Leading Teacher Update

School Wide Positive Behaviour Support Framework

This year Fairfield Primary School has been accepted into coaching from the Department of Education to help us create a School Wide Positive Behaviour Support Framework (SWPBS).

We are really excited by this opportunity. We know we have many wonderful systems in place at school such as teaching the Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships program and our four school values: Community, Creativity, Respect and Excellence, but we are also always looking to learn and grow.

Our Department coach, Daniel, presented a session to all FPS teachers about what SWPBS is, the successes it has had across other Victorian schools, and began enlightening us about the 5+ year journey we are beginning.

SWPBS works as a framework that is taught and agreed on by the whole school community to increase wellbeing and learning outcomes. 

Schools that have been successfully implementing SWPBS have seen:

• An improved school climate.
• An increased capacity for schools to provide individualised support.
• Improved student behaviour and student social skills.
• Reduced incidences of bullying.
• Higher academic outcomes.

The underlying philosophy of SWPBS is: 

We can’t ‘make’ students learn or behave, but we can create environments to increase the likelihood students will learn and behave. 

To support this philosophy, SWPBS includes:

• Building a culture within the whole school that supports academic, social and emotional success.
• Building systems for early identification of challenging behaviour.
• Explicit teaching of social and emotional skills, and of expected behaviours in different parts of the school.
• Using behaviour and wellbeing data to inform our framework.

So, What Does this Mean for FPS?

We are in the ‘explore’ stage of our SWPBS training. This means that we:

• Have established an SWPBS team of teachers that will work together and complete training early in term two.
• Have agreed as a staff that SWPBS is a good fit for our school.
• Have begun consultation with our Department Coach (Daniel).
• Are working with similar schools who are ahead of us in their SWPBS journey.

This year we aim to:

• Work as a team to create an Action Plan (we need to keep in mind that this is a five-year coaching plan!)
• Review our existing student management policies and procedures.
• Work with the Student Voice Team and wider school community to agree on expected behaviours for different school areas.
• Create a first draft of our Behaviour Matrix (have a look at the examples to see what this looks like for other schools).

I am very excited to be part of the implementation of SWPBS at Fairfield Primary School. I have already learnt so much through the coaching sessions, from the SWPBS team, and from teachers at other primary schools, and I know there is still so much to find out. I am keen to see how the SWPBS framework will look at Fairfield Primary School.

~ Grace Clark, Wellbeing and Inclusion Leading Teacher