As a school who caters for young people with social and emotional mental health difficulties, a well thought out and balanced behaviour policy is essential.

Our young people deal with issues which directly affect their ability to deal with social and emotional issues effectively and/or to positively balance their mental health and we are committed to helping them. We are committed to preparing the young people in our school for adulthood and life outside of school.

We aim to do this by enabling them to learn how to deal with setbacks and challenges and successes more effectively and appropriately. This is despite the fact that many of our young people may have experienced significant trauma, deprivation and or neglect in their formative years.

We want them to be successful as the result of a well-balanced, well thought out and implemented whole school curriculum (including behavioural aspects), not just because they ‘got lucky’.

We want them to learn how to do this via our 6 core themes and, therefore, by developing the ability to;

• have a more balanced response to setbacks and challenges.
• communicate difficulties and concerns.
• reflect on positive and negative events and learn from them.
• think and act independently.
• push beyond their borders and change what might have been expected of them previously, by themselves and others.
• develop resilience to a range of difficulties and situations.

Our behaviour policy and approaches form a key part of our whole school curriculum, as all of our pupils have an Education and Health Care Plan with SEMH identified as a primary need. Learning how to make progress with their behaviour is a key pastoral assessment factor for our pupils.

At The Gateway School we run two distinct behaviour management policies simultaneously: the ‘hidden’ relational approach, and a structured system that rewards and provides short term-consequences. For both, we try to do things with our students, not to them, as we recognise how important control and relationships are to our students – more so than in any mainstream setting.

Conor Renihan

Head Teacher