365 ways to improve your school – behaviour (279-289)

Ani Magill, Headteacher at St John the Baptist School, Woking, has compiled almost 400 tips that could help you to improve your school. They are split into 5 groups: leadership; learning and teaching; achievement; behaviour; general.

Ani would like to remind you that you shouldn’t view the tips as a panacea for school improvement – they are simply ideas that have worked at St John the Baptist. Bearing this in mind, here are her behaviour tips 279-289…

279. Your behaviour policy is only as successful as how the weakest member of staff implements it. It’s the consistency that counts. How do you induct new staff and staff that join mid-year to ensure they follow the policy?

280. Ensure every child’s photo is displayed somewhere in school. The most important aspect to behaviour is that every child feels that they belong to the community. Do 100% of your children have a member of staff who knows them really well?

281. Have league tables for attendance and reward best form with mufti or a trip.

282. Give prizes to students such as phone apps rather than things 10 years out of date.

283. Change the sixth-form dress code – our experience is that smarter students have a better attitude to learning.

284. Make sure you engage with all non-English speaking parents. We took over a school where year 11 Polish parents hadn’t set foot in the school for five years because of language difficulties. There are so many people out there willing to act as free interpreters.

285. Take every child’s photo when they arrive and then again in year 10 and year 12. It’s so useful and can be used for things like year 11 and 13 leaving assemblies.

286. Find a way to recognise childrens’ birthdays – the easiest way is to run the happy birthdays along the bottom of a TV screen each day – it can be set up for the whole school easily. Alternatively, create a display for all form tutors to write children’s names on easily.

287. Appoint a tenacious member of support staff to be responsible for improving attendance of pupil premium students.

288. Have a staff briefing each week which focuses on students who need TLC, have difficulties at home, good news children.

289. If you have really good behaviour, have split lunch. It frees up all the specialist rooms and makes timetabling so much easier.

SSAT’s High Performance Leadership programme (in conjunction with NASA, HSBC and Phillips) launches on 17th October.

Visit St John’s website.

Follow SSAT on Twitter.

Find SSAT on Facebook.