What is your approach to ensuring good behaviour?

Our school structure, timetable, pastoral system and curriculum give us many advantages that ensure good behaviour.

We know our students, families and background well. Our school is small, with a fixed class size of 25 and a teaching assistant assigned to each class. Classes work with three teachers for each expedition allowing teachers to know each student personally.

In most other schools, teachers would see 250-300 students over a fortnight, and students would see 20-30 teachers.

Our curriculum is engaging, personalised and authentic. When students do work that actually matters and is useful to them and their community, they have a much greater need to engage in it. When they know that they will be exhibiting their work in front of people that they care about, positive peer pressure is a great motivator.

We have an extremely strong behaviour policy and extremely high expectations for our students.

On top of our firm zero-tolerance anti-bullying policy, we have pastoral structures that support the total elimination of bullying, such as our ‘crew’ and the small, personal size of the school.

Each crew is a group of 12-13 students and an adult that stay together for the 7 years they are with us. Crew meet every morning and follow a supportive and challenging pastoral and academic curriculum.

Each Crew Leader visits and regularly contacts parents which gives us a very strong pastoral team enabling them to deal with issues such as bullying extremely effectively.