Managing Behaviour Guidance

Key Principles

Safety – The safety of everyone involved in the most important factor, may it be psychical or emotional danger. Do not try to deal with the situation or the behaviour until you have made sure everyone is away from the danger and deceased the likelihood of it accruing again.

Listen and talk – Make sure you listen and talk to everyone involved, the child, their parents or guardian, other leaders or parents, member that have been effected.

Respect - Treat everyone involved with respect and don’t expect respect to give if you do not show it first.

Try to find a solution – Try to work out a solution that everyone involved is happy with and ideally involving the child staying as part of the group. This could be after a break from the groups or with a new behaviour agreement in place. There will be are cases were this won’t be best for everyone involved.

Agreement - Where possible agree a response and if needed a suitable punishment with all involved include the child. Where possible the child themselves should be encouraged to self-manage their own behaviour. This will help the child to develop and learn.

Support - You are not alone, so ask for support. Dealing with challenging behaviour is tough so don’t do it alone. See where to do support help sheet found here

Prevention

Prevention is key, as dealing with behaviour is tough all everyone involved. So we want to do what we can to avoid it.

As a group set expectations including what isn’t acceptable and what the outcome if people behaviour in an unacceptable way. The expectations should be made clear to new members and parents. The expectations should be flexible and reviewed regularly to develop as the groups grows. Doing a ground rules session is a great way to do this. A step by step can be found here

It’s important to collect consent forms as soon as possible for new members join the group. This isn’t simply for medical reason it is also as it may highlight some behaviourally challenges that will need to be thought about and managed. In some cases the consent form may not have all the needed information so following them up with an informational chat is key. This may highlight more information such as possible ways the manage the behaviour

Managing behaviour should be part of the groups risk assessment. This may be informed by inform collect when a young person joins a groups or just as the group grows and develops. Including it in your risk assessment will get the groups to really focus on the behaviour, what is unacceptable about it? Why is it unsafe? Then it will get the group to think about solution to prevent or manage that in advance rather than on the fly. It will also help link it into the risk management the group does. Template risk assesments can be found here:

Report everything as accurately as possible and use it to review the groups activity. See reporting help sheet here

Thinking about games and your activities carefully and if you had done it in the past or a similar game or activity, did it work or didn’t it and why that was.

Setting up a chill out/ book corner, so if young people need to chill out or don’t fancy joining in the group then they have a space they can go to.

Ensuring there’s enough volunteers plus 1 as a circulating person who can provide 121 attention. Some groups call this a group guardian. See the role outline here

Limiting changes to the group. This may be the number of different member that you accept each term or the activities you do on a group night. Change commonly lead to disruptions.

Ensuring (where possible) a Gender balance which may include positive discrimination on waiting lists

The group night environment should be welcoming, open to all and most importantly fun.

Best practice in dealing with challenging behaviour is:

Distraction – Start a new game, give them a task to do or show them something you think will inter them.
Verbal what will happen – Tell them what will happen if the unacceptable behaviour happens again.
Acknowledge – If the unacceptable behaviour continues then act based on the agree way to deal with the behaviour
Remove – If all else fails remove the young person from the environment. This may be for a few minutes for the situation to calm down, the rest of the session or future sessions. It should be explained at the time how long this will be.