Student Wellbeing

Upwey South Primary School has developed a range of strategies to promote engagement, an inclusive and safe environment, positive behaviour, and respectful relationships for all students in our school. We recognise the importance of student friendships and peer support in helping children feel safe, connected with their peers, and less isolated. We acknowledge that some students may need extra social, emotional, or educational support at school, and that the needs of students will change over time as they grow and learn.

 

The strong social-emotional learning culture of Upwey South Primary School is structured around the following frameworks:

 

Social Emotional Framework:

Social Emotional Curriculum:

  • Berry Street Education Model: The Berry Street Education Model (BSEM) provides strategies for teaching and learning that enables teachers to increase engagement of students with complex, unmet learning needs and to successfully improve all students’ self-regulation, relationships, wellbeing, growth, and academic achievement. https://www.berrystreet.org.au/learning-and-resources/berry-street-education-model
  • Respectful Relationships: The Respectful Relationships program supports schools and early childhood settings to promote and model respect, positive attitudes and it teaches our children how to build healthy relationships, resilience, and confidence. https://www.vic.gov.au/respectful-relationships

Social Emotional and Mental Health Support:

  • Let’s TALK Program: The Let’sTALK Program for schools is a proactive and preventative approach to establish an environment of trust, understanding, and caring to encourage open and safe conversations. The school’s leadership, wellbeing team, teachers and education support staff play a key role to ensure the Let’sTALK program develops a culture of psychological safety that improves wellbeing and performance for students as well as staff.http://letstalkprogram.org/
  • School Counselling Service: We understand that sometimes students need to be given time to talk to a trusted adult. These conversations can be many and varied, and will often revolve around what is going on in the world of the 'child' with whom the conversation is being held. Through our school’s partnership with Inspire Health and Medical, students can access one-one individualised counselling, and take part in proactive group sessions which focus upon promoting mental health. Currently, we employ a qualified School Counsellor three days per week. https://www.inspirehm.com.au/

To view an online video explaining the Let's TALK Program, click below: 

 

"Letting Everyone Talk Safely"

 

School Wide Positive Behaviours for Learning (SWPBL)- An overview

 

School Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) is a broad range of systemic and individualised strategies for achieving important social and learning outcomes in schools, whilst preventing opportunities for problem behaviour. The key attributes of SWPBS include preventive activities, data-based decision making, and a supportive problem solving orientation.

 

A safe and orderly school environment is important to learning. Disruptive classroom behaviour is known to interfere with learning and is a cause of stress and concern for students, teachers, and families. Most children start school with the social skills they need for success. They have learned these socially valued behaviours from their parents, families, carers, early childhood learning experiences, and their social networks. Children learn behaviours very quickly, but often they also learn 'misrules' or behavioural errors.

 

Across a large proportion of schools, examples of behavioural errors include a student swearing when they get something wrong, raising their voice to get teacher attention, crying to avoid doing work, fighting, threatening or embarrassing others in order to get certain things such as social attention from their peers, or intimidating others to be included in games.

 

At Upwey South Primary School, SWPBS is referred to as School Wide Behaviours for Learning (SWPBL). This terminology is used as the key purpose of the framework is to provide students, staff, and the community with a structure in which to learn and develop expected behaviours; which in turn promote greater opportunities to engage in the learning of the curriculum.

 

Why are School Wide Positive Learning Behaviours an important part of the USPS Learning Culture?

 

Upwey South Primary School is well-known across the surrounding community for providing an inclusive, orderly, and socially positive learning environment. Problem behaviours at our school are negated by our clear focus upon building relational trust through consistency and predictability of our daily routines and communications. 

 

However, it is important that in order to continue promoting and engaging positively with our school community, we take the time to understand why some schools may appear to encounter regular and frequent problem behaviours in comparison to the embedded orderly learning environment of our school. 

 

The SWPBL information below will provide you with base knowledge to understand children's behaviours. 

 

SWPBL provides students with the tools and mindset to sustain their own learning growth through a clear framework of self-efficacy. Combined with a rigorous academic program, this learning framework enables learners to deeply apply their skills, knowledge, and social-emotional awareness to the world around them. At USPS, we understand that problem behaviour manifests itself to serve a purpose for the student, and can often be related to the fight, flight, freeze (F3) response. Following the impacts of lockdown and increased domestic volatility and violence in many homes, a fourth response is now recognised as fawning; hence as a collective these reflex responses are now referred to as the 'F4 Reflex'. 

 

The fastest way to turn problem behaviour around is by explicitly telling students what behaviour is expected, modelling this behaviour, providing proximity praise, and teaching students acceptable and appropriate ways to interact with their community.

 

Why do children misbehave at school?

 

Positive student behaviours are most effectively developed and supported through relationship-based, whole-school, and classroom practices, with clearly communicated behavioural expectations. In the classroom, quality planning and instruction that is tailored to the needs of the students can further prevent and reduce challenging behaviour. Sometimes students exhibit challenging behaviour, which requires additional support and interventions to address this behaviour, and to develop positive behaviours.

 

Through data tracking of student behaviours, schools are able to use evidence-based approaches to address misbehaviour and identify patterns in students. Misbehaviour in schools is often associated with outburst of anger, either physical or verbal.

 

 

All behaviours are a form of communication, and often reflect an unmet need for the student.

 

In most primary-aged children an outburst of anger can be linked to the student exhibiting a loss of control due to the F4 reflex. Some social situations such as sensory overload, feelings of exclusion or injustice, often trigger the amygdala (the brain’s fire siren) telling a child that a perceived or real threat may be present. In a practical sense, the amygdala can be triggered by the student feeling;

 

  • isolated (eg: left out of a game)

  • threatened (e.g. hitting another child because they felt targeted)

  • overstimulated (e.g. too many rules in a game cause confusion)

  • unfairly treated (e.g. by the teacher or a group of peers)

  • physiologically unwell (e.g. hungry, tired, injured, sleep deprived).

 

In rare circumstances, children from trauma-related backgrounds will exhibit challenging behaviours without an obvious trigger to an uninformed oberver. This F4 response to stimuli overload, requires intensive and immediate action, and support, from a trsuted adult within the school.

 

There are many potential influences on student behaviour, and many factors that can lead to behaviour that is challenging for schools to deal with. These include:

  • biophysical factors, such as medical conditions or disabilities

  • psychological factors, including emotional trauma or lack of social skills

  • behavioural/social factors, including where a student’s problem behaviour has been learned through reinforcement, consequences or adaptation to social practices. For example, a student with a learning difficulty repeatedly misbehaves knowing that he/she will be removed from the class and this will avoid his/her learning difficulty being exposed.

  • historical community factors, including for Koorie students whose family member/s had difficult, sometimes traumatic, experiences of school and government agencies

  • cultural factors, for example Koorie community ‘Sorry Business’

  • student group dynamics, such as bullying and teasing, social cliques, or student apathy

  • environmental factors, for example the level of classroom noise or classroom seating arrangements

  • classroom organisation issues, such as inconsistent routines, inadequate materials or obliviousness to cultural differences

  • teacher behaviour, for example boring or disorganised lessons, over-reaction to misbehaviour or over-reliance on punishment.

In many cases, there is no single cause of challenging behaviour, as the behaviour is a result of several factors operating in combination. When seeking to understand challenging behaviour, it is important to understand the role of behavioural triggers.

 

Triggers are actions or events that play a role in prompting particular behaviours. Triggers can be used deliberately by teachers to elicit correct student behaviour. For example, if a teacher wants students to listen, they will generally call for their attention (sometimes using a signal) and wait for them to be quiet, thereby triggering the desired attentive behaviour. Sometimes actions or events in the classroom may be a trigger for some students to exhibit challenging behaviour. For instance, a teacher’s instruction to students such as “put your books away and take out a piece of paper so we can start writing” might act as a trigger for a student with learning difficulties, who may exhibit challenging behaviour in order to avoid completing the work, which could potentially reveal that they are struggling.

 

Whether or not a particular action or event is a trigger for challenging behaviour will depend on the individual student, and the environment or setting in which it takes place. The instruction above might produce very different behaviour if it is shouted in a large, noisy classroom rather than made in a calm voice to a small, attentive, and quiet group of students.

 

A crucial element of any response to a student's challenging behaviours is identifying the triggers for that particular student.

When triggers are identified, teachers and other school staff are then able to more easily remove these triggers, and also can start to develop and use communication tools to elicit positive behaviour.

 

For further information regarding SWPBL, we encourage you to reference our school's Student Engagement and Wellbeing Policy. This policy provides detailed information on tiered behaviours, student rights and responsibilities, behavioural expectations, and what SWPBL is and is not within a school context. 

 

Talk Moves at USPS- Dialogic Pedagogy

 

We learn best through teaching, not preaching.

 

The above statement basically says that effective learning comes from 'doing', which means that if we are able to contribute to our own learning through meaningful and respectful conversations then we are more engaged with what we are learning.

 

Great discussions are one outcome of a classroom culture where students’ thoughts are welcome, and where students are regularly expected to speak, listen, and respond to one another. But we understand we may have students who are shy, hesitant to speak, or fearful about sharing their thoughts. Talk Moves invite these students to stay involved, and to express themselves in unthreatening ways using gestures (which if you have visited our English page, you will know is one of the building blocks of communication). Through using Talk Moves students build up the confidence to contribute to classroom discussions. 

 

What are our Talk Moves?

Talk Moves are an agreed set of Auslan signs which we utilise across our entire school, from classrooms, to the yard, to staff meetings. We communicate using talk moves every day in every way. Talk Moves are a practical application of our school values in action; Respect, Responsibility and Resilience

 

 

School Wide Acknowledgement System

Upwey South Primary School’s acknowledgement system is an organised and consistent way to recognise students who meet our school’s behavioural expectations. The purpose of our acknowledgement system is to prompt adults and peers to respond positively when a student engages in the behavioural expectations; hence the behaviour is reinforced and most likely to be repeated due to the positive attention given by trusted adults and peers. 

 

Refer to the link below, to view how we structure our school-wide acknowledgement system: 

For the real-life stories of what happens within our student wellbeing framework and our wellbeing curriculum please refer to our school newsletters.

 

For further information, we encourage you to speak with one of our many highly skilled teachers.


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