It’s Tuesday. The bell has gone.
The corridor is filling up, the next lesson has started, and one pupil is standing outside the classroom door.
An adult asks them to go in.
The pupil says no.
Another adult is called. The conversation gets louder. The pupil walks away. Someone follows. The pastoral lead leaves what they were doing.
By the end of the day, the incident has been recorded, a parent has been contacted, and several people have spent time trying to put things right.
The following Tuesday, it happens again.
This is an illustrative example, not a client story. But I imagine many school leaders can picture the corridor.
When the same behaviour incident keeps happening, it’s worth looking at what happens before, during and after it, as well as whether the adults involved have a response they can use when the day gets busy.
Is there a moment that keeps happening in your school?
If one situation has already come to mind, my free Hot Window check can help you look at where it repeats, who gets pulled in and what might need a clearer response.
The incident ends. The work doesn’t.
When we talk about repeated behaviour incidents, we often start with the number in the system.
That number matters. It can tell leaders that something needs attention.
But it doesn’t show the whole day around it.
It may not show the lesson the pupil missed while standing outside. The teacher trying to settle a class while wondering what’s happening in the corridor. The pastoral lead pulled away from another child. The parent answering a call in the middle of their working day.
It may not show the time spent recording, communicating, reassuring, repairing and helping everyone return to learning.
And it won’t tell you, on its own, why the doorway keeps becoming difficult.
That’s where I think we need to get curious.
Behaviour matters. Expectations matter. So do the conditions that make it easier or harder for a child to meet those expectations.
If the same moment keeps returning, we need to understand more than the point at which it becomes visible.
What happens before the behaviour incident?
Let’s go back to the classroom door.
Before anyone asks the pupil to go in, what has already happened?
Perhaps the corridor is noisy and crowded. Perhaps the pupil has come from a lesson they found difficult. Perhaps they’re worried about who they’ll sit next to, whether they have the right equipment, or what will happen if they get the work wrong.
Perhaps something happened at break that nobody has heard about yet.
Or perhaps none of those things is true.
That part matters.
We can’t know what sits underneath a behaviour simply by looking at it. The pupil might not have an answer straight away either. But we can start noticing the pattern.
Is it always the same lesson or time of day? Does the pupil manage the transition differently when a particular adult is there? Are there days when it goes more smoothly, and what might be different about those days?
What does the pupil say makes that moment harder? What do their parents or carers notice? What information reaches the adults who are actually at the door?
These questions are not about finding someone to blame. They’re about making sure the school has a fuller picture before the next Tuesday arrives.
The Education Endowment Foundation encourages schools to understand individual pupils’ needs and use an assess, plan, do, review approach. In practice, that means taking time to notice what is happening, making a considered change and looking again at whether it helped.
A policy can be clear. The doorway can still be difficult.
Most schools already have a behaviour policy. Staff know there are expectations. They know pupils need to get into lessons. They know they have a responsibility to keep everyone safe.
But a policy can’t stand in every corridor and make a judgement for the adult who is there.
That adult might have a class waiting, another pupil calling their name and a message coming through on the radio. They might not know this particular transition has been difficult before. They might not know what was agreed with the pupil last week.
So they do what people do under pressure. They make the best decision they can with the information and time they have.
A different adult may make a different decision the next day.
That doesn’t automatically mean either person got it wrong. It may mean the response around that particular moment needs to be clearer and easier to use.
There’s a question I often come back to:
What happens when the person who usually knows what to do isn’t there?
If the answer is “we call them anyway”, that tells us something.
The trusted adult may be doing wonderful work. But if the response depends on that one person being available, what happens when they’re off, in a meeting or already supporting someone else?
And how much work are they quietly carrying to keep the rest of the day moving?
Take a closer look at the moment
You don’t need to map the whole school. Start with one situation that keeps returning.
The free Hot Window check gives you prompts to explore what happens, who carries the response and whether ownership is clear.
Consistency doesn’t mean treating every pupil identically
When we talk about a consistent response, it can sound as though every adult must say and do exactly the same thing with every pupil.
I see it differently.
Consistency means the people involved understand what has been agreed, know their role and can respond predictably. It also means they have enough information to use their judgement and take the pupil’s needs into account.
For one pupil, a useful first step might be a quiet check-in before the bell. For another, it might be knowing where to go and who to speak to if they aren’t ready to enter.
For someone else, the school may discover that the difficulty sits somewhere quite different.
We don’t have to guess the answer. We can agree something worth testing.
DfE guidance recognises the importance of high expectations and of considering pupils’ individual needs, including SEND. It also makes clear that we shouldn’t assume every behaviour incident involving a pupil with SEND is caused by those needs. [2]
What might a clearer response look like?
Let’s stay with the doorway.
Imagine the school brings together the people closest to that moment. Perhaps the class teacher, the pastoral lead and an adult who is regularly on duty.
They make time to hear the pupil’s perspective and, where appropriate, speak with home.
Together, they notice that Tuesday’s transition is particularly difficult. They don’t yet know exactly why, but they decide to try a small change.
Before the bell, an agreed adult checks in with the pupil and makes sure they know what the first step of the lesson will be.
At the door, the adult on duty uses a short, calm prompt instead of asking several questions at once. They know what to do if the pupil needs a moment and who to contact if the situation needs more support.
If the usual adult is absent, someone covering the role knows where to find the plan.
Afterwards, an adult checks in with the pupil when appropriate, helps them return to learning and records what the team needs to know.
The team then agrees a date to review it. Did people know about the plan? Was it used? Did it help? Did it create extra work for someone else?
That isn’t a plan to lift and apply to every pupil. It’s an example of what a school might agree with a pupil once it has understood more about their situation.
There’s one more question to ask before putting any plan in place:
If we add this, what are we taking away?
If the plan asks a stretched pastoral lead to be in two places at once, it isn’t ready yet. If it relies on a teacher finding information they don’t have time to access, it needs another look.
A good response has to work for the people using it on a difficult day, not just the people who agreed it in a meeting.
What is the behaviour teaching us?
When an incident repeats, a school leader will naturally ask:
“How do we stop this happening again?”
It’s a fair question. Everyone wants the next day to be safer and more manageable.
I’d add another:
“What is this telling us about what happens around this pupil at this moment?”
The answer may involve a skill the pupil needs help to practise. It may involve an unclear routine, a difficult transition, an unmet need, a relationship that needs repair, or information that isn’t reaching the right people.
It may involve several things at once.
Responsibility still matters. So does teaching.
A child can be helped to understand the impact of their actions while adults also look at what support, practice or change might make a different response more possible next time.
The aim isn’t just to get through the doorway once. It’s to help the pupil and the adults around them have a clearer way through when that moment comes around again.
How do you know whether the response is helping?
You don’t need a complicated new scorecard before you can learn anything.
Agree what you want to notice and when you’ll come back together to review it.
You might look at how often the difficult moment happens, whether the agreed response was available and used, how long it took the pupil to return to learning, and who was involved.
You might also ask the pupil, staff and family how the experience felt from their side.
The number of incidents is useful information. It isn’t the whole story.
If incidents fall because one person is quietly spending every lunchtime holding the situation together, the pressure may have moved rather than disappeared.
Equally, a rise in recorded incidents might sometimes reflect better noticing or recording. The numbers need a conversation around them.
Keep the review proportionate. Record only what is needed, and use your school’s normal safeguarding and data-protection procedures.
This is where I start with AmbiSense®
I work with schools and MATs to look closely at the moments that keep pulling the same people back into the same difficult situation.
We start with one repeated moment.
We look at what happens around it, listen to the people involved and identify where the current response becomes difficult to use. Then we agree a practical response, make sure the right people know it, practise how it will work and review what happens.
That might mean a clearer handover. A short script. A different transition routine. A named owner and someone to cover. A better way to communicate with home.
Sometimes it means changing a plan that looked sensible on paper but was adding pressure in practice.
The aim is to make one part of the day more workable and learn from what happens next. Your school doesn’t need another heavy programme to do that.
AmbiSense® supports the work schools are already doing. It doesn’t replace safeguarding procedures, SEND duties, clinical advice or emergency action. If a concern needs a referral or urgent action, that must not wait while a pathway is reviewed.
Which doorway keeps bringing your team back?
Your school’s doorway may not be a literal doorway.
It may be the arrival that unravels at the gate. The return from lunch. The same parent email that takes three people to answer. The point in the week when the SENCO is called away again.
Whatever the moment, you don’t have to solve the whole school at once.
Start here:
What is the one moment that keeps bringing the same people back together, and what do we need to understand before it happens again?
My free Hot Window check will help you take a closer look at that moment and consider a practical next step.
Naomi Withers
Founder of The HRologist and creator of AmbiSense®
