For schools and MATs

When the policy is right and the same thing keeps happening

It is rarely a people problem. It is a system signal.

This page answers four questions that come up most often in schools and multi‑academy trusts where staff are competent, the systems are in place, and the pattern persists anyway.

Why do the same behaviour incidents keep escalating when staff are following the policy?

Because a behaviour policy tells staff what to do once an incident is underway. It does not tell them what sets the incident off in the first place, so the same sequence runs again the following week, with the same people, in the same place, at the same point in the day.

When escalation repeats despite correct practice, it is usually doing one of three things:

1. Marking a pressure point, not a person. The same lesson, corridor, transition or time of day keeps appearing in the records. The child changes; the conditions do not.
2. Arriving late. Staff are responding at the point of escalation because that is the first point the system registers anything. The signs earlier in the sequence are visible to someone, but there is nowhere to put them.
3. Costing more than it looks. Each incident absorbs senior time, a reintegration conversation, a parent call and a record. The policy is working as written, and the school is still losing hours to the same pattern.

What to do instead of reviewing the policy

Take one repeating incident type and map it before you change anything. When does it happen, where, after what, and what has already been tried? Most schools find the pattern is narrower than expected: a specific transition, a particular demand, a point where a pupil is being asked to do two things their capacity cannot do at once.

Then build one bridge at that point, and review it. Not a new system across the school. One adjustment, at the point the pattern actually starts, with a date to check whether it held.

This takes longer to set up than a policy refresh and shows change sooner, because you are changing the conditions rather than the response.

What can a school do about EBSA once the attendance team has already tried everything?

Stop treating it as an attendance problem and start treating it as an anxiety problem that shows up as absence. EBSA, or emotionally based school avoidance, does not respond to attendance levers, because the child is not choosing not to come. They are avoiding something specific that the attendance process has not yet identified. Letters, meetings and penalty thresholds add pressure to a child who is already at capacity, which is why they usually make the pattern worse.

EBSA is practitioner language, not a Department for Education category. There is no EBSA code and no statutory EBSA process. The relevant statutory framework is Working together to improve school attendance (current edition July 2026), which expects schools to identify the barriers to a pupil's attendance and work in partnership with the family to remove them. DfE also publishes separate guidance on mental health issues affecting a pupil's attendance. Both point the same way: find the barrier, then build around it.

What “we have tried everything” usually means

In most cases, the school has tried everything in the attendance toolkit. That is a different thing. The questions that usually have not been asked:

• What is the child avoiding, specifically? Not school. Which lesson, which room, which part of the day, which person, which transition.
• When did it start, and what changed in the fortnight before?
• What does the morning actually look like at home, minute by minute?
• What has already been tried, and what happened each time? Including the things that partly worked.
• Where is the child's capacity going before they even arrive?

The practical move

Build a partial, specific return rather than negotiating a full one. A child who cannot do five days can often do one lesson, in one room, with one adult, at one time of day. That is not a lowered expectation; it is a bridge with a known starting point and a review date.

The common error is making the bridge conditional on the child's anxiety reducing first. It works the other way round. The bridge is what allows the anxiety to reduce, because it gives the child something they can actually complete.

How do you reduce parent‑school conflict over SEND support?

By changing what happens in the first conversation, not by improving the offer. Most SEND conflict is not a disagreement about provision. It is what happens when a parent has learned that being reasonable produces nothing and escalating produces a meeting. The school, meanwhile, has learned that saying anything definite gets quoted back at them. Both sides then behave rationally, and the relationship deteriorates anyway.

Three things usually drive it:

1. The parent sees a different child. What happens at home after school is invisible to the school, and what happens in school is invisible to the parent. Each has accurate information the other does not have, and neither set is written down anywhere they both see.
2. Escalation is the only reliable channel. If calm emails go unanswered and formal complaints get a response, the system has taught the parent what works. That is a design problem, not a difficult parent.
3. Staff are also at capacity. A SENCO holding a large caseload cannot absorb an angry conversation well. Defensiveness in that moment is a pressure response, and parents read it as not caring.

What actually reduces it

Put both pictures in one place. A short, shared record of what is happening at home and at school, written where the parent can see it, removes most of the argument about whether a problem is real.

Be specific about what the school can and cannot do, early. Vagueness meant to avoid conflict tends to produce it later. A parent told plainly “we can do this, we cannot do that, here is why” will usually accept a smaller offer than one who has been managed.

And agree a review date at the point you agree the support. Most conflicts escalate in the silence after a meeting, when nothing visible happens and the parent cannot tell whether anything is underway.

What should a MAT inclusion strategy cover beyond the behaviour policy?

It should cover what happens before an incident and how the trust knows whether anything is working. A behaviour policy governs the response. An inclusion strategy governs the conditions. At trust level it also governs consistency, because the same pupil can get four different responses across four schools in the same trust.

Five things a trust strategy needs that a behaviour policy does not give it:

1. A shared way of spotting pressure early. Not a new assessment. A common question set that every school uses when a pattern starts repeating, so that a concern raised in one school is legible in another.
2. Named thresholds, and what happens at each. At what point does a repeating pattern stop being a classroom matter and become a school one, then a trust one? Most trusts have this for safeguarding and for exclusions, and nothing in between.
3. Staff capacity as a strategic variable. Training tells staff what to do. It does not create the time or the headspace to do it. A strategy that adds expectations without naming where the capacity comes from will be implemented unevenly and blamed on culture.
4. Data that shows pattern, not volume. Incident counts tell you how much. They do not tell you where, when, after what, or whether the same twenty pupils are generating most of it. Trusts routinely hold the data that would answer this and do not cut it that way.
5. A review loop with a date on it. One change, one review point, one decision about whether to keep it. Strategies without this accumulate initiatives and never retire any.

What to leave out

A trust inclusion strategy does not need to restate the SEND Code of Practice, duplicate each school's behaviour policy, or commit every school to the same intervention. Those are the parts that make strategies long and unread.

The test of a trust inclusion strategy is whether a head of year in your weakest‑resourced school could use it on a Tuesday morning. If it only functions at executive level, it is a position statement.

Related reading: Your school's inclusion strategy has a deadline. What happens when it meets real life?