Summary
Ever had that moment where your reward system just… stops working? The stickers lose their sparkle, the house points barely register, and suddenly every child in your class is asking, “What do I get if I follow the rules?" It’s frustrating, it’s exhausting, and it leaves you wondering what on earth to try next.
In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, we unpack why reward systems lose power over time – and what the science of motivation says we should be doing instead. We’ll explore the hedonic treadmill, reward inflation, and the classic study that shows how easy it is to accidentally kill intrinsic motivation in children. And we’ll look at why transactional “tit for tat" systems can be especially damaging for pupils with SEMH and SEND needs.
Then we’ll dig into what actually works long-term. You’ll learn how to build behaviour that lasts, how to make motivation stick even when there’s a supply teacher in the room, and how to transition away from over-reliance on stickers and points without causing a classroom riot.
If you want your pupils to behave well because it’s who they are – not because they think they’ll earn a token, house point, Dojo and sticker – this episode is for you.
Important links:
Download your FREE copy of the Classroom Management scoresheet.
Download other FREE behaviour resources for use in school: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources
Share this podcast with your friends:
Show notes / transcription
Simon Currigan
Ever had that moment where your reward system just dies? The stickers start working, the house points barely register and the prize box, well it might as well be filled with gravel and cabbage. My name's Simon Currigan and I've spent the last 18 years helping literally thousands of teachers, pupils and school leaders with SEMH and behaviour. I've trained thousands of staff, completed thousands of lesson observations in schools and more than 100,000 educators use my SEND behaviour handbook. To understand pupil behaviour and I've even run a PRU for permanently excluded pupils and today I'm going to show you exactly why rewards stop working and what you need to do instead so behaviour improves naturally in your classroom rather than needing you to hand out constant bribes to get anything done. Let's get into it. Hi there, welcome to School Behaviour Secrets.
My name's Simon Currigan and I'm the kind of man who loved that game in the original Shenmue on the Dreamcast where you move crates from one location to another and that was it, that was the whole mini game. Move a crate, move it over here with the forklift, drop the crate, repeat. Hours of my life gone. It's like I was doing something that other people do in real life as a job but I wasn't getting paid for it and I loved it.
And what blows my mind? Is that I genuinely thought I was making progress in the game, but really I wasn't getting anywhere at all. And I can't even remember the relevance of moving the crates to the story quest, which dodgy link alert is the perfect metaphor for what happens in school when rewards stop working. We go through the same motions because they used to work three years ago. We keep moving the crates. We keep handing out house points. We keep the system going.
But the truth is, somehow quietly, it stopped having any real impact ages ago. And yet we keep persisting with it. If you're new to School Behaviour Secrets, this is the podcast where we unpick what's really going on with pupil behaviour and SEMH needs, and then we give you straightforward strategies to make a difference in your classroom or your school. And if you like my references to crate moving, forklift driving, or any other forms of virtual manual labour as it relates to SEMH or behaviour in school. Stop what you're doing immediately and leave me a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps spread the word about the podcast. And while you're there, if you haven't subscribed yet, give that subscribe button a quick tap and a tickle so you never miss a future episode.
Right, so rewards. Let's jump into it. Today we're tackling something every teacher experiences but no one warns you about in your training. The moment that your reward systems that used to work beautifully get stuck. Stuck over time like the door on a badly built Ikea wardrobe. It used to motivate your class but now it barely moves the needle at all. The house points, the stickers, the golden time, the dojo monsters, they've all started working and I'm gonna look at why that is and more importantly what we do next.
So let's start by looking at why reward systems feel magical in September and deeply disappointing by March. Here's the key takeaway. Rewards tend to have immediate impact on our kids because they're shiny and new. When we introduce something new to a group of kids, there's like a novelty effect there. Their brains go, Ooh, stickers or ooh, house points or ooh, a 37p key ring shaped like an off-brand K-pop demon hunter. And then after a while, the novelty of those rewards and the novelty of that system wears off and that's human nature. The sticker stops feeling special.
The house point becomes normal. It becomes humdrum. The prize box, it becomes predictable. And what felt exciting yesterday becomes every day today.
It's boring even. This isn't a sign, by the way, of your class being shallow or that you're teaching ungrateful kids. It's a sign the human brain is doing exactly what it has evolved to do. It's built into our psychology for good reasons. So let me introduce a psychological concept that describes this perfectly. It's called the hedonic treadmill. In simple terms, the hedonic treadmill says this: Whatever good thing happens in your life, you quickly get get used to it.
It becomes normal. And once it becomes normal, it becomes expected. It no longer drives behaviour so your kids get a house point, lovely. After a week, expected. After three weeks, bare minimum. After 12 weeks, meh, can live without it. The kids start moaning that what you're offering them isn't even a genuine brand K-pop demon hunter key ring.
What's happened here is, it's not that the reward system has failed, it's just doing what reward systems do. They fade over time. Like all of us, they have a limited lifespan. And we should expect that. So now I want to introduce you to something I call house point inflation and it works like this, which is another danger of what happens when these systems fade. When teachers notice these reward systems losing their sparkle, what we do is the obvious thing. We increase the dose.
So one house point becomes three, one raffle ticket becomes a strip of five. The prize box, it gets bigger and then bigger again with more choice, more glitter, more of those fidget toy things where they have the bits that pop in and out that you only see in schools and the reward sections of seaside arcades. But here's the problem, increasing the reward only works for a short time before the treadmill catches up again. The more we inflate the rewards, the more the kids expect the inflated rewards and the faster they lose their power. And this is where things start to get messy because eventually kids begin to expect the reward for something they used to do for free. So instead of I'll tidy up because that's what we do in this classroom or because being tidy important to me personally, we start hearing what do I get for tidying up? And this is the point where the teacher relationship with the pupil becomes transactional.
Tit for tat. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. It's all about me.
What's in it for me? And once the relationship has shifted to a transactional one, you have to keep paying to maintain a minimum standard of behaviour.
Not with money, obviously. I'm talking the currency of like points, cards, tokens. And when the reward or a token has become the reason to behave. It quietly replaces the original internal reason the child brought anyway to do the right thing. It skewed the why that's driving our students behaviour and that's really dangerous ground. I want to bring in a classic piece of research here from Edward Deci. Classic but really sad actually.
He gave a group of reception children who loved art activities. He told them that they would get a special reward every time they drew a picture. At first, as you can imagine those kids were thrilled. Motivation shut up. I mean, you can imagine kids were like elbowing each other out of the way to get a space at the art table. It probably went all Hunger Games. All right, not really.
That was my imagination. Anyway, the point is, kids who naturally loved drawing, and that's the important part, these are kids who already had a desire to draw. The adults started incentivizing them to do that art with prizes and rewards. And here's the kicker, right? A few weeks later, when the adults removed that reward, something genuinely awful happened. Their love of drawing dropped below where it had been before the start of the experiment. Their engagement at the art table dropped below that normal point below where it was at the start of the test.
So the kids actively lost interest despite loving art. And why was that? It turns out it was because the adults had taught the children's brains. You don't draw here because you enjoy drawing. You draw because you get a kickback. Take away the treat and the internal motivation inside the child. Well, that goes away with it.
If we're not careful, we can accidentally create this effect in our classrooms and our schools or in our kids if we're parents all the time. For pupils with SEMH needs or SEND needs this is actually amplified. You can imagine kids with poor working memory falling behind in reward systems because they literally forget to follow the system consistently so they don't earn enough points. You can see anxious kids becoming terrified of losing their place on the chart or slipping down a behaviour chart onto the sad cloud. Kids at the the bottom of a sticker chart or those kids in secondary who never earn points in class learn the wounding message, I'm the kind of child who never wins or never gets noticed. People with trauma even can interpret reward systems as putting conditions on the relationships that they have with adults in school. So they say, if I behave, the adult sees me as worthy.
If I don't, I'm out. That relationship is done. And then what happens is they opt out of that system because, well, it's better to be in control of the opting out than it is being rejected by the adult. They reject the system, they reject the adult before it rejects them. When we look at this through the PAIN framework, the primary areas of internal need, we see the impact of what happens when reward systems go wrong. And if you want to know more about the PAIN framework, jump back one episode to episode 255, where I sort of go through it in detail. But basically, in the key categories that fuel stress in students, we could have rewards impacting on the physical domain, the physical category, because sensory overload means that certain students might miss instructions and lose points in a busy classroom.
You can see it affecting the emotional category because rejection sensitivity makes public reward systems painful when you don't achieve. You've got the cognitive area where kids who experience slower processing, they're always just behind the others and not making sense of how to win the rewards. On the social side, you might see the same kids winning every single week. And on the pro-social side, if a student can't contribute in the way a reward system demands, fans, they're left feeling like an outsider. Plus, reward systems can accidentally reinforce shame, which leads to a whole range of issues. And this is why long-term intrinsic motivation beats extrinsic motivation, which is reward systems every day of the week. Extrinsic motivation is when you do something to get a reward or avoid a punishment.
Intrinsic motivation is when you do something because it lines up with who you are or the values that you hold. Intrinsic motivation, it comes and goes because of the hedonic treadmill. Intrinsic motivation, well that's scientifically proven to be much longer lasting. Extrinsic motivation is visible. Intrinsic motivation is invisible. Extrinsic motivation relies on being caught doing something good so you get rewarded by someone else. Intrinsic motivation, well that doesn't care who's watching.
And I think as teachers and school leaders, we aren't just aiming for pupils who behave well because they think points are on offer. We want people to behave well because that's the kind of people they believe they are. And this is where identity comes in. When children see themselves as the kind of people who act in a certain way, they behave consistently, whether it's the usual teacher in the room, or it's a supply teacher, or a PPA teacher, or there's an Ofsted inspector there, or absolutely no one is watching. They do the right thing because it's the right thing. They're polite because they care about other people's feelings. They help others because they don't like to see others struggle get left behind and they care about their friends.
So you hear them saying kind of identity-based phrases like in our class we look after each other. I'm the kind of person who sticks at things even when they're hard. At this school or in this class we treat people fairly. When you tie behaviour to identity like that you're building something that lasts longer than any sticker chart. You're building an ethical, moral, identity-based framework that helps your students negotiate the world, not just today, but for the rest of their lives. And I want to pull in some research from David Desteno here that he describes in his book, Emotional Success. If you haven't read it, I recommend you do.
It's brilliant, it's evidence-based, but it's also super accessible. And what he found was two emotions correlate strongly with long-term goal achievement. And they were gratitude and pride, but they work very differently. His research found that gratitude improves improved relationships and emotional well-being for students. But pride, and I'm talking about here pride that's done in a healthy way, not an arrogant way, pride builds identity. It sends the message, I am the kind of person who does difficult things. I can trust myself, I can rely on myself when things get tough.
I am the person that sees things through. In his studies, it built resilience in people and this kind of persistence towards goals and identity that we all want to see in our students. This is why saying, you should be proud of how you solve that problem is actually far more powerful than here's a sticker for solving that problem. One builds identity, the other builds dependency on the next handout. So what do we do in our classrooms when rewards start working? So here's the practical part. Here are the steps to take away.
Start by auditing your current reward system. Ask yourself, in my classroom or in my school, who always wins? And who never wins. Has reward inflation crept into our way of doing things? Do the kids still care about the reward system? Or if I took that reward system away, would it really make any difference to the way kids act and behave anyway? Next, start linking children's behaviour to their identity.
Use identity-based statements every single day. Link kids' behaviours to aspects of their character. So say things like, you didn't give up on that maths even though you found it hard. That makes you resilient. Or, I'm proud you for sticking through that. Those kind of statements, they matter more than the points that you can hand out to incentivize them.
And you know what? The kids will love you more as a professional for it, and that's a bonus. Next, think about using rewards as a launch pad, not for seeing you through the entire journey. So I'm not saying tear up all your reward charts, set them on fire, put them in the bin. But if you are going to use them, use them intentionally as a temporary support to launch new behaviours or new patterns or new routines and then intentionally shift away from them. Don't cling on to them or make them the reason children behave in the long term. Transition from the reward to the identity, which means you'll gradually need to fade the rewards over time.
When you do that, like don't go cold turkey, don't go from a situation where you have lots of rewards and then fall off a cliff. That causes riots that creates a sense of unfairness in the class because the children then say, we don't know where we stand. What you need to do is reduce the frequency of how often you give those rewards out, give the kids notice that the system will fade away over time, build in more verbal identity feedback as you do this. And you do that by building shared class values essentially keep referring back to as a group, this is who we are, this is how we behave. And this is how we treat people here in this room, in this building. And when you do that, you find that kids rise to your values and they stop chasing rewards. Now, obviously, there are going to be some special cases and special reasons to introduce rewards and as ever, what works with your students is the most important thing.
You are the expert on your kids and don't let anyone tell you anything different. But if you're looking at your class or looking at the kids in your school and you're offering them house points or dojos or whatever it is, and that bribe isn't really landing, well, Well, maybe it's time to look at a different form of motivation, intrinsic motivation. So wrapping up the message is simple. Rewards can kick-start behaviour change, but they won't sustain it. And if you want that behaviour to last longer than a cheap pack of shiny stickers from Amazon, you need identity, you need pride, and you need that intrinsic motivation. Before you go, if you found today's episode useful, make sure you subscribe so you never miss a future one. And if you want more help on improving the motivation of your class and how they engage in your lessons, We've got a free download to help you.
It's called the Classroom Management Score Sheet, and it gives you a checklist of actions and factors inside the classroom that impact on behaviour and motivation in class. And it gives you simple, concrete ways of moving things forward. If that sounds helpful to you, head to beaconschoolsupport. co. uk. That's beaconschoolsupport. co. uk. Click on the free resources section and then click on the image for the Classroom Management Score You know how to use a website.
You'll see it near the top, but I'll also bang a direct link in the episode description that takes you straight through to the score sheet for this podcast as well. Hope you found that useful today and thanks for listening. If you heard something that's worth sharing, remember forward it on to two or three colleagues using your podcast app or just share this podcast on your social media using the share button. Thanks for listening today. I hope you have a brilliant week. And remember, behaviour isn't built with stickers.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
