OFSTED Report - Managing Challenging Behaviour

OFSTED published a document on Managing Challenging Behaviour this week that reports its findings from visits to schools. This report gives an account of behaviour in schools based on national evidence and provides an analysis of behaviour in a range of educational settings based on visits by OFSTED. The full report can be downloaded from the OFSTED website

Some highlights from the report regarding monitoring and tracking behaviour were:

• Some of the schools carry out detailed tracking of behaviour and learning, identify pupils' needs and quickly take action. The more effective secondary schools, special schools and PRUs use this information to timetable lessons, to organise teaching groups and to focus attention on subjects where teaching and learning is less effective.
• However, in many of the schools visited pupils' needs are identified too late and there is insufficient analysis of patterns of behaviour. In these schools it is usually a crisis that leads to belated action.
• The quality of teaching is strongly associated with attitudes and behaviour in lessons. Analysis of this relationship can play an important role in school self evaluation by helping to pinpoint the subjects in which poor behaviour, as a symptom of low achievement and disaffection, is most evident.
• Inspection evidence indicates that schools which use information systems well are in a good position to analyse patterns of behaviour and take action accordingly
• In schools with well-established procedures for monitoring the outcomes of interventions for pupils with the most difficult behaviour, the process involves a range of staff, all of whom have clear roles and responsibilities
• An increasing proportion of schools have systems for tracking pupils' academic and personal development but only about a third of the secondary schools identifies and tracks pupils' difficult behaviour well
• In over a quarter of the schools and units, monitoring is weak and senior staff or individual teachers are slow to share information which could benefit all and lead to changes in the strategies used to manage behaviour. As a result staff do not have access to well-founded information or strategies to assist them in managing pupils with more difficult behaviour
• When information over time is collated well and senior staff act decisively on the analysis of the information, remarkable change can be brought about

sleuth has been designed to fit with any school behaviour policy and within existing school systems and procedures. Several hundred schools around the UK are already benefitting from the behaviour change brought about by effectively tracking behaviour using sleuth. Some case studies from schools using sleuth can be found on our Case Study page.

We have also prepared a document that has been used in KS3 Behaviour Management workshops illustrating how behaviour data can be presented and used as a result of effective behaviour monitoring. Download the Sleuth Example Reports document. This is also available as a Powerpoint presentation on our Documentation page.

Please contact us if you would like us to send you copies of any of our case studies or reports.

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