Summary
Why do so many sensible school strategies fail, even when staff are trying their best?
In this episode, you’ll learn why attention-seeking behaviour is often a misleading label - and why two pupils can show very similar behaviour for completely different reasons.
Using the PAIN framework, you’ll discover how to look beneath the surface, identify the hidden drivers behind a child’s behaviour, and choose responses that actually match their needs.
You’ll also learn why adult attention can change behaviour in the short term, but won’t solve the problem on its own unless you understand what that attention is doing for the child in the first place.
If you work in a school and want a more thoughtful, SEMH-first way to understand behaviour, this episode will help you think more clearly about your students’ needs and how to support them.
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
Are you working with a child who engages in attention-seeking behaviour? They're constantly shouting out, dancing during whole-class introductions, stuck like Velcro to your side during task time? Then this episode will help. My name's Simon Currigan, and I've supported real schools for over 18 years with the social, emotional, and mental health needs of their students. And this week on School Behaviour Secrets, I'm going to show you how to use the PAIN framework to understand what's really driving your student's behaviour, so you can pick the strategies that will actually make a difference to your student in the classroom and show how the same behaviour can actually have different causes in different children.
Hi there. Welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and I'm going to open this week's episode for a change with a game of Two Truths and a Lie. And I'm going to tell you three things about me, and your job is to guess which one is a lie. Are you ready? Okay. Number one, I once had a top 10 app in the App Store in the education section in the UK that outranked one of the official Dora the Explorer apps. Number two, one night I accidentally locked myself out of my hotel room whilst completely naked, and then ended up stuck in the corridor standing in front of a glass door that overlooked a busy car park. And number three, as a teenager, I almost broke my nose during a karate lesson, and I still have problems with my breathing and sinuses to this day. Okay. What do you think it is? Which sounds a bit like me from what you've heard on the podcast, and which doesn't? Have you decided? Perfect. Well, hold on to that thought, because I'll tell you which were the truths and which was the lie at the end of the episode.
Now, today's episode is all about something that looks obvious on the surface, but it turns out to be more complicated than that once you start digging underneath it. Because in schools, one of the easiest labels we can slap on a child is this. They are attention-seeking. We say it all the time, don't we? He's attention-seeking. She's attention-seeking. They just want attention. They're constantly shouting out. They're acting the class clown. They might be making silly jokes or asking for help when you know they don't really need it. They might be making noises. You know the drill.
But here's the problem. That phrase, attention-seeking, sounds like it's given us an explanation for the child's behaviour, when actually it hasn't provided us with much useful information at all. It's just a description of what the behaviour gives the child, which is attention. It doesn't really tell us why the child is doing it. And if we stop thinking the moment we've used a term like attention-seeking as if we've found the destination for our thought process, we can end up choosing the wrong strategies or the response to support them in the classroom.
So in today's episode, we're going to use the PAIN framework to look more deeply into what causes attention-seeking behaviour in the first place, and how the same behaviour can actually have different causes in different children. And looking at causes is important. Because, like, so the analogy might be: imagine a patient walks into a doctor's room with a cough. The doctor might then discover that they have a cold, or they have the flu, or they might even have throat cancer or whatever. And the doctor will know that those different conditions require very different remedies. The same presentation with different underlying causes. And we need to have the same kind of thinking in the classroom. We might see the same behaviours or the same surface-level behaviours, but we do need to think about what's driving those at an underlying level.
But before we get into that, if you find this episode useful, make sure you subscribe so you never miss future episodes of School Behaviour Secrets. And if you do know a teacher or a SENCO or a behaviour leader or a school leader who'd benefit from listening, make sure you share it with them or pop it on your social media feed. That helps us reach more people working in schools who need this information.
So let's start with something interesting that comes from the research. There was an old study written about 1968, if you want to look it up, by Hall, London Jackson. And it was called The Effects of Teacher Attention on Study Behaviour. Really catchy title. The researchers looked at a teacher interacting with pupils with behaviour difficulties in the classroom. And one of the big takeaways they recorded in the report was that adult attention can have a very powerful effect on pupil behaviour. In other words, the teacher can change behaviour merely from where and on which child they focus their attention. And I think we've all had the experience of that if we've worked in a classroom. If a pupil's off task, say, and we go over and we work with them, largely they'll settle down and get on with their work whilst we're there with them.
Now, that lived experience that we've had in the classroom and what the research backs up matters. It tells us attention isn't neutral. It can reinforce behaviour. It can calm a student down. It can redirect them. It can literally change what a pupil does next. But, and this is the really important bit, knowing that attention affects behaviour is not the same thing as understanding the child's underlying needs. Because yes, if adult attention makes the behaviour stop in the short term, that can be useful. Of course it can. But if the behaviour comes back straight away when the adult moves away or the behaviour comes back in the next lesson or the next day, then all we've really learned is that attention does something powerful in the moment for that child in the short term. We still haven't understood the deeper drivers of what's causing that behaviour. We've treated the symptom, the cough, but we haven't understood the role that attention is playing for the child. Is it helping them feel significant? Is it helping them feel safe? Is it helping them feel socially included? Does it help them reduce their anxiety in some way? Is it helping them avoid feelings of shame, or is it helping them regulate?
Now, those are all very, very different things that can trigger the same or at least same-looking at the surface level attention-seeking behaviours. So this is where the PAIN framework becomes really useful. If you've not come across it in the podcast before, PAIN stands for the Primary Areas of Internal Need. And it's a way of thinking more clearly about what's driving dysregulation or distress or discomfort in the children that you work with. Instead of only asking, "How do I stop this attention-seeking behaviour?" it helps us find out what stress or what unmet need might be causing the behaviour in the first place.
Now, inside the PAIN framework, there are seven different areas that we can look through to find those drivers. And the acronym for those seven areas is IMPACTS, which stands for Integration and Belonging, Mental Processing, Physical State, Anxiety and Emotions, Contribution and Care, Transition and Change, and SEND-specific needs. Don't worry about remembering all of those now. They'll become important later.
But if you do want to know more about what goes into those categories or you want a deeper explanation of them, head back to episode 255 titled Escape Behaviour Firefighting with the PAIN framework. The PAIN framework's also the backbone of a book I'm writing with Emma on de-escalation and dysregulation, where we go really deep into these topics and how to apply them in the classroom. But that won't be available for some time yet.
So before I go any further, one really additional important clarifying point, if that's not too many adjectives in a sentence: real children do not fit neatly into one tidy category in the IMPACTS framework. They don't sit in one box. In the real world, most of the children you work with will sit across two, three, maybe four or more different areas of the IMPACTS at once. So when I give you these case studies in a minute, I'm going to give you some simplified examples to make a point about attention-seeking behaviour. What I'm not saying is in the real world, a child's behaviour is only driven by one or two things. I'm saying these are the main drivers that seem most relevant in this situation to make a point.
Because human beings are messier than frameworks, and schools are messier than frameworks too. And certainly from my time in the classroom, my classroom was messier. The framework is there to help us think better and give us structure, not kind of flatten kids into categories or just put them into boxes.
So let me give you the example of two pupils. They're going to make their behaviour look fairly similar on purpose. Because, well, that's the point of the episode. And on the surface, both of these pupils might get labelled as attention-seeking by adults.
So we've got pupil one who keeps interrupting whole-class teaching. He calls out. He makes little comments under his breath when the teacher's talking. He tries to get laughs from the other kids. So he's a bit of the class clown. He draws attention to himself during group work. Sometimes he winds the others up. Sometimes he over does stories, or he tries to be the centre of attention in the room. And if an adult tells him off, then he seems to get weirdly energised or excited by the interaction with the teacher. So for him, even negative attention feels better than being ignored.
Now, contrast that to pupil two who also keeps trying to pull the adults in. She interrupts them. She calls out during teaching. She keeps asking the teacher for reassurance when she's working in her book. She hovers near the adult during independent work. She can seem unsettled if support is given to someone else and not to her. She can become silly or a bit needy or even a bit provocative when the adult's attention moves away from her. Again, on the surface, that can very easily get labelled as attention-seeking. It's the same broad category, the same broad description of behaviour, but they have very different possible causes in this case.
So let's see how this works. Let's look at pupil number one first and apply the PAIN framework. When we do some observation of the child and then add together what we know about them, what we observed, our experiences of working with them, what their parents tell us about them at home, their history in schools, and we add that to the behaviours that we see in the classroom and look at what's driving those behaviours across the IMPACTS I talked about earlier, we find that the strongest likely category or the strongest likely drivers for pupil one might actually sit around integration and belonging and contribution and care.
So what do I mean by that? When we observe him carefully, we see he doesn't feel secure in the social group. He doesn't feel at ease. He doesn't feel valued by his peers. He may have a low social status in his eyes. We see from his comments and the way he avoids praise that there might be an issue around him with perhaps self-esteem. And he may have learned, consciously or unconsciously, that the easiest way to get attention and to matter and to get status in the classroom is to get a reaction, to get the laugh, to get the groan from the other kids, to get told off, to get everyone's eyes on him, even just for a few seconds. Because to him, being noticed feels better than feeling invisible.
Because that's what he fears most. Sometimes these pupils look confident, but when you dig into it, that's actually like a paper-thin shell. They're not as confident. They're not as secure as they make out. Sometimes they look like the big I am. They look bold. But underneath that is this really fragile social insecurity. Often they may struggle to read the room properly. They may misjudge what counts as funny and what counts as irritating. You might see them push boundaries without quite realising it. Sometimes they might dominate conversations. They might push too hard for attention because they don't know how to get the social acceptance they need in a healthier way.
And this is where the PAIN framework helps us ask better questions. So when we look at integration and belonging, we'd be asking, "Does this child feel accepted by the group? Do they know how to join in socially in a way that actually works? Do they misread facial expressions and tone of voice or what the other children mean by their comments? Do they feel on the inside like an outsider?" And then in the category of contribution and care, we'd be asking, "When they engage socially, are they able to contribute in a reciprocal way? Can this child share, take turns, listen, let others lead? Can he celebrate their successes or repair relationships after a conflict or something's gone wrong in a conversation? Or are they trying to boost their standing in ways that may actually damage the relationships that they ironically care so much about?"
So in this case, attention-seeking behaviour for child A might not really be about wanting adult attention at all. Not mainly. It may be more about trying to raise their social standing, their social value, their status in the group. They're trying to be important. They're trying not to feel lower status than everyone else. They don't want to be ignored. And if that's what's going on, then a response that's focused on ignore it or don't give them attention may miss the point completely and ironically make that behaviour worse. Because the underlying need has not gone away. The child still feels overlooked. They're seeking significance. They want belonging. They want some kind of proof that they matter and they count in the group.
So given what working through the PAIN framework and the IMPACTS categories has told us, what might help in this situation with the behaviours we're seeing in the classroom for child one? Well, now when we frame it like that, we're beginning to think differently. Now we might look at structured ways for that child to gain status positively. Leadership roles, used carefully, obviously, we don't want to create a tyrant, might be helpful here. Genuine praise tied to how he's contributed to a lesson or a piece of work rather than putting on a performance might be effective, as might explicit teaching around social interaction or coaching on how to join a group, how to share humour, how to repair relationships when things go wrong, helping him experience being valued without having to earn it through disruptive behaviour, helping him find structured ways to contribute that his peers respond really well to and appreciate. That's a completely different intervention to simply saying, "Stop trying to get attention."
Now let's compare that to pupil two. Her behaviour may look similar, but the likely drivers are different. So we're going to do the same process. We'll go and we'll do some observations in class closely, watching how she works in the classroom, gets on with her friends, engages with whole-class time. And then we combine that with what we know about her background, her history in school, her teacher's experience of working with her in the classroom, her parents' thoughts, and combine that with what we see in terms of her behaviour. And we work through the IMPACTS to see which is important. And on the IMPACTS, we discover she scores strongly in the category of anxiety and emotions, maybe with some transition and change as well.
So unlike pupil one, she's not necessarily trying to raise her social profile. She's not necessarily trying to be the centre of attention of the peer group. She doesn't feel overlooked. Instead, adult attention for her, it's functioning more like a safety blanket. It helps her feel secure. It helps regulate her emotionally. It helps her feel less like she's going to be attacked or in physical danger. Kids like this struggle when the teacher moves away. They may become more unsettled when they're asked to work independently. They might repeatedly check in about that task, asking the same question again and again, or keep pulling the adult back into their work and asking them more questions. And again, not because they want status, but because distance from the adult, physical distance, makes them feel uncomfortable, maybe unsettled.
Maybe she's worried about the consequences of getting it wrong and needs that reassurance from the adult that it's not the end of the world. Maybe she's anxious about what's happening in the next lesson. Maybe she finds transitions difficult and she's become dysregulated or is moving towards dysregulation before anything has actually happened because she's full of stress and anxiety now. And that's important, by the way. A lot of children don't just react to stress because of what's happening in the moment. Their bodies react to expected stresses or anxieties, something they perceive as bad that's going to happen in the future or shortly as well. So they become unsettled before the event happens, before the change, not during it. And then we can misread that and think the trigger was the activity that they were working on at the time, not the activity that was coming up or fears about the transition itself between those activities.
So with this child, when we check her against the PAIN framework and the IMPACTS, we get a different picture. Under anxiety and emotions, we're asking, "Is she experiencing high emotions all the time in school? Is she quick to feel shame or worry or overwhelmed? Does she need constant reassurance because she doesn't feel safe emotionally or physically in school or in the classroom?" And then under transition and change, we're asking, "Does she find it hard when lessons change, the adult moves away, the routine changes, or she can't get immediate support?"
Again, notice what happens when we ask questions using the IMPACTS categories. We're still seeing the same surface behaviour, calling out, dragging the adult in for attention, repeatedly pulling them back. But the reason for the same behaviours is very different. And the PAIN framework helped us tease that out in a structured way. One child's basically saying, "Look at me because I need to feel important." The other child is saying, "Stay with me because I don't feel safe without you." And if we respond to both children in exactly the same way, one or both of those interventions isn't going to work. That is why this matters. And this is also why identifying a trigger is often not enough to support a child with their behaviour.
In schools, we're often trained to ask, "What triggered the incident?" But that question can be too narrow because the real issue often isn't one single neat trigger that we can bang a label on. It's a combination of triggers and stresses the child experiences across the day. Sometimes we're looking for one obvious cause when in reality, there are multiple overlapping causes that all stack together and interact with each other. And that brings me back to something really important about the PAIN framework. And I've said this on the podcast before, but it's important to remember that regulation isn't just about emotional regulation. Children are regulating across lots of different areas all day long. They're regulating across all those IMPACTS categories: social belonging, thinking, physical discomfort, anxiety, changed communication needs, sensory needs, safety needs. They're not separate little boxes in real life, and your brain doesn't treat them like that. They overlap and they merge. And if a child is using lots of energy to regulate one area of the IMPACTS categories, that usually leaves them with less left over to regulate the other categories. That's why reducing those stresses overall across the board, not just focusing on emotional regulation, matters so much.
So if you're listening to this as a teacher, a teaching assistant, a SENCO, a school leader, here are three practical things to take away. First, be careful with the label attention-seeking. And I'm not saying never use it informally. People know what you mean by it. Keyboard warriors on social medias will shoot you down for saying it, saying, "Don't you mean connection-seeking or whatever?" And they probably have a point. But actually, even that connection-seeking label doesn't get you very much further than attention-seeking. So whether you call it attention-seeking or connection-seeking, don't let that become the end of your thinking. Treat it as the start of the way you're analysing the student's behaviour, not the end of it.
Secondly, focus not just on the behaviours the child's engaging in, but what it does for them. Does it increase their status? Does it reduce anxiety? Does it get them reassurance? Does it help them avoid shame? Does it help them create a connection with their friends or the adult? Does it buy them time with the adult? Once you understand what the behaviour's doing for them, it informs our next steps and how we can help them. And the PAIN framework and the IMPACTS are a great way of structuring your thinking about that.
And third, that said, don't assume a child fits into one neat category. Most often, if you use the IMPACTS framework or any other approach, you'll find that behaviour is complex and often has more than one driver. Real children are complicated, and your thinking should allow for that. Once you've identified those categories, you can then make a proper, informed decision about what you need to focus on first to support the child, what's less important, and where to focus your efforts.
And by the way, if you work with children with challenging behaviour and you're not always sure what might be driving that, I do have a free download that can help. It's called the SEND Behaviour Handbook, and it helps you link classroom behaviours with possible underlying causes, including things like ADHD and autism and ACEs. It's not about teachers trying to make a diagnosis because as educators, we're not there to do that. We're not qualified to do it.
But the quicker we join the dots and link behaviour to possible causes, the quicker we can start putting the right support in place for those pupils and get the right professionals involved to help them. You can get it by going to beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources, beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources, and you'll see it at the top of the page. And I'll also put in a direct link in the episode description.
Okay, let's wrap this up. Basically, the same behaviour can have different causes, and children don't always fall into neat little categories. The causes for their behaviour overlap. They merge together. They're messy. And that's because kids like you and I are human. We're complicated, which to be fair is inconvenient if you like tidy systems, but it's useful knowledge to have if you actually want to help kids in the real world, in real classrooms.
Now, before we finish, let's come back to the two truths and a lie. I said that I once had a top 10 education app in the UK App Store that outranked one of the official Dora the Explorer apps. I said that I once accidentally locked myself out of a hotel room whilst naked and ended up stuck outside of a glass door that overlooked a busy car park. And I said that as a teenager, I almost broke my nose during a karate lesson, and I still have sinus problems to this day. So which are true and which is the lie? What did you think?
Well, they were all true, every single one of them, which means this was not two truths and a lie. It was more like three slightly embarrassing facts and an abuse of the classic party game rules. And that one about the hotel, I mean, we've all been there. There was a lot of alcohol involved. Although the way my wife's looking at me right now, maybe it hasn't happened to everyone, and maybe I'm oversharing. I'll let you decide.
If you found today's episode useful and enlightening, please subscribe and leave me a review. It really does help more school staff find the show by prompting the algorithm to share school behaviour secrets with more people on the podcast apps. Plus, if you leave a review, it will make my mum proud. Thanks for listening today. I hope you have a brilliant week, and I can't wait to see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
