Summary
Christmas is exciting… but in schools, it can also send behaviour spiralling.
Between nativity rehearsals, parties, Christmas jumper day, and all the glitter-induced chaos, many pupils tip from festive fun to full-on overwhelm faster than you can say “silent night."
In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, you’ll learn why December is such a challenging month for regulation, the hidden SEMH pressures pupils face and the simple changes that help children stay settled so they can actually enjoy the fun.
You’ll learn:
- Why Christmas disrupts the nervous system for many pupils
- The bedtime routine analogy that explains festive behaviour perfectly
- Practical strategies you can use immediately to reduce silliness, anxiety and pre-holiday chaos
- How to help pupils enjoy Christmas without tipping into dysregulation
If you want a calmer, happier run-up to the holidays — for you and your pupils — this episode is your roadmap.
Important links:
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Show notes / transcription
Christmas is magical. That's what the adverts tell me, but for some pupils in school, it's also overwhelming. The noise, the change, the excitement, the social pressure. And when their nervous system can't keep up, you see behaviour wobble. My name's Simon Currigan and I've helped literally hundreds of schools with SEMH and behaviour, observed thousands of lessons and students and teachers, and every year, hundreds of thousands of educators around the world come to our website, Beacon School Support, for practical help and strategies to support their students' social, emotional and mental health needs. And in this episode, I'm going to show you why Christmas creates the perfect storm for dysregulation, the hidden pressures pupils are dealing with, and the small stabilising routines that can save your sanity as a teacher. If you want to enjoy the festive season without the meltdown season, this episode's for you.
Hi there, welcome to School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan and I'm the kind of man who thinks the height of Christmas chic is shoving a shiny T-Rex bauble on the Christmas tree. Roar. And by the way, I've written a poem about that Christmas Tyrannosaur and I'll read it out at the end of the podcast. Believe me, you do not want to miss this. This is high brow podcasting at its best. Because School Behaviour Secrets is the podcast where we unpick the real reasons behind classroom behaviour.
Give you practical strategies to support the children who need it most. Before we get stuck into today's festive episode, I would be really grateful if you could do me one quick favour. If you're finding this podcast useful, hit the subscribe button on your app right now so you never miss a future episode. And if you can spare 30 seconds to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify, it helps more teachers and school leaders find this kind of support and it keeps me motivated to keep pumping these episodes out. Thank you, I genuinely appreciate it. Okay, so as this episode goes out, it's the start of the Christmas season in school. The most wonderful time of the year.
And hopefully by saying that, I'm not committing any copyright infringement. Or if you work in a school, the time of glitter in your hair and all over the desks and the glue sticks. Peak numbers of kids in detention, shepherds losing their tea towel headgear, and one child crying because Joseph said his cloak smelled like farts. You've got nativity rehearsals, Christmas jumper day, class parties, carol concerts, school fairs, charity days, Santa popping in with a sack full of pound shop mystery items and the ever present hum of Last Christmas and the original Band-Aid single drifting down the corridor because innovation in the Christmas song market obviously peaked in the 80s. Yes there was the Phil Spector Christmas album in the 60s but well anything to do with Phil Spector is complicated since you know the Trial. And look Christmas is brilliant, it's magical, it's joyful but it's also overwhelming. Whatever age you teach primary or secondary because excitement and overwhelm run on the same fuel.
And for lots of pupils, especially those with SEMH needs, December can tip them from this is fun to I can't cope in about three seconds flat. So today I'm going to talk about why Christmas can dysregulate some children and where that pressure comes from and what you can do to help your pupils enjoy all the fun of the season without it tipping over into meltdowns or excess silliness or tears arguments or that general end of term behaviour wobble that can make teaching feel like being in charge during a small festive riot. So Christmas stay's fun, we keep the good parts and kids enjoy it without the downsides. So let's start with the big idea. Christmas in school, especially primary schools, changes everything. It changes the environment, the routines, the expectations, the sensory landscape, the social dynamics. And children, they feel that intensely.
And in primary schools, again, more than secondary schools, those changes, they start really early. So you'll hear Christmas carols being practised in late November because preparing younger pupils to be ready for a nativity or a Christmas play, it takes time. And some kids, well, they thrive on that change and that novelty. But a lot of children rely on predictability to feel safe and when that predictability disappears, well, you see dysregulation, overwhelm and behaviour changes. So let's break this down. First, let's look at routine. Now we all know routine is important but at Christmas it can be the first thing to go out of the window.
The regular rhythm of maths and English and the foundation subjects can get burned to the ground the minute we hit December. One day you've got an unexpected nativity rehearsal that takes out English. The next day the timetable shifts for Christmas dinner. The choir's needed for practice so they miss English or then we have a surprise visitor in school or there's the Christmas fair or you can't do PE all of a sudden because there's 200 parents in the hall or your class is making paper chains until the room looks like the Blue Peter craft cupboard vomited everywhere. It's like the entire timetable is suddenly made out of jelly, when normally it's made out of iron. But here's the thing, routine is the stabiliser many kids need to regulate. Routine is the emotional safety blanket that tells children, nothing bad to you is going to happen today.
You know what's coming. You've got this. You can cope. So when that safety blanket disappears, kids feel it in their bodies. And that feeling often ends up showing as behaviour. And I want to bring in a bedtime analogy here. Don't worry, it's PG-13 because I think this explains it perfectly.
If you've got kids, right, you'll know this. When your children have a consistent bedtime, Apart from getting the quantity of sleep they need, that routine also gives them reassurance and structure for the day. So they go to bed at roughly the same time, the lights go off at roughly the same time, and their bodies know what's happening. They can predict what's going to happen next. And when you build in that pattern, it's actually a form of physical regulation. And here's the interesting bit. Once that routine is deeply embedded, it actually creates freedom.
Freedom to break it on special occasions. You can stay up late for bonfire night or a movie night or a party because once the excitement's over, you can return to the safety of the normal routine. And because that routine exists, your child's nervous system settles quickly back into it. Now imagine the opposite. Imagine a child whose bedtime is 7:00 PM one day, 11:00 PM the next, then 8:30, then midnight, then 6:45 PM. There's no pattern there. There's no predictability, no stability.
The child's physical state is then all over the place. With a knock on for their emotions and their behaviour. Not because they're being difficult, but because their nervous system can never settle, never gets the safe base it needs to regulate. Chaos in routine leads to chaos in behaviour and Christmas in school is exactly like that. If we throw all routine out of the window, we remove the safety net that many children rely on. Exciting events become overwhelming because there's no stable structure to return to. And that's when you get the silliness, the tears for no reason, the fallouts, children who can't settle to their work, children who suddenly can't remember the rules, or kids who seem to lose all impulse control, like a Christmas elf mainlining Haribos.
So that's why routine is so important. So while it's fine to have change and one-off events and they should be enjoyable, I'm not saying take those away, make sure your timetable retains a familiar core. The day and the week have some familiar shape to them and I'm not saying you need to be doing spelling drills on the last day of term, but without some structure, kids stop coping and Christmas stops being fun for them and for you. Now let's look at some of the other pressures around Christmas. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna share some of the stresses related to Christmas and then I'm gonna share strategies at the end so that the strategies are all together and easy to remember at the end of the podcast. I wanna start with sensory overload and this is an obvious one, but basically Christmas is a sensory assault course. You've got tinsel, flashing lights, Costumes, glitter, bells, music, excited voices, movement, smells from the kitchen, the hall echoing with rehearsals.
Classrooms rearranged for performances. It's intense and for children with sensory sensitivities, especially autistic pupils or those with sensory processing needs, this is like turning up the volume of school life up to maximum and then throwing away the volume knob entirely. They can't dial down that sensory input so their brain goes into survival mode faster. And then on top of that we've got emotional pressure. We tend to think of Christmas as a happy time but for some families it's actually really stressful. Financial pressure, family conflict, housing insecurity, difficult memories, separation from parents. Lots of children walk into school carrying the weight of what's happening at home and now is no different.
Christmas just amplifies it. If home feels unstable, Christmas can feel unsettling or frightening or disturbing. And those big emotions spill into the classroom, sometimes through tears, sometimes through withdrawal, and sometimes through angry, explosive behaviour. And then we've got the social pressure. Things like Christmas assemblies, performances, extra group work, going to parties, dressing up, standing on stage in front of parents, singing in front of strangers. Just think about how often you do that as an adult. For socially anxious children, this can feel like their personal sixth ring of hell.
Even Christmas jumper day can be stressful. What if your jumper isn't as good as someone else's? What if your family couldn't afford a decent one? What if someone makes a comment to you about your jumper? What if we've got the wrong day entirely? And I come into school wearing a Christmas jumper and then I discover that no one else in the classroom is. And by the way, don't underestimate that fear on any non-uniform day throughout the year as well.
But basically don't underestimate how social comparisons peak at Christmas. And now I'm going to add two more cognitive overload and transition overload. When routines change, instructions become more complicated. You'll hear adults saying things like, we're doing the Christmas rehearsal instead of maths, but only after the hall's free and before the choir slot. And then we're swapping with year three. And lunch is earlier today. Oh, and by the way, you won't have your usual supervisor, so don't forget your costumes and remember your tinsel's in your drawer, not on your desks.
And then at the end of the day, we'll finish artwork if we have some time. That was stressful just saying, let alone listening to it. For children with working memory difficulties, this is impossible. It's like trying to catch snowflakes in a hurricane. So when you put all of that together, the disrupted routines, the sensory overload, the emotional load, the cognitive load, the transitons, all that change, all that social pressure, it's no wonder behaviour shifts in December. But, and here's the good news, you can absolutely protect children's emotional stability during Christmas, which means you don't need to dampen the fun. The trick is you need to manage it, you need to think ahead and organise it.
So here are some practical strategies to use in your school and with your class in the run-up to Christmas. First, protect your key routines that anchor the week. If possible, keep your routine exactly the same each day and keep your end of day routines the things you do in the last sort of 10-15 minutes the same as well. Keep your expectations the same, keep your transitions the same. These small pockets of predictability act like emotional stabilisers for your children. Secondly, signpost everything. Use visual timetables, warn children about changes the day before, talk them through in detail, about what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, who will be there, and what will stay the same.
That predictability reduces threat. And there's a tip here as well. For reassurance, don't just talk to the class about what will be different. Reassure them about what's going to stay the same too, because they'll need to hear that, and that knowledge is powerful. Third, build mini-routines inside the changes. For example, every time you start a Christmas craft activity, start with a similar introduction or signpost or sentence. Use the same calm down signals in rehearsals as you do in class.
Or always do a one minute calming or breathing or stretching exercise. Or again, heads down, thumbs up, whatever works for your kids before you leave the classroom for a busy event. Those little routines have a big impact. Fourth, look after students with sensory needs. Give the pupils who need it a chance to regulate, be before they hit overwhelm, not afterwards. Plan in for regulation before busy times, not let them get overwhelmed and then reach for them. You want the situation where they never get overly stressed in the first place, and that involves planning and timetabling.
Plan for when they can use quiet corners. Plan for them to sit near the edge of the hall instead of in the middle. Use ear defenders during loud rehearsals. Reduce visual clutter when possible for those students, not the whole class. Plan their breaks in proactively, not reactively. Write them on the timetable so they get done. Fifthly, reduce cognitive loads.
If you're giving instructions, keep them short, keep them clear, model them where necessary, give your students one step at a time to process. Don't expect children who are excited when they're already buzzing to hold long sequences of instructions in their head. They're in a physical state where they're less able to do that. Six, proactively watch for emotional wobble points. This is when kids tip from excited to over excited and overwhelmed. You'll see it in their voice, the way they move, their frustration tolerance. So step in early with connection and co-regulation.
Say things like, look, this is getting a bit much for you right now. Come and help me do something for a minute. And when I say do something here, this is a job, or even better, send them on a job somewhere else in the school where it's quiet. And then they can come back and rejoin in with the activities and the excitement, more regulated and ready so they can enjoy that don't wait for the car to crash when you see those telltale signs. Take evasive action early on. And seventh, after every exciting moment, return to routine intentionally and immediately. Fun, then settle.
Fun, then settle. Excitement, then predictability. That's your stabilising cycle. That's co-regulation through structure. And just before I move to the final thoughts, I've got something for you that might help you during this period of year. We've created a free resource called the SEND behaviour handbook. It gives you clear, simple fact sheets for understanding conditions like ADHD, autism, ODD and trauma, as well as a behaviour analysis grid that helps you link surface behaviours you might see in the classroom to underlying needs.
Its purpose isn't to try to turn teachers into paediatricians, but it is about helping kickstart professional curiosity about behaviour in school, so we can get the right professionals involved when necessary and take genuine steps towards real early intervention. It's free, it's practical and it will give you the confidence to support pupils who struggle the most during busy times like Christmas. Grab your copy at beaconschoolsupport. co. uk/SEND-handbook. That's beaconschoolsupport. co. uk/SEND-handbook or use the link that I'll put in the show notes.
So final thoughts about Christmas. Christmas is wonderful, it's joyful, it's religiously important, but excitement Christmas is not the opposite of anxiety, but excitement and anxiety run on the same neurological fuel. For some kids, the dial tips too far, too fast. And your job isn't to remove the joy like the Grinch, it's to support it and structure it, so Christmas is fun and it doesn't get spoiled. Routine gives children something to rely on, to stand on. Predictability gives them emotional safety. And when they feel safe they can enjoy the fun.
When they don't feel safe, well you see that tip into overwhelm. And I think it's worth saying as adults we might want the days to be packed with fun, fun, fun, but as professionals we have to give the kids what they need, not what we would necessarily want them to have, wall to wall chaos. We need a mix, a stable base, so they can handle the activities and the sparkle. If you found today's episode useful don't forget to subscribe so you never miss future episodes and if you could take a moment to leave a quick review on Apple or Spotify it genuinely helps more teachers and school leaders discover the show. I really appreciate your support it would be like you giving a Christmas present to me. And while you have your podcast app out don't forget to share it on social media or with other colleagues who'd find the information we've covered today useful. So thanks for listening and as promised here's my Christmas gift to you.
My dinosaur poem. My advice, grab a pen and paper, jot this down because this is set to become an instant school behaviour secret classic moment. You're gonna wanna read this to your kids tonight and on Christmas Eve, whatever their age. Ready? Okay, let's do this. I'm a tiny cardboard tyrannosaur roaming across the land. But when I roar, no one runs because I've got tiny cardboard hands.
And if that level of profundity doesn't win me a podcasting Christmas number one this year, I don't know what I've gotta do. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and as ever thanks for listening to School Behaviour Secrets. Have a brilliant week, enjoy Christmas, enjoy your rehearsals and your nattivities and I can't wait to see you on next week's episode. Bye for now.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
