Duration: 2:22
Tawhai School principal, Matt Skilton talks about how they have improved behaviour management by using the Pastoral Care tool on MUSAC Edge. Matt explains how the system works and provides examples of when the tool has been found particularly useful in their school.
At Tawhai School, one of the things we've been doing is trying to get coherence around behaviour and behaviour management, and that's actually understanding our students and understanding their needs. Schools are very diverse with needs, particularly around behaviour, and so we use the Pastoral Care tool on MUSAC Edge. Using the tool for us is around entering data, information around issues that might happen within the playground, or in the classroom, and that is reported monthly in regards to monitoring or tracking any sort of patterns, and we report that through our SENCO (Specialist Educational Needs Coordinators) system, and we have a committee that talks about what's going on.
We're a PB4L school, so we're very interested in the positive approaches to managing behaviour. What this does is it provides us really good information in regards to understanding where things are happening with which particular kids at what particular point in time, and then we can work out preventative strategies to support those kids.
An example of where we've actually used the data and made a change has been when we were monitoring last year some significant issues around our juniors and a period of time during the longer lunch break, and it was, particularly around boys. Through the analysis we realised there was an issue there, and some of the preventions we were trying to put in place weren't really happening. We also followed that up with a student voice survey, with which those boys were screaming out with something that they were really interested in, which was a sandpit. So now we have a sandpit in there, and that has really reduced the number of silly incidences, I guess you could say, dramatically.
One of the things that we use quite a bit is, within the Pastoral Care tab, is you can create your own lists. You can actually dig deep, in terms of finding out particular cohorts, or year levels, ethnicity, boys, girls.... You can actually break it right down to find particular areas of need within the school.
I think with us it's really key, because we need to see it through their lens, and understand why the issues are happening, where they are happening, then we can look at engaging with them and any other sources in terms of looking at preventative strategies.