Summary
When pupils show persistent, emotionally escalated behaviour, it’s easy to focus on the surface - the shouting, the refusal, the walking out - and miss the real cause.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to use the PAIN framework (Physical, Emotional, Cognitive, Social, Prosocial, and Transition needs) to help your pupils make progress with their SEMH needs. You’ll follow the story of Liam, an 11-year-old pupil whose behaviour seemed oppositional - until the PAIN lens revealed hidden what was happening below the surface and driving his behaviour.
You’ll discover:
- How to identify unmet needs using the PAIN framework – and use this to pick the right support strategies for your students
- Why those needs can mimic “defiance" and “chosen behaviour"
- How to replace traditional behaviour plans with proactive regulation plans that prevent crises before they start
If you’ve ever thought, “I’ve tried every strategy, and nothing works," this episode will show you how to think like an SEMH specialist - and how the PAIN framework can transform your understanding of your student’s behaviour.
Important links:
Get our FREE SEND Behaviour Handbook: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/send-handbook
Download other FREE behaviour resources for use in school: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources
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Show notes / transcription
Simon Currigan
Ever had a pupil whose behaviour just does not make sense? One minute they're calm, the next they're refusing, arguing or walking out and every strategy in your toolkit just seems to bounce straight off them. Here's the truth, often their behaviour is feedback. It's a message about unmet needs and when you learn to read that feedback properly you can predict and even prevent those emotionally charged incidents before they even happen. My name's Simon Currigan and I've spent 18 years supporting hundreds of schools and literally thousands of teachers to get SEMH and behaviour right in their schools. And today I'm going to do a deep dive into using a simple, powerful tool called the PAIN Framework to understand pupil behaviour, and we'll explore it together through one student's story so you can see what this looks like in the real world. Hi there, my name's Simon Currigan and after 255 episodes of this podcast, I think it's obvious that when it comes to SEMH, I'm a man who just can't say no.
School Behaviour Secrets is the podcast where we dig into practical, needs-led strategies for improving behaviour and supporting pupils with social, emotional and mental health needs in school. If you haven't done it already, take a moment please to subscribe or follow the show so you never miss another episode. And if you're finding the show useful, please leave a quick review. It really helps other teachers and school leaders find the show and it helps us spread this good practice. So today's episode, I've had a lot of people getting in touch following episode 246, which was entitled Why de-escalation is enough and what to do instead. And in that episode I shared the PAIN framework. And leaders and teachers have been asking me, can you go into a bit more depth with this and apply it to a case study so we can see more about how it works in detail?
Well, to hear is to obey and that is the exact focus of this week's episode. And it's also the golden rule for a happy marriage. I'm sorry, was that a bit Les Dawson? Was it a bit 1970s comedian? Off brand, never mind, I'm gonna style it out, I'm gonna push on with the podcast. Okay, so enough messing around. Now, this episode is interesting, I think, because when you listen to this thought process, you learn how to think like an SEMH specialist and how we at Beacon pull apart cases to move things forwards for the child and for the teachers and for the school and the families.
It kind of exposes how we think critically about cases. And by doing that, you will definitely take away principles that you can use in your own school and your own classrooms. Because the thing is, in the real world, SEMH is often messy. It's not compartmentalised into, this child's got anxiety, this child's got ADHD, this child's affected by trauma. The kids often show up with overlapping needs or a mixture of needs. And the PAIN framework helps us to break down those needs into specific areas to kind of pull apart that confusion so we can take action. So let's meet Liam.
Liam is 11 years old in year six, top of primary school, and he's bright, he's funny, he's creative, he's good with words. But over the last term, term and a half, his teachers have noticed big changes. He's been argumentative, refusing tasks, wandering out of lessons, falling out with friends. In the past, he's had a couple of issues and wobbles, but he's managed to get past those. Parents say at the moment he's become quiet and irritable at home too, but he's not said anything to them. So on paper, this looks a bit like attitude. He's getting a bit older, we've seen a bit of chosen behaviour, and yes, chosen behaviour is a thing, and I know other people in SEMH will hate it when I say that, but they're only encouraging me, so I'll continue to say it.
There are different forms of behaviour, but we need to start asking if this is persistent behaviour, if it's something that we're seeing in the long run, we need to start asking what if Liam's behaviour isn't chosen? What if it isn't attitude? What if there's something else going on driving what we're seeing at school? So to find out we're going to walk through Liam's case using the PAIN framework, which is a simple way of uncovering the real causes of dysregulation so we can support pupils proactively rather than being stuck in a cycle of firefighting them every day.
PAIN stands for the Primary Areas of Internal Need. And yeah, it's a little cute, it's a little on the nose, but it reminds us that there are specific categories where our students can experience stress and pressure. And yes, they can even be painful to them in school. And those categories are physical, emotional, cognitive, social and pro-social needs. Five key areas where internal stress can build up and drive behaviour. And I'm going to build on those later in the episode with another two on top. And by the way, full credit, this is all built on the work of Dr.
Stuart Shanker, whose research into self-regulation really helped us understand how stress in one area spills into another. And I want to say his work actually transformed the way I think about behaviour in classrooms, and certainly the journey I've been on with that over the last 10 or 12 years as an educational professional. So I definitely recommend you check out his work. So I mentioned five areas, and I said I was going to expand that, but let me just repeat them again. They are physical needs, emotional needs, cognitive needs, social needs and pro-social needs. But what I like to do is often pull out a sixth area, transitional needs, because for many pupils, especially those that tend to have SEMH needs, change in transition itself is one of the biggest stressors of all. Now, technically it fits within the cognitive category, but for me, you see transitional pain or stress so often, it's helpful just to pull it out completely.
So let's take Liam's story and through each area of the PAIN framework step by step and see how this framework helps. So we'll start with physical needs. Staff had noticed when we talked to them and through observation in class that Liam was restless, he was fidgety and he'd begun avoiding certain types of work. He particularly didn't enjoy PE or music. He complained about having headaches and the noise and during PE that the room was just too busy. That's the way he described it. When he was younger, when we started talking to the school and going over his records, we discovered that sometimes he would have refused to go outside at playtime saying the whistle and the children playing were too loud or going into the hall at lunchtimes because it was just too echoey.
That was when he was in the infants, when he was in year one and two. But over time those behaviours kind of faded away as he moved up the school. So now when those needs haven't been obvious or prevalent for a while, it just looked like he wasn't settling in the classroom. So at first everyone assumed his behaviour was just work avoidance, you know, classic task avoidance. But when we applied the PAIN lens, it pointed to something else entirely, sensory overload. Once we looked through the behaviour, the why not the what, the pattern actually became obvious. The noise and the movement and the unpredictability of the spaces he was having difficulties in were triggering physical stress, his physical needs.
He'd learned some coping strategies for managing that stress in his early years, so he didn't stand out. He wanted to fit in. He didn't want to get into trouble or draw attention to himself because lots of kids don't. But we found even in year six, as the day drew on and he was using those coping strategies, his body was struggling to tamp down those classroom sensory stresses to regulate them, which was starting to lead to the restless and focused behaviour. You can only tamp down those emotions and those stresses for so long before they break free. I saw a brilliant description of this. It's like trying to hold down a beach ball under the water.
You can fight with it and fight with it. But the moment you relax, the beach ball comes flying back up into the air. What Liam was was he was in high stress. Now, this is different from being in fight or flight survival mode. He wasn't running out of the classroom exactly, but he was experiencing difficulties with those kind of physical sensations, the sensory feedback. And that led to a big realization. Maybe Liam might have underlying sensory processing difficulties.
Now, we often associate sensory need with our autistic students, but it's important to know that people can have sensory needs as a discrete difficulty without all the other needs you would expect to see in terms of language processing and social interaction and so on with autism. You can have sensory processing needs without being autistic, and specifically looking for those needs on the PAIN Framework highlighted this. So the adults made some small changes quieter spaces for PE and music, ear defenders available, when he opted to use them. Clear warnings before loud transitions were going to happen, visual demonstrations instead of shouted instructions. Discussion with parents, by the way, also focused on his physical needs. Also highlighted something else which was super important away from school. They highlighted that he experienced poor sleep.
Now this is disastrous because being sleep deprived automatically pushes your body into high stress. It makes every negative interaction become painful and triggering. It puts your amygdala literally on a hair trigger. So teachers worked to implement better sleep routines at home. Now, that wasn't an instant fix for his sleep, but it did improve the amount of sleep he was getting overnight. And within weeks, the combination of the sensory strategies and the better sleep hygiene, we saw those refusals and difficulties at work time start to reduce. So that told us this was beyond chosen behaviour.
Liam wasn't just being defiant. His physical needs were overwhelming him. So now let's move on to the next section of the framework, which is emotional needs. Liam's emotions appeared to spike during transitions, when he was having his behaviour corrected or spoken to about his behaviour by his teacher during group tasks. It looked kind of random, but when we talked to him underneath, what we discovered was he wasn't being stroppy, he was scared. And behind it all was the move to secondary school. That transition was looming and he was terrified.
Terrified of losing everything familiar to him, his friends, his teacher, even his place in the pecking order in the social group. A lot of his other friends were moving to a different secondary school, and we'll touch on that in a minute. And all these kind of factors around that transition were unsettling him emotionally, driving stress and pain. To get that information, by the way, it took a series of low pressure conversations with adults that he trusted. Now, the thing is, when emotions are high in a child, or any human being actually, logic goes out the window. So much of his behaviour was being driven by emotions rather than choices. And that meant the fix wasn't about tougher consequences or talking about expectations.
Actually, the fix was around connection and reassurance with key adults Liam trusted in school. And those conversations were systematically put in place in a planned way to make sure they happened to help him talk through and understand the change. And over time, those simple moments of recognition and conversation helped settle his emotional system, his nervous system. So the thinking part of his brain could come back online. Next, we looked at his cognitive needs. Now, Liam was struggling. We noticed through observation with multi-step tasks.
He'd often give up halfway through saying, I can't do this or worse, or refusing to start the task at all. But it wasn't about his ability. It was another form of overload. It was to do with his working memory. And when we did assessments, we discovered that his working memory was limited compared to other pupils of his age. And this was impacting on his ability to complete the tasks because as he moved up through the school with the other children, the work naturally became more complex and he felt like he was being flooded with information that he couldn't process or remember or juggle during certain tasks. And that cognitive stress resulted in higher stress chemicals, higher pain.
And when we're in that high stress. what happens is it narrows our brain's capacity to plan and reason and move information around. So ironically, the more pressure he was put under to do the work cognitively, the less he could access the task. So there was a problem with the way the task was being structured and communicated. So to compensate with these difficulties with working memory, staff started chunking tasks, giving him different ways of recording information, teaching him strategies for swapping bits of information in and out visually using mini whiteboards, They reduced instructions and built-in visuals. All those compensations for his difficulties with his working memory enabled him to access the task and guess what? Over time, refusals started to melt away.
Next comes social needs. In the playground, Liam had started pushing friends away, arguing, nitpicking, isolating himself, making fun of his friends. Underneath this was a link to him moving to secondary of the sensation that he was going to lose lots of his friends because many of them were going to a different school to him. Now that loss was painful. So it was like his behaviour, he was rejecting his friends before they rejected him by moving on to another school. It was like he was taking control of the separation, having it on his own terms. When adults understood that, they stopped seeing his behaviour with his friendship groups as difficult and started to help him build belonging and understanding.
Understanding that relationships with friends can continue even if they move on to another school. They also used techniques like peer mentoring, social problem solving, connection building, and the opportunity to get a peer mentor in the secondary school. So we would have a connection when he got there. This is the opposite of punishment. It's dealing with what is causing Liam stress and pain.
And guess what? Over time it worked. And that leads us to the next section of the PAIN framework, which is pro-social needs. So as a quick reminder, Social needs are about whether Liam could get his needs met by the group. Basically answering the question, can I fit in here? Whether the group would accept him. Pro-social needs on the other hand are about contribution and being able to compromise to other people's points of view.
Asking the question, can I add value to the group? And for Liam, that wasn't a specific issue actually. He knew how to compromise with his friends, but because he didn't feel part of the group anymore, he was falling back on anger and rejection. And there's an important point here. All kids are different and different parts of the PAIN framework will apply to different kids. You don't have to find an issue in every part of the framework for every child. For some kids, like Liam, lots will apply, but not all.
For other kids, only one or two parts of the framework might be in play. For others, it might be all the primary areas of internal need. So finally, the big one for the summer term for Year 6 pupils, transition. Transitions deserve their own spotlight because they're one of the biggest SEMH flashpoints. New buildings, new adults, new rules. For some children, that's exciting. For others, it's pure threat.
So we use the PAIN framework to anticipate and coordinate that stress rather than react to it. His school arranged for early visits, visual timetables, older pupil mentors, like I said before, again, addressing that need for social acceptance and given space to talk about his worries with key adults. When we treated transition as a genuine emotional need, not just an administrative event, his anxiety eased and his behaviours faded with it. Notice here how transition actually touched on almost every other category of PAIN. Transition stirs emotions. It disrupts the bonds with children's friends. It increases cognitive load.
It raises physical stress. And that's why I pull it out separately in the framework so it doesn't get missed. Now, important point, Liam is a child who required a coordinated response to a range of needs. In fact, that's why I picked him because he's an interesting case. And this is where the PAIN framework that really comes into its own. It helps you make sure nothing gets missed or overlooked. Now, I'm not suggesting you need something as in depth as a PAIN framework for all of your students, but where you do see a persistent need or persistent dysregulation, the PAIN framework, it gives you the perfect lens to understand the students behaviour and really dig into what's really going on.
And before we move on, if you're listening and thinking, we could really use a tool to help us link behaviour to underlying needs, then you need to go to our website, Beacon School Support and grab our free SEND behaviour handbook. It is packed with simple guides to common conditions like ADHD and autism and trauma and includes a behaviour analysis grid that helps you link the behaviours you're seeing in your classroom with those underlying needs. And it fits in perfectly with the PAIN framework we're talking about today. You can download it from beaconschoolsupport/SEND-handbook. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/SEND-handbook. And I'll also drop a link to that in the show notes so you can click right through.
So what happened next for Liam? When we mapped his stress across all six domains, physical, emotional, cognitive, social, prosocial and transitional, the picture began to change. And because we worked out what those needs were systematically, we could begin to address them. And those insights, well, they changed his way forwards. In the past, Liam would have had a behaviour plan, a list of dos and don'ts. You'll be told to use this strategy when someone argues with you use this strategy if you find the work difficult. But this time we helped the school build something better, a regulation plan, a forward thinking plan that combined reasonable adaptations like reducing sensory load and cognitive load and planning for transitions with coaching, coping strategies, helping Liam learn what to do when he felt overwhelmed.
It was proactive rather than reactive. Traditionally, behaviour plans tell you how to react, but regulation plans tell you how to prevent, well, regulate, but not just regulate emotions, regulate sensory needs, physical needs, cognitive needs, social needs, pro-social needs and so on.
And that's the power of the PAIN framework. It doesn't just change how we respond, it changes how we think. So here are your action steps for this week. Think of one pupil whose behaviour feels like a mystery to you. Don't start with the behaviour, start with the PAIN framework. Physical, emotional, cognitive, social, pro-social needs plus transitional needs. Which of those areas might be out of balance. And what's one proactive change you could make to make school calmer for them and for you that addresses those areas of PAIN? And by the way, depending on the child, you might also add, and I didn't mention this, I started out by saying there were five categories.
Actually, there are seven. So we've got the five categories we talked about, plus a pull out transition. And you might also want to add SEND specific needs as a seventh area, especially if diagnosis or neurodiversity plays a role. It's going to depend on the child. But as that wasn't a factor in today's episode, to keep things simple, I did leave it out. If you want to know more about the PAIN framework, it's something I'm going to develop in greater detail in a book I'm writing, but that won't be out for a while yet. I'll just put that on your radar in case you're interested.
If you found this episode useful, please take a moment to subscribe or follow us and leave us a quick review. And don't keep it to yourself while you've got your podcast app open. Please remember to share it with other members of your team, where you work, or friends and colleagues who would find it useful. The share button is easy, you just tap it, you send someone a link and they'll be able to open the episode. My name is Simon Currigan, thank you for listening to School Behaviour Secrets. Have a brilliant week, I can't wait to see you on next week's episode because guess what?
When it comes to SEMH, I just can't get enough. Bye now!
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
