SWPBS Update

School-Wide Positive Behaviour Supports (SWPBS)

You might have seen snippets in newsletters around SWPBS, heard bits and pieces from your children as they have learnt our Fairfield Primary School expected behaviours each week in their classrooms, or maybe even seen some posters in classrooms and around the school displaying these expected behaviours. 

SWPBS has been slowly introduced and created at FPS over the last 15 months and we are now at a place where we want to share all of this hard work with our community. Last year, teachers, students and our school council worked collaboratively to identify four expectations that are important to us; Be Respectful, Be Resilient, Be a Learner, Be Safe. 

From here, teachers looked at behaviour data to identify common misbehaviours and locations in the school in which these behaviours were occurring, and teachers work together to identify what behaviour we expect students to show instead. For example, a common misbehaviour in the playground is students not wearing their hats in term one and term four. The expected behaviour is simply ‘wear hats.’ This connects to our expectation of ‘Be Safe.’ 

Some of our students designed our SWPBS characters and our talented Science teacher, Mariah, has used these designs to publish our four characters: Respectful Riley, Resilient Rex, Learner Lily and Safe Sam. 

Next, our SWPBS team created lesson plans for teachers to use in their classrooms to explicitly teach our students how to achieve each behaviour. In these lesson plans, students practise each behaviour and teachers reinforce this by positively acknowledging their effort. For example, you might hear, “Thank you [student or grade] for using your quiet voice and feet when we were moving around the school, that’s being respectful.” 

Each week, a new expected behaviour is being taught in classrooms. This is the same expected behaviour across the whole school. From now on, when you receive the ‘Next Week at FPS’ notification on Compass, you will be able to see which expected behaviour will be taught in the classrooms so you can ask your child/children about this and reinforce this expectation at home.

If you would like to see all of SWPBS expected behaviours, you can also now access our matrix here. 

So far, reception of our SWPBS framework has been overwhelmingly positive from teachers and students alike. Ask your child about SWPBS and see what they have to say.

~ Grace Clark, Disability Inclusion & Wellbeing Teacher