School behavioural problems

The school s prospectus describes Kingsley as a fully inclusive school . This was reiterated by the headteacher We would admit anyone. .. although currently not [physically] accessible to aU. .. we would have found a way . However, he had reservations about including those children from outside Kingsley s catchment area who had been permanently excluded from other schools. The most difficult to integrate are those with behaviour problems. .. Not just that individual child s needs but... [the school] has a responsibihty to aU children . Because there are spare places at Kingsley, he argued that the LA put pressure on him to accept such children. 

The school s 2001 Ofsted report records that in that school year no permanent exclusions and three fixed term exclusions took place. However, different forms of temporary internal exclusions are used to address particular behaviour problems. For example, if a child misbehaves repeatedly during lunchtimes s/he will be sent home for lunch. One Teaching Assistant (TA) described this practice as being an inconvenience for parents , and therefore an effective way of gaining their involvement in supporting the school to address their child s behavioural concerns. 

The investigations iof this problem from the standpoint of thermodynamics, which have been pursued for a considerable number of years, have greatly extended our knowledge of the behaviour of such solutions This advance, as will be inferred from the references given below, has been made chiefly by the Amencan School of Physical Chemistry... 

Disruptive students, or those with behavioural difficulties appear to have increased teachers frustration with inclusion and have pushed some beyond their limits. Wamock is clear that it is disruptive youngsters who create the biggest problem for schools ... 

The House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee (2006) also noted the frustration caused to everyone by the growing number of children with problem behaviour in mainstream schools ... 

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) The optimization method based on the study of social behaviour in a self-organized population system (i.e., ant colonies, fish schools). Itisanon-gradient, heuristic method which requires calculation of the objective function only. This method is able to find a global solution to non-convex optimization problem and problems which have many local minima. 

Staff need to understand that the Inclusion Team are not miracle workers. There are pupils who have such deep-rooted problems which need such specialist support that they cannot survive in mainstream schools. Learning support units cannot change behaviour overnight. Some staff feel that there should be an immediate change on exit, rather like pupils taking a pill which makes them a different person. As inclusion is a process, so is the way which the services impact on pupils. Pupils difficulties could be as a result of a range of problems such as ... 

There is a wealth of information about pupils now available in schools - the challenge is to distinguish what is relevant and what is not what does it mean and how can we use it to best effect Often pupils will present an uneven picture when professionals start looking at their behaviour, learning attainment, attitude and so on. Causes of difficulties can be in the home, peers, teacher, curriculum or a mixture of ever57thing. Behaviour descriptors or inclusion indicators are extremely useful in helping to piece together an overall picture of the problem, and of areas of success. 

The school does not use local authority central services except in the area of visual impairment where they do not have the expertise. Otherwise the school is developing the same levels of expertise as people from central services. According to the SENCO, the problem has been tiiat the central services are still categorical (speech and language, social, emotional and behavioural difficulties and so forth) not curriculum-led. 

Although the attitudes of many staff are positive, others feel that those students who have been identified as having complex special needs and/or behaviour difficulties should not be in the school. Fiuther, some teachers have low expectations of the students because of their perceptions of the community and the problems that it faces. In turn these low expectations are associated with low aspirations. 

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