Summary
Some of the most damaging ideas about behaviour in schools don’t sound wrong.
They sound kind.
They sound scientific.
They sound progressive.
And that’s exactly why they stick.
In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, Simon Currigan unpacks four popular SEMH myths that are quietly making behaviour worse - not because people mean badly, but because good ideas have been overstretched, oversimplified, and misunderstood.
You’ll explore:
- Why children do still make choices - even when emotions run high.
- The truth about trauma-informed practice (and why it doesn’t lower expectations).
- Why consequences matter even when they don’t “fix" behaviour.
- Why SEMH can’t replace behaviour systems - and what happens when schools try.
This isn’t about winning arguments.
It’s about clearing away the half-truths that sabotage classrooms and replacing them with thinking that actually works.
If you’re a teacher or school leader who wants calmer classrooms, fairer systems and a better understanding of what’s really going on underneath behaviour, this episode will give you clarity - not slogans.
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Show notes / transcription
Simon Currigan
If we frame every poor decision as neurological helplessness, we don't actually become compassionate. What we're doing is we're disempowering our students. Children don't need us to remove responsibility, they need us to scaffold it. So they learn to develop their decision-making skills. That's how they mature and they grow. Hi there, welcome to School Behaviour Secrets. Hope you had a good Christmas break and happy New Year.
My name's Simon Currigan and in my world view the kind of people who make a coffee and then immediately use the same teaspoon for a cup of tea, making the tea taste half like coffee and with that bitterness in it, those people, right, they're animals and they'll be the first with their backs against the wall when the revolution comes and rightly so. And don't tell me that you only had one spoon. You could have washed the spoon.
That's all I'm saying. Which, believe it or not, is actually a nice lead in to today's episode because it turns out that humans are very, very good at holding terrible beliefs and defending them fiercely, meaning we accept all sorts of nonsense as normal. Stuff we read in a poorly researched article what someone thought on a social media post, some nonsense we watched on TikTok. And I mean, come on, let's be honest, when did TikTok become a trusted news source for teachers? Am I really that old? Don't email me the answer to that one. Look, anyway, some of that stuff is harmless.
Some of it just leads to mildly flavoured tea with an edge of bitterness to it. But in education, some of the beliefs that are shared quietly undermine classrooms, leading to burned out staff and misunderstood children. Children, especially around SEMH. And some of that stuff just leads to wasted time we could do without mentioning no brain gyms, as was recommended by the Department for Education about 15 years ago. So today we're going to talk about behaviour and SEMH myths that really need to die. Not because I want to win an argument, but because when we get these wrong, it's the kids that we work with that pay the cost. And I'm going to be honest, I think I'm going to upset some of my colleagues in SEMH with some of these.
But before I burn my dwindling fan base. I've got a quick favour to ask. If this podcast helps you in some way, hit subscribe or follow in your app so you don't miss future episodes. And if you've got 20 seconds to spare, please leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. When you do that, it helps other teachers and school leaders find the show. And honestly, if you thought this episode was useful, also share it with a colleague in the real world. Because calmer classrooms don't come from one person working or struggling on their own.
Teachers need answers to complex problems and they don't come from overly simplified social media poster that are touting simple fake answers to complex problems. I mean, you're talking to a man here who uses full punctuation in his text messages. This stuff's important to me. So right, let's get into it. These myths survive because they sound kind or they sound sciencey, they sound modern, they sound enlightened, they're soundbitey, they fit nicely on one of those kind of dreamy social media quote posts. But in practice, what they do is they quietly undermine and break behaviour systems in school and they damage the way we work with children with SEMH needs, the kids who need us to get it right. What makes them dangerous often is not that they're completely wrong, it's that they're partially right.
There's an element of truth that then gets wildly overextended. So if this episode feels uncomfortable at times when you're listening to it, that's okay, no judgment. We all need to course correct from time to time when we get new information. And that includes me when I've thought about SEMH and behaviour has definitely evolved over the last 10 years or so, even since we started this podcast. And that's good. When the facts change, we should change our opinions. So let's start with myth number one, which is there is no such thing as chosen behaviour.
Now, you'll hear this myth dressed up in neuroscience. People don't choose their behaviour. Emotion decides everything, or our emotional brain is at the root of every decision we make. Sometimes you'll see a post on social media that shows like an fMRI scan as the image for a post that kind of thinks it settled the debate. It says, look at the image on screen, the emotional brain centre is lighting up first. And you know what? On a basic level, that's right.
But here's what the research actually says about decision making. When researchers study decision making using brain scanners like fMRIs, they often find that the emotional centre does activate before the logical, rational part of our brain jumps in. So there's some studies by Antonio Damasio that showed the emotional part of the brain that that kind of emotional processing plays a central role in decision making. And when people took brain damage to the emotional system in their brain, they found that people could still reason logically, but they couldn't then make the jump to making good decisions or prioritising effectively. So what would happen was they'd be asked to make a decision and they'd get stuck in endless cycles trying to rationally solve the problem of lunch at my place or yours and never reach a conclusion because there isn't a logical one. And Damasio showed that emotion is not separate from thinking, it's a necessary ingredient in reasoning and choice. And I think I've even quoted his research in the podcast before.
So as an example, when people are making buying decisions, their emotional brain lights up first about whether they'd like to buy something or not. Fine, true, right? I'm not arguing against that. I'm not arguing that the emotional brain doesn't light at first. But that research does not mean that logic never gets a vote. It means that emotion is the start of the conversation in your brain, not the end of it. So kind of like here's the adult version of how it works.
Have you ever wanted to send a furious email or a text message and you've actually typed it out and then deleted it and then wrote a much more polite version? Well, that's choice, right? Let's think about what happened in that shape. Emotion fired first and then logic stepped in and said, maybe not such a great idea. And then based on that conversation between emotion and a logic, we changed our behaviour.
There's a chain. Our emotions suggests the behaviour non-verbally so it tells you to tell your boss what you really think about the changes to the marking policy that are going to add two extra hours of work every week. And then the logical part of our brain tries to explain why we're having that emotion. And then it thinks through the consequences of sending the message. And then it offers like a course correction from the logical point of view. So it might say, well, the marking scheme will be good for the kids and writing that email is going to result in loads of stress at work. So it's not the best thing for you.
And then we choose a way forward. And probably we don't send that email. So this process, emotion followed by logic followed by a decision is why most people don't send the resignation letter to their boss that they'd really like to send. So basically when we're calm or even moderately stressed actually choice is very much alive. Now here's where this becomes dangerous in schools. It's when people stretch that truth into because it starts with emotion no child ever chooses their behaviour. That's not neuroscience, that's dogma, that's ideology.
When we're calm, choice does appear. It does shrink under stress. When pupils experience so much stress they hit survival mode, in that case the gap between the emotional impulse and the action almost shrinks away entirely. But this sits on a sliding scale. Are we able to sometimes choose the right path, a positive behaviour, even when we're feeling emotional? Well, yes. A lot of the time we can.
The truth is, our brains are more complicated than everything is emotion. And if choice genuinely didn't exist, then things like therapy wouldn't work. Teaching coping strategies wouldn't work.
Boundaries wouldn't work. Learning wouldn't happen. Because nothing would ever change. Everything would be fueled by emotion. Did you make an emotional decision to listen to this podcast? You know what? Probably not.
Did you make an emotional decision to cook dinner tonight? Probably not. Did you make an emotional decision to catch the bus to work? Probably not. Not because when you're calm there's a conversation between emotion and logic at play in your brain. You can choose which behaviours you engage in. And here's the uncomfortable bit: sometimes children, just like adults, they just make bad decisions not because of trauma, not because of unmet needs, not because of stress, but because they're nine years old or they're bored or they're showing off or they're frustrated or they're copying a friend or they're testing a boundary.
That called normal development. And I'm using the term normal here, not in a pejorative way, but in the mathematical sense, saying it's an expected statistical norm. If we frame every poor decision as neurological helplessness, we don't actually become compassionate. What we're doing is we're disempowering our students. Children don't need us to remove responsibility. They need us to scaffold it. So they learn to develop their decision-making skills.
That's how they mature and they grow. This is something I dig deeper into in a book I'm writing on dysregulation and helping students with social, emotional and mental health needs. But I'll let you know more about that in the future as it's a way off yet. But the end of the myth is sometimes decisions are emotionally based 100%. But a lot of the time logic has its part to play too, which means chosen behaviour. Well, yes, it is a thing. That's what neuroscience tells us.
So let's move on to myth two, trauma informed practice. Means lowering expectations. This one causes real damage. There's a group of people in the education system who associate trauma informed work with being soft. They hear the words trauma informed and they think no boundaries, no standards. Just let the kids kick off and nothing ever happens. And if you've ever seen trauma informed done badly, I completely understand why you'd think that.
But trauma informed practise done well does not mean lowering the bar. It means building a platform, a series of steps to reach the high bar. High expectations without support. It's just exclusion dressed up as rigour and high standards. And on the other hand, support without expectations. That's stagnation. It turns kids who are capable of success into victims.
We're implicitly telling them for them low expectations are fine. Real trauma-informed practise isn't like any of those extremes. It's disciplined. It offers clear boundaries, consistent routines, high expectations, and extra scaffolding to reach those expectations. Not easier, fairer. And there's research to back this up. Bruce Perry and the Child Trauma Academy have shown that children exposed to chronic stress have underdeveloped regulatory systems.
They're not less capable, they're more overloaded. Trauma informed classrooms reduce cognitive load. They help kids feel more safe, help them feel more secure so they're ready to learn, which actually results in better academic outcomes, not worse ones. And this is why schools that do this properly see reduced behaviour incidents, improved attendance, stronger relationships, higher academic engagement. Trauma informed done right doesn't weaken standards, it stabilises children emotionally so they can reach high ones. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, well that all makes sense, but give me something practical. I can actually use in school with the kids that I work with.
We've put together something that might really help you. It's called the SEND behaviour handbook and inside you'll find clear, no-nonsense guides to common needs like ADHD, autism and trauma, plus a behaviour analysis grid that helps you connect what you see in the classroom to what potentially might be driving it underneath without guesswork or slapping on labels or making things over complicated. It's not about trying to turn teachers into doctors or pediatricians. We're not qualified to do that. But when we think deeply about what might be causing behaviour that's persistent in the classroom, not behaviour that comes and goes, but behaviour that hangs around in the long term, we can get the right professionals involved and we can get early intervention strategies in place. The guide is completely free and you can download it from beaconschoolsupport. co. uk/send-handbook. That's beaconschoolsupport. co. uk/send-handbook and I'll also put a link in the show notes so you can open your app, click right through and grab it later.
So now let's move on to myth three. If a consequence doesn't change behaviour, there's no point in using and I've touched on this before and this is destructive in a very quiet way. It often comes from people like me, advisors who specialise on the behaviours of individual kids and lose sight of the big picture because of that. They forget that there's two layers to managing behaviour in school. So you've got the big picture view of managing the group and the whole class and what you do about putting in place support for individual pupils with specific needs. So what happens is a student with a history of SEMH needs, they become dysregulated for the second time this week say they damage some property or they hurt someone and then the topic of consequences comes up amongst the adults. And people like me say well if the child doesn't learn from the consequences and change their behaviour what's the point in the consequence?
It won't change anything. And the problem is that is a very simplistic, very specific reading of the purpose of consequences. From the point of view of behaviour change for the individual student but that student exists in a social environment, in a system, and there's more at play than behaviour change for the individual student because consequences were never only about changing behaviour of that one child. They also exist to restore the relationship balance between two individuals who have fallen out, to signal boundaries to the group, to protect victims and maintain their sense of fairness, and to reinforce group trust in the adults. So imagine that you're a student and that you're the person who's just been hit or sworn at or humiliated. If nothing seems to happen what do you learn from that? What do you learn when there doesn't appear to be a consequence?
You learn that your pain doesn't matter, that the rules and systems in school don't protect you, that everything's unfair, that the adults look away and then well your resentment quietly sets in. Now imagine you're the classmate of that person who also did follow the rules and and then you see someone else hurt your friend and there doesn't appear to be a response. Well, what do you learn from that? Watching the interactions between the two children and the adult in the room, you might start thinking, well, he got away with it, so why should I bother doing the right thing? And that is how cultures in classrooms start to rot. Not loudly, not quickly, silently over time. Consequences don't only deter, they stabilise a social system.
And all social systems have rules and boundaries about what's acceptable in this group or what isn't. They communicate this matters to us. Everyone in the group matters. Behaving in this way isn't okay. This group is safe for everyone because we have shared standards. Now there's a difference between punishing mindlessly and holding someone accountable. You don't abandon consequences just because emotional regulation is difficult.
But you apply those consequences with intelligence. With dignity for everyone involved and with proportion. Sometimes the truth is you need a consequence to make a political point to children and teachers and parents that has nothing to do with behaviour change for the individual student. That doesn't mean the consequence is pointless. It means it's got a different point. And if a child is stuck in an endless loop of punishments, that's the student's brain and body telling us through their behaviour to the adults in school that something in this environment isn't working here. And punishment by itself isn't going to be enough to encourage behaviour change because it would have done that already.
So maybe we need to look underneath the behaviour or what's driving the behaviour to figure out what's causing it so we can put in place reasonable changes and teaching programmes and adaptations so the student can escape the cycle of behaviour and consequences that's dragging them down. And finally, here's the fourth myth. If we've got SEMH, we don't need behaviour systems. Or you might hear this dressed up as relationships matter more than rules or if children feel safe their behaviour will take care of itself or we don't do behaviour in schools anymore it's all about well-being. It sounds progressive, it sounds caring, it sounds like it belongs in a very glossy prospectus. Unlike most dangerous myths it's half true and half true again is often more dangerous than completely wrong. Yes, children need emotional safety.
Yes, pupils with SEMH needs struggle when they feel frightened or overwhelmed or disconnected. Yes, connection matters. It definitely does. Some people ask me actually, why isn't this called the SEMH Secrets Podcast? Why do you call it the Behaviour Secrets Podcast? Isn't that old school? Well, it's because behaviour in schools is bigger than individual children.
Behaviour is not just about the psychology of the individual. It's not just about trauma, it's not just nervous systems, there's a lot more going on. In schools, good teachers look at behaviour from two different viewpoints. You've got the 30,000 foot view where you look at the behaviour of the whole group and then you've got the close-up view, the needs and behaviour of individual children. Now, these two poles, they matter equally, but they are not the same thing. There's a tension and a relationship between the two that the professional has to manage. And if you've never taught, and there are a lot of commentators in this that have never taught.
It's easy to imagine that classrooms are actually just a collection of individuals. So you think if we meet enough individual needs, the rest will just take care of itself and behaviour can melt away. But it doesn't. Here are some things that massively affect behaviour, for instance, that aren't primarily about a child's diagnosis or their emotional profile that impact on the behaviour in the room. And you will see these are small concrete things. Things like did the teacher arrive before the children? Are they engaging to listen to?
Do they stand in the right place to command attention during whole class time? Was the lesson planned or was it improvised? Was there pace in the lesson or did it sag? Can pupils see the board from where they're sitting without having to twist and turn around? Are resources allocated around the room so they're easy to get hold of when the kids need them so there's not a crush as kids try and access glue sticks or whatever it is? Can kids get feedback from the teacher without having to sit in long cues? Were expectations about work noise clear?
Is disruption addressed quickly or is it allowed to grow? And at the whole school level, the big group level, you've got things like are the values we believe in translated clearly into behaviour expectations? Is behaviour monitored across classrooms and corridors and playgrounds? Are routines calm and predictable? Are staff consistent between classrooms? Do the SEND and behaviour policies talk to to each other? Are there clear links between the two?
Are transitions in school calm and planned or are they a bit chaotic? How is the quality of classroom behaviour management monitored by senior leaders? How do they role model and give feedback on whole class management? And what do they do to follow up on those suggestions? And that's just a list I've reeled off the top of my head. None of them anything to do with individual children's social, emotional and mental health needs. Now, none of that disappears just because you understand trauma.
SEMH is but it's one part of the system, not the whole system. It's like behaviour is the orange, SEMH is one of the segments. And here's where schools and some professionals go wrong. They hear behaviour is communication and they translate that into once we understand feelings, behaviour doesn't matter. And that's not true. Understanding behaviour does not mean tolerating chaos or harm. If a child's banging their head against a wall, it doesn't matter how good your insight is into the causes of that behaviour.
The behaviour never changes. You can't have to have an inspector in school and say to them oh yeah that's Kenneth, he bangs his head on the wall for hours every day, but don't worry we're quietly confident it's the sensory environment. That understanding is worthless unless it brings about behaviour change. And without the harmful behaviour going away, understanding the causes, well it leaves that harm in place and does no one any good. So here's the relationship in simple terms. SEMH helps children cope inside well thought out embedded established behaviour systems. It does not replace them.
If SEMH is like the emotional muscle that helps our children move day to day, sorry, this is a terrible analogy, but I'm gonna run with it. The behaviour systems are like the frame, the skeleton. You can't stand upright on muscle alone because your muscles need the skeleton to attach to. You need both systems. They're interrelated. So the aim is not SEMH replacing behaviour. The aim is SEMH inside a clear, consistent thought-out behaviour system.
And when schools get that balance right between the two, you get calmer corridors, safer classrooms, more settled pupils, less firefighting, more learning, and more emotional security. Because children don't feel safe just because the adults care or understand their needs. They feel safe when the adults are reliable and there are systems in place to support them. So when you put all of these myths together, there's no such thing as chosen behaviour. Trauma-informed means low expectations. If a consequence doesn't change behaviour, don't use one.
If we've got SEMH, we don't need behaviour. Here's what they've all got in common. Yeah, they've all got a grain of truth in them that I probably agree with. But then that truth just gets stretched too far, simplified too much, or turned into a social media slogan instead of a useful tool that's based on the science that we can use in the classroom. And when that happens, good ideas stop being helpful and they start becoming harmful. Not because people mean badly, but because in schools half-truths don't just sit in your head. They shape policies, they shape conversations, they shape how children are treated every single day.
And if there's one thing I hope you can take from today, it's this: we don't need better slogans about behaviour. We need better thinking. We don't need quick answers. We need honest ones. Behaviour is complex because children are complex. There are no shortcuts around that. But there are clearer ways through it. And they sit in that Venn diagram in the overlap between compassion and structure, neuroscience and common sense, understanding and accountability.
You need all of it. And I want to add here, this episode isn't a criticism of SEMH.
I love SEMH. It's a defence of it done properly. So here's a question that I'd like to leave you with this week. Which of these myths have you potentially quietly believed in, even just a little bit, if you let go of what's one small change that you might make that would free you up in your classroom or in your school to really support your students? Because we don't change outcomes by being right or defending positions. We change outcomes by using the science, seeing what works and seeing things more clearly. We don't change the facts to fit our opinion.
We should change our opinion to fit the facts. If you found today useful, hit subscribe so you never miss a future episode. And if you've got a moment, please leave me a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps me It helps more teachers and school leaders find this kind of support. I know I say that all the time, but it's genuinely true. And please do pass this on to a colleague if you think it will help them too, because behaviour doesn't get better in isolation. It gets better when we work together, when we talk together, and we think differently together.
Thank you for listening today, and I can't wait to see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
