline, putting that structure in place so you have, not shameful discipline or anything like that at all, but where you look at how you can support the children to keep regulated, to coregulate with somebody, how you use your adults, how you keep that level playing field for the children, building those relationships with the parents.

So if you have a school that starts a foundation stage level and goes up to year six, obviously you’ve got longer with the foundation stage parents growing through your school than you would have for the children who are in year six. So you need to be a bit scientific about and realistic about how you’re going to build those relationships. If you’re coming into this new, you need to build the relationships that you realistically can build. If you’ve only got one term left with parents, totally build those relationships as much as you can and realise you’re not going to get to the same depth of relationship as you would with someone that you get to know over the years and for longer.

You need to consider the way you want your school to grow and the way you want the children’s behaviour to grow. We always used to talk about our school way of doing things and all the children knew our values and how we would do them. And we told them through stories, through teachers modelling those things, all staff modelling those values, through discussions with them and building relationships with the kids and the parents so that they knew why we valued those values and why it was important to build those things up.

It’s about thinking about how you can support your peers, so even if you’re not a senior leader, you can still be in a position as another teacher to support other staff. And it is never helpful to say, “Oh well, they behaved for me”, or where a child only gets an intervention once they’ve bitten the headteacher. It’s about valuing every person in the school and helping each other to regulate, to co-regulate. If y ou can see someone’s losing it, saying to them, “I’ve got 5 minutes, you go have a cuppa, I’ll sit with little Johnny over here, or I’ll sit with little Suzie and we’ll just read a story and you can come back in a minute.”

Staff have to be supported, but they also have to recognise it’s not going to be an easy fix. You have to build those relationships with the children, and particularly for children who have undergone trauma. They need to understand that their teachers and headteachers are humans. It’s human time. They have to have that opportunity to come in, to know that you’re going to listen and care about their opinions and what’s going on. But you have to also remember as the adult in that relationship, that it’s not just about caring, it’s also about giving consequences. Just because you care about the child doesn’t mean that they can then continue to hit people or to tip tables over or throw things through windows or cut other people’s hair or whatever it is that they’re doing. They have to have that natural consequence.

And putting that in place, there’s no point – I had a little lad who tipped over tables in the classroom and built this amazing series of slides and climbing things by moving the tables around and turning then over. Obviously we evacuated the other children from the room, but he was really, really heightened. And it was by watching him do this that we can see that actually lifting the really heavy tables, he’s balancing them on his head. He was physically using his body, he was really trying hard to be grounded. And there was no point in saying to him, “Stop that, that’s dangerous. I don’t want you to get hurt.” He didn’t care. He was trying to find his place in the world again. He felt like he was flying apart and he needed to be pushed back down to earth. So actually letting him pick the tables up and carry them around, as long as he wasn’t throwing them at anybody, gave him the opportunity he needed to calm down. And once he finally calmed down 45 minutes later, we were then able to repair what happened, to talk about what happened, and get him to understand that actually, yes, we understood he needed to feel grounded, but he couldn’t do that the way he chose to do it. And the natural consequences around that were he had to tidy that up. He’d made the mess, he had to tidy it up. That was great for him to pick the tables up, turn them over and push them around, because it was also a further deep pressure exercises. But it was really, really important for him to show the class that he was sorry he scared them, because he hadn’t thought about them at that point. He was so deep in his own trauma and in his own way of trying to cope that he hadn’t thought about the impact he was having on the other children. So we had to consider how he could make reparation for that.

Now, the worst thing you can do is force a child to say sorry, especially they don’t mean it, because the kid who is receiving apologies is going to see them go “Sorry” and they’re not really meaning it. But also, that child who perpetrated the difficult situation is then going to have to hide behind a shield of shame. So they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that they’ve done something wrong because that reinforces the negative self-esteem they’ve got. They try and hide from them. So the best way to do things is to get them to show sorry rather than say sorry, because showing sorry has more meaning to the people who receive the shown apology and it has more meaning for that child to know that they can repair the relationships that they feel they’ve broken.

I think the other thing I would recommend is networking with other schools. So, speak to your school improvement partners, speak to your virtual school head, your local virtual school. Can they recommend others that they know who do it well? And see, can you go past and magpie? Can you speak to the head teacher or all the other teachers in the school? Do you know someone who knows someone and you can make an appointment? Get in there, find out, ask questions. There are lots of advisory panels and boards that you can sit on as a senior leader where you can then get access to things like who’s got high levels of exclusions and who doesn’t, what school seems to have an awful lot of movement of children and which don’t. See which schools don’t and go talk to them, find out what they’re doing. Because there are lots of amazing schools out there who know amazing things and who are doing brilliant things with the children, who aren’t advertise that. They’re not going to wander around touting, “We’re amazing at this, come and find out more.” But if you ask, you nearly always will get an answer that can be helpful. Sometimes 90% of what they say you’re doing already, but it could just be that 10% that tweaks how you do it.

The other thing I would suggest is there are some really, really, really good courses and training out there. And I know that some of our local authorities are engaging in training about around therapeutic thinking. The local authorities are trying to change the way they view exclusions and suspensions and things like that. And one of them that I recommend is the therapeutic thinking by Angela Wodham. She works with the local authorities and it’s really, really valuable what she has to say. I’m not going to repeat it because she has her own role to do that. But what she says and how she suggests you work within your schools marries up very nicely to a trauma informed approach, where you can look at the therapeutic ways of supporting children and staff so that you can be in a position where you build relationships up, you move the children forward, and you don’t try and exclude anybody or kick anybody out. You are continually helping them to belong and to be a part.

And that’s partly why my school, we never did time out, we did time in. We, if something had gone very, very wrong, you would spend time with your trusted adult and they would regulate with you, coregulate, get you calm, do whatever you needed to do, whether that was bouncing across the peanut ball in the hall or leaping off the play equipment or swinging around. Get you to a point that you could then consider what had happened, make reparations, and get back into class to continue the learning at that level where you’re able to absorb knowledge.

So I know that there’s so much out there and so many people saying all behaviour is communication and, you know, suspension is necessary or not necessary, or it’s the equivalent of imprisoning a child or excluding them. I think the question that I’m going to leave you with is, who does it help and how does it help? And if you are in a position where you’re choosing whether to exclude or suspend the child or if you’re the parent of a child who’s being excluded or suspended, ask that question. The children aren’t going to be able to ask it themselves sometimes. But you as the representatives and their advocates, should be asking the question. How is it happening? What difference is this going to make? Before you then make that decision.