Cayley Primary School

Aim:

What do we want?

To support children and staff in establishing and maintaining positive behaviour for learning and for life within and beyond school, enabling each of us to achieve the aspirations described in our vision.

Written Statement:

Our ethos

At Cayley, we have a vision, values and a Code of Conduct based on rights, respect and responsibility, where all children and adults contribute to a community in which we can learn and teach, feel valued, and feel safe.

We know that ‘behaviour’ is the way we act and respond to people, and to situations we find ourselves in. At Cayley, in keeping with our vision and values, we take a ‘guidance approach’ to helping children learn about behaviour and develop positive behaviour for learning and for life within and beyond school. Within this view, ‘discipline’ is about teaching, rather than controlling or punishing children. Children’s emotional lives and the quality of their relationships are crucial to this process.

We remember that:

• Children are learners.
• When we’re learning, we make mistakes.
• Making mistakes should lead to learning.
• Children behave as they do for many reasons during their stages of development, e.g. the strong feelings they have, the influences upon them, or needing adults’ attention.

It is vital that adults create the best ‘conditions for success’ for children’s learning. We can create a safe, secure and emotionally, cognitively, physically ‘enabling environment’.

Positive communication, within the two ‘main modes’ of ‘acknowledgement’ and ‘problem-solving’, plays a significant part. It should:

• Help children to ‘get back on task’.
• Help children to learn how to make good decisions.
• Help to prevent problems from getting worse.

Over time, adults’ support and action helps children learn to understand, take responsibility for, and develop control over their own behaviour and emotions, and to understand the effect of their behaviour on others.