When Marcus came back from lunch, he was already drawing circles in the air with his finger before he even sat down. His body was turned away from the table, one leg swinging under the chair like it was trying to get somewhere else. I had the worksheet out, the one I’d spent twenty minutes making look calm and manageable, and I remember thinking: here we go.
Ten minutes earlier, the lunch duty hadn’t gone well. Marcus had been involved in something on the playground—a disagreement about a football that turned into shoving. The other boy had been sent to find a senior teacher. Marcus had been told to sit on the bench for the last ten minutes of break. By the time he got back to class, his face was closed off. Not angry. Just empty.
A year ago, I would have handled it differently. I would have given him the worksheet and a warning. When he inevitably pushed it off the desk, I would have said his name in that low, firm voice that tells the whole class someone is in trouble. Then he’d go to the quiet corner—or the corridor if it got worse—and the tension would sit in the room for another half hour.
But this year, our school started rolling out Positive Behaviour Support. And at that moment, sitting across from Marcus, I still wasn’t sure whether it was just another initiative that would fade by Easter.
PBS is one of those terms that sounds like something from a training manual, but the basic idea is actually pretty simple at its core. It’s about trying to understand what’s really behind a child’s behaviour, instead of just dealing with the behaviour itself. The old approach often asked: what did the child do wrong? The new one tries to ask: what is the child trying to tell us?
That sounds soft when you say it out loud. But the strange thing is, the actual practical changes in the classroom feel quite firm and steady.
The first thing that changed was that we stopped using the same response for everyone. Marcus, for example, struggles with transitions. Moving from the playground back to a desk is genuinely hard for him. His brain takes a while to land. So instead of meeting his fidgeting with “sit down, start your work,” I sat down next to him and said, “I’m going to tell you what we’re doing while you get ready. You don’t need to start yet.”
He looked surprised. So did the girl next to him, who had already finished her answer sheet.
That’s the core of PBS in practice: looking at what happens before the behaviour, not just after it. Marcus’s behaviour at the desk wasn’t defiance. It was an overload. The lunchtime incident had taken all his emotional energy, and the ninety minutes after lunch are the hardest part of his day. For him, being told “start now” is a bit like being asked to run a sprint immediately after running another one. You can’t just tell him to try harder. You have to slow the track down.
The school still has consequences. That’s a common misunderstanding. People hear “positive behaviour support” and worry that children are being told “good job” while they throw chairs. But the firm boundaries are still there. The difference is how those boundaries are communicated and who they are aimed at.
We still have a quiet room. We still have a system for when things escalate. But the conversations afterwards are different.
At the end of that afternoon, once the other children had gone to assembly, I spoke to Marcus about the playground. We didn’t discuss the shoving right away. Instead, I told him I’d noticed he was feeling frustrated before break, when his partner changed for the maths game. He nodded. We talked about what he could do next time when that feeling started rising. He said he could “use his words.” Then he added: “Or I could just walk away and find somewhere to sit for a bit.”
That was a plan. And he came up with it himself.
This is what the PBS training has been teaching us, and it works surprisingly well. Instead of asking questions like “why did you do that?”—which tends to make a child defensive—we ask questions like “what do you think we need to happen now?” The explicit goal isn’t to catch the child being good. It’s to give them the tools to manage themselves before the situation spirals.
For parents, the same principles apply at home, and they don’t require a school’s funding or staff meetings.
The simplest thing to start with is at the end of a difficult day. When your child is acting up, instead of focusing on the behaviour, ask yourself what happened in the hour leading up to it. Did their energy change? Did something get taken away (a screen, a turn, a snack)? Did they have to shift attention quickly? This isn’t about excusing bad behaviour. It’s about making the next hour go differently.
A phrase that has genuinely worked for me at school and at home is one I heard in the training: “I can see you’re struggling right now. We’re still doing this, but let’s figure out how.”
That doesn’t make the behaviour disappear overnight. Marcus still had a bad week four weeks later. He slammed a book down and said the work was “stupid.” But even then, something had shifted. He didn’t run out of the room. And the other children didn’t brace themselves the way they used to. Instead of waiting for the shouting to start, one of the girls at his table simply slid the book back toward him and said, “Let’s do the first one together.” No teacher needed.
I’m not naive enough to think that every child will respond like that. PBS doesn’t work like a magic formula. It’s slow. It relies on adults being consistent even when they’re tired, and being calm when every instinct says to raise your voice. And sometimes it feels like you’re the only one doing it, especially when other classes or other families haven’t picked it up yet.
But the more we practice it, the more I notice the moments when it actually works. The child who used to take twenty minutes to settle now takes four. The child who used to kick the door when lost at football now sits on the bench for a minute, counts to ten, and asks to rejoin. It’s not perfect. Some children still reach crisis points. But the way back from those points is quicker, and everyone in the room knows what to do.
I don’t know if that will change the way schools run across the whole country. The funding is uncertain, and training takes time—especially when staff are already stretched. But seeing it in action in our classroom, I can tell you this: the same child behaves differently depending on what we, the adults, decide to do first.
Marcus is still a child who finds school harder than most. He still needs help getting organised. He still has weeks where he struggles to cope. But the kind of help he receives has changed. And it’s made enough difference that I can’t imagine going back to the old way—even on the days when the new way feels like far more work.
That afternoon, he never did finish the worksheet. We ran out of time. But he came back to class after assembly, packed his bag without being reminded, and as he was leaving he looked back and said—half to himself, half to me—”Tomorrow I’ll do better.” For now, that’s enough. We’ll see what tomorrow actually brings.
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