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School Safety and Security
Mike Kirby
26
75
Mar 98Develop a whole school policy
Ensuring that a school provides a safe and secure environment is a major concern for governors and teachers. Tragic events highlight the extent of the school's responsibility in this key area and the complexity of the issues involved. Careful planning is essential to protect the personal safety of pupils and staff, and to maintain the overall security of the school.
School Safety and Security contains a range of materials for helping governors, headteachers and senior staff to develop a school policy that covers all aspects of personal safety and the security of school property. The resource provides a step-by-step guide to the planning process – from reviewing existing policy to implementing new initiatives and involving the whole school. Safety both on and off the school site is considered.
A school policy on safety and security provides a focus for coordinating arrangements and procedures in this crucial area of school administration. This pack offers advice and practical support for the policy coordinators, helping them to draw together the diverse elements of school safety and security into a coherent, sustainable and developable plan.
School Safety and Security covers a wide range of topics and offers:
- Teacher guidelines and recommendations
- Essential planning materials
- Reviewing systems for existing provision
- Discussions of on-site and off-site security
- Curriculum links
- Whole school involvement
- Guidance to support from outside agencies
- Checklists and action plans.
Contents
- Introduction
- A school plan
- Personal safety
- Health and safety
- Fire safety
- Theft and burglary
- Vandalism
- School trips
- OFSTED reports
- Curriculum links
- Useful addresses
Onli56484
http://www.pearsonpublishing.co.uk/education/catalogue/493729.html
Coping with Difficult Children
Roland Chaplain and Andrea Freeman
978 1 84070 604 8Useful guidance and ideas
Recent media and political debate has highlighted the increased and often conflicting pressures on schools having to cope with difficult children. This accessible and highly supportive publication offers essential information and guidance for headteachers, governors and classroom teachers. Focusing on key issues in the assessment and management of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, the pack provides a positive and practical framework for the whole school as well as specific techniques for working with individual pupils. In addition to advising teachers on how to deal with the students themselves, working with parents and outside agencies is also addressed. Topics covered include:
- Legislation and statutory policy: Summaries of key Acts and documents to clarify the current frameworks within which schools are expected to operate.
- Definitions: Clear and user-friendly explanations to help clarify emotional and behavioural difficulties in context.
- Assessment: Practical approaches to determining the precise nature of emotional and behavioural difficulties.
- Intervention strategies: Examination of a range of approaches for preventing and responding to students' difficulties, ranging from whole school responses to multi-professional interventions with individual pupils.
- Whole school approaches: developing informed, sensitive and effective whole school policies.
- Classroom-based responses: a major section for teachers on developing coping strategies.
- Working with other professionals: role clarification, developing constructive and shared understanding of aims and processes with special schools, special units and other agencies.
- INSET materials
Classroom management techniques for elementary school classes
by JCSprenger
Created on: August 06, 2008
Language Difficulties Between Children and Adults
It is amazing how we forget that once we were children. We expect students to understand adult concepts, and we get upset when they react differently from what we expect. I personally hate to be called honey or sweetie; and I am a cranky cantankerous old man. Yet, when I ask my nephews and grandchildren, none older than 14, they unanimously reject the appellatives, thus creating a transgenerational link of agreement.
John Holt was an amazing author and teacher who wrote several books about education and the lives of children. He seemed to read their minds and understand what makes them tick. One of his best books is called "How Children Fail", originally published in 1962 (Pitman Publishing Company, New York). Holt was way ahead of his time, and his lessons still apply today. In a nutshell, we, the teachers (and parents sometimes), do not communicate effectively with children. He says about a difficult student: "The more I see of our troublemaking Jane, and the more I think about her, the clearer it becomes that she has a great need to feel truly loved, but feels that being loved when she is nice, good, obedient, etc., does not count."
Jane, and any other student like her, cannot tell the teacher: "Don't call me sweetie!" That be would be rude! I know a few teachers, female mostly, who regularly call their students, male and female, by that name. A student likes to be called by his/her first name, as it is a sign that the teacher has attached importance to his/her identity. But the child has been told since the first day in school in kinder that it is considered improper to contradict the teacher. So they simply roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders, and pretend they are pleased. This causes an important breakdown in communication, since it prevents the bonding that is so crucial between teacher and 'difficult' student.
Just as Jane, our first example, needs to be loved all the time, and not only when she is performing according to our criteria (teachers and parents), so do many more children quickly understand that they must adapt to the adults' requirements if they want to be 'loved' and appreciated. The right thing to do would be to show them that we really care about each and every one of them. Unfortunately, our school system gives teachers very little time to attend to the needs of every child in their classroom. Many will stay long hours after school to correct papers or do the bureaucratic paperwork required by the administration. Others will go to special events at night or on weekends to be close to their students. But they cannot do enough without help and the only solution is to come up with a way to reduce their work load to give them more time to bond with kids, especially the 'troublemakers'.