Several staff had attended courses on students with behaviour difficulties during the year 1996-7 and the project funding was to be used to meet the objective of freeing staff to work with disruptive and disaffected students.

There would be two target groups:

• students entering Year 7 who had been identified as presenting behaviour problems by feeder primary schools
• students in Years 8 & 9 already presenting difficulties

A Working Party was set up in the Autumn Term involving a member of the Senior Management Team and representatives from departments and the pastoral team to determine what behaviours could be tolerated and which should be deemed `not acceptable in the classroom situations. This group identified three categories of behaviour as not acceptable:

• abusive
• confrontational
• disruptive

and examples of each were cited, drawing up a grid to illustrate the categories. A member of the SMT was identified for each lesson period who would be contacted if any of the unacceptable behaviours occurred. That Duty Teacher could be called upon and would immediately extract the student, escort them to a designated room and deal with them `on-the-spot'.

GEST funding provided supply cover to protect this time. The system has been evaluated twice internally and on each occasion was highly valued by the staff because the feel both supported and able to concentrate on teaching rather than maintaining discipline.

The Project Directors also worked closely with the SENCO to see if they can see any patterns in the behaviours of some students. If this is so and a student can be dealt with under the SEN procedures then more help may be available to the school.

In the case of the lower levels of misbehaviour, the Heads of Department developed a system whereby there is a Departmental Policy. For a first incident, the Head of Department interviews and counsels a student. This could involve a warning, a telephone call to parents or `talking the problem through' or even a detention. More usually a detention is given as a `second-level' sanction, where a record is also made in the Departmental Record Book.

The Project Directors monitored the recording system over a year. This involved analysing the daily records of extractions on a regular basis. The extraction system appears to have been effective in reducing disruption as the number of pupils regularly extracted has declined markedly. The use of detentions has also been monitored and a slight decrease noted.

1. The system for managing behaviour and information about extraction and detentions was made very public. Year 7 students were made aware of the policy on entry and reminded of it regularly. Staff paid particular attention to those students,(20) identified as presenting behaviour problems in Year 6 of their primary schools. Year 7 settled very well and only three students exhibited the behaviour problems anticipated from primary school reports.

2. Stronger links were forged with the SEN department over behaviour management

3. The Project Directors believe that there has been a more consistent application of the behaviour policy, rewards and sanctions, as expected. They attribute this largely to the greater shared understanding of the policy and related practices, emphasising:

• the `behaviour grid' drawn up by the Working Party was shared with all staff whilst in draft form and staff felt involved in drawing it up.
• the system was explained to all students both in assemblies and form groups
• parents were informed in a newsletter

4. The monitoring process was introduced and has shown a reduction in incidents of poor behaviour and in particular less referral to senior staff

5. Staff satisfaction has been evaluated based on a questionnaire and there has been a high level of satisfaction with student behaviour, staff commenting particularly that they feel they can now concentrate on the quality of their teaching rather than dealing with disruption.

6. The school uses a `red card' system when a warning is given for misbehaviour and this immediately triggers a letter home to parents. Response from parents has been very supportive of the system and they feel reassured because they feel that the school is acting responsibly about discipline.

There had been an attempt to introduce a `blue slip' system related to indicating when a student came `ready and prepared' for working (i.e. with pen, ruler etc.) but this was abandoned as it produced too much paperwork,

The system operating at the school appears to use only a minimum of paperwork whilst maintaining necessary records for monitoring behaviour, but it was not possible, without sight of this to judge whether this perception was accurate.