Stand-alone units help students isolate the root of their misconduct

A STAND-ALONE unit dealing with students' behaviour problems should be attached to every high school.

Behaviour school

A STAND-ALONE unit dealing with students' behaviour problems should be attached to every high school to assist with the management of difficult teenagers and to help teachers better understand their problems, according to a principal specialising in student misbehaviour.

The principal of North Gosford Learning Centre on the NSW central coast, Daniel Hayes, said a specialist unit co-located with a high school would enable students and teachers to be better supported in dealing with disruptive and aggressive behaviour.

The learning centre is one of almost 100 specialist facilities and programs across NSW for disruptive students, including 35 behaviour schools.

The schools are intended as a short-term intervention that students attend for no more than one year, with the aim of reintegrating them into their original school. In practice, some students stay longer.

The students arrive with a long history of suspensions from their mainstream school, mostly for verbally abusing other students and teachers, fighting, including hitting and punching, being defiant and unco-operative, and running away from school.

Many have undiagnosed behavioural problems, such as attention deficit or hyperactivity disorder and undiagnosed learning difficulties, and many are on the autism spectrum or have an anxiety disorder.

"They're not bad kids at all," Mr Hayes said. "They're not good at expressing themselves appropriately and they react inappropriately to stress and perceived injustice.

"Nearly all the students come to us having experienced some form of trauma. It could be relational trauma, from conflict in the family, domestic violence, abuse, a difficult family structure. It could be in utero trauma, such as fetal alcohol syndrome, drug use, premature birth. Or it could be socioeconomic trauma, affecting their ability to learn socially and academically.

"Often their parents haven't had a good education either and come from generations on welfare. For some of these kids, we're their last chance. All have been at the point of not being able to go to school at all."

Mr Hayes said the students also brought problems from growing up in chaotic families, from having drug-dependent mothers or fathers in prison, and some had been removed from their families and live in foster care.

"We work very closely with families. The families coming to us have a lot of scar tissue related to schools, and our role is to work through that. They haven't had good experiences, and often it's not just the parents but the grandparents as well who have had poor experiences at school," he said.

"Some parents come to us very much excusing students' behaviour; they don't think their kids can do any wrong. We need to work with them, help them understand there are issues. Sometimes it's hard for students to see they have issues they need to address."

At North Gosford, students remain enrolled in their home school, which contracts to take the student back, and initially attend the learning centre full-time before starting to return to mainstream school one or two days a week.

About 60 per cent of students leave the centre to return to their home school; 20 per cent move on to another type of school, such as a specialist autism unit; and 20 per cent, the older students, move into vocational training and part-time work.

Building relationships with the students is critical, and many struggle to accept praise or to realise that even after verbally abusing a teacher or support worker in the school, the staff will be there the next day still wanting to see the student succeed.

Giving students a chance to experience some success at school is one of the first things the school strives to do, setting achievable goals for each student that might be about managing their behaviour rather than a high test score.

A maximum of 20 points a day are awarded for doing schoolwork, speaking respectfully and following school rules; and students who earn 75 points participate in reward activities on Fridays, ranging from bike riding, trampolining, going to the beach or movies.

"It's our main focus, really, redefining success for the students. The traditional idea of school success for each student isn't really achievable so we look at other ways," Mr Hayes said.

Assistant principal Max Hoste, who oversees the vocational training program, aims to give every student who leaves the school a recognised qualification.

Once students turn 14, they complete a course for a construction industry white card, required to work on construction sites and, next term, Mr Hoste will run Certificate I courses in manufacturing for students in Year 8 and above.

"A lot of these students don't achieve in their other school, so if they can go back to a mainstream setting and say 'I've got this', they have to turn around and think the student can achieve something," he said.

Most of the students who attend North Gosford have never been on a school excursion and part of the program puts students in unfamiliar settings to build their self-esteem and teach them how to behave in different places.

Mr Hoste said many students needed to be explicitly taught appropriate behaviour, and did not necessarily get instruction at home.

"If it's a straight behavioural issue, you break the behaviour, break the habit, but it can be another issue, a processing issue or learning difficulty. How frustrating would it be if you don't know the rules?

Everyone else is doing it but you're thinking, 'Why are they doing that?'. We put in strategies to help them work it out," he said.

"Every student who comes here has the potential to go somewhere - 98.9 per cent of the time they're doing the best they can. They're not the devil's spawn, they're little kids."