Judith Harwood, senior regional adviser for the primary and secondary strategy, describes what one school has been learning from its involvement in the Social, Emotional and Behavioural Skills (SEBS) pilot.<\/p>\n\n
Morland Community School (not real name) is one of 13 secondary schools in its local authority which became involved in the pilot project to develop materials for Social, Emotional and Behavioural Skills (SEBS). The school was hoping that SEBS could bring coherence, clarity and explicitness to its existing priorities. As the headteacher said: ‘SEBS is what we are all about. It is a way of being. We are looking at what goes on, and intending to enrich it rather than bolt on something new.’<\/p>\nMorland is a mixed comprehensive with around 1,400 pupils, of whom 300 are in the sixth form. The roll has been growing and the school is oversubscribed. Standards of attainment on entry are now slightly above the national average. The last Ofsted report said that ‘teaching and learning is very good in all years with much that is excellent’.
\nAmong the specific reasons for taking part in SEBS, according to the headteacher, are that it would:\n
The school started the programme by holding a series of launch events for the stakeholders, including staff, governors and parents. These outlined the 72 learning objectives of the programme, and used ideas from the professional development handbook. Care was taken to present SEBS as something that would build on what the school was doing already.<\/p>\n\n
The school’s approach has been to ‘drip feed SEBS into everything we do across the school community’. A core team of people, led by the deputy principal in charge of curriculum, is developing SEBS across the school. Also involved are the advanced skills teacher for geography, head of humanities and head of personal development. These represent the main curriculum areas where there is a focus on SEBS. Other participants include the student liaison officer, coordinator of the student support base\u00a0 and a member of the senior learning team with responsibility for staff welfare.<\/p>\n\n
The team has sought to integrate SEBS into a wide range of whole-school activities that includes:<\/p>\n\n
The school sees itself as an innovator in work on teaching and learning. The advanced skills teacher (AST) leads on this for the local authority as well as the school. In his view, there are five key areas for the development of SEBS in teaching and learning:<\/p>\n
Learning forum for staff Modelling Information retrieval project He has asked the students to evaluate his practice, and to set targets for him. The group then focus on themselves and set targets for themselves.<\/p>\n\n SEBS is being integrated into the school’s personal development curriculum, which is taught for one period a week and covers: personal management, personal relationships, health and safety and citizenship.<\/p>\n Staff are being encouraged to reflect on what aspects of SEBS they have covered in the personal development curriculum. At the same time, they are being asked to consider the links to Every Child Matters, and to see how drama can be used to build empathy and other social skills. The school also sees SEBS as fundamental to enhancing its status as a healthy school.<\/p>\n\n Before becoming involved in SEBS, the school had targeted its student support efforts on intensive work with between six and eight pupils, for periods of six weeks. The evaluation of this work showed that the unit was acting more as a containment device than as an agent for change. Once pupils went back to mainstream, they usually reverted to their previous behaviour.<\/p>\n The school has used the SEBS programme to rethink this approach. It now works less intensively with many more pupils, keeping them in mainstream classes but holding weekly groups that focus on explicit SEBS work. Up to 80 children take part. Using circle time and other group activities, they explore themes such as anger management, personal organisation and self-esteem.<\/p>\n There is still one-to-one work available for those who have the most acute need. This provides students with opportunities to look at issues such as assertiveness, anger management and behaviour recovery. However, the recidivism rate is now much lower.<\/p>\n Students with a poor record of attendance and motivation are being reached through work on aspirations. A survey was carried out with students in Years 10 and 11 on the factors that influence aspirations. This has led to offers of support, advice, examples of celebrities who did not start life as a success, one-to-one work and inspirational posters around the school about the value of having high expectations and dreams.<\/p>\n\n The school prides itself on having a happy staff and spends a good deal of its budget on continuous professional development, as well as improving the conditions of work. The result is that staff say they feel ‘well looked after’ and turnover is low. The SEBS programme has given the school an opportunity to deepen this work on staff wellbeing and add new skills. For example, the school has added to its work on stress by:<\/p>\n Work on SEBS falls naturally into the action research model that the school uses to generate strategies for improvement. This follows a well-established sequence whereby:\u00a0<\/p>\n The professional development handbook has been used for training, with the goal of demystifying what SEBS is about, and emphasising the continuity with existing activity. Observation partnering is also being used in humanities. This involves two members of staff working together and observing each other to bring about new ideas. This work now highlights SEBS.<\/p>\n\n SEBS has clearly had a major impact on almost all aspects of the school. Staff report that it brings things together, provides a useful umbrella for what they were already doing, adds value and makes things more explicit. It is hard work, they say, but ‘infectious’ and ‘having enormous knock-on effects’. SEBS has also strengthened links with external agencies such as CAMHS.<\/p>\n\n There is a huge amount happening. ‘It is spinning off in all directions’, one teacher reports. The school plans to build on activities described here through:<\/p>\n Judith Harwood, senior regional adviser for the primary and secondary strategy, describes what one school has been learning from its involvement in the Social, Emotional and Behavioural Skills (SEBS) pilot. Morland Community School (not real name) is one of 13 secondary schools in its local authority which became involved in the pilot project to develop …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ub_ctt_via":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Admin","author_link":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/author\/webdev\/"},"featured_image_src_square":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/strong> This group has representatives from all departments. Its aim is to develop and disseminate good practice in teaching and learning across the school, specifically by trying out ideas from the DfES Pedagogy and Practice materials and looking at how SEBS ideas can be integrated into them. Following a coaching session with the advanced skills teacher, each member of the group worked with the ideas in one unit. This led to the development of a toolkit to go with the pack.\u00a0<\/p>\nTutorial work<\/strong>
\nThe AST has been working with his Year 8 tutor group on the question: ‘What is an effective learner?’ Teacher and pupil assessment has been used to identify students who have problems with learning. Each person identified has been given intensive help to develop one academic and one SEBS skill.\u00a0\n
<\/strong> The advanced skills teacher has invited staff to watch him delivering teaching and learning so as to demonstrate ways of building SEBS through using the ideas in Pedagogy and Practice<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/strong> The school is finding that students struggle with extended, project-type work. The sustained effort is emotionally hard for them. This has led to the development of work focused on relevant SEBS dimensions such as motivation, perseverance, and self-knowledge.\u00a0<\/p>\nLesson plans and objectives<\/strong>
\nThe AST has developed a scheme of work for his subject – geography. This integrates SEBS with subject objectives so as to promote the skills of:\n\n
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\nThey used the audit in the professional development handbook to identify the key areas for development across the school.<\/li>\n\n