Product reviews for When the Adults Change, Everything Changes

After completing an exhausting academic year in July 2017, due to dealing with the extremely challenging behaviours pupils across our school were presenting with on a daily basis it was abundantly clear that our approach to managing behaviour wasn't working and something needed to change. With this in mind, I read Paul Dix's book over the summer holidays which completely transformed my thinking and enabled me to establish a clear action plan around a whole school approach to managing children's behaviour. As the title suggests -˜When the Adults Change, everything Changes', it was obvious that a change of culture and mind set was needed - we needed to change.

The practical nature of the book meant that it was full to the brim with easy cost-effective strategies which has enabled us to implement these changes and these changes have had an immediate impact on the everyday life of every member of our school community. Paul stated that -˜small visible shifts in adult behaviour have an incredible effect on children's behaviour' and we have been able to witness this first hand. We started very simply with what Paul Dix refers to as -˜Botheredness.' Every class teacher greets every child with a hand shake. We actively encourage daily acts of care and interest resulting in our children starting their school day feeling calmer, feeling valued and feeling safe.  We are all being relentlessly bothered in order to maintain a positive rapport with our pupils

Next, we simplified our behaviour policy introducing just three whole school rules which has defined whole school behaviour expectations and has created visible consistencies for our whole school community. There isn't an adult or pupil who does not know what our three school rules are; suffice to say this wasn't the case before. Additionally, we have introduced the '30 Second Intervention' which is providing a planned, predictable and safe way to send clear messages to the children about their behaviour. Before this, staff were responding emotionally to behaviour and were deferring to SLT which was undermining their relationship with the child.



We are still very much at the beginning of our journey, but everything we have implemented thus far has come straight from what we have learned directly from reading Paul Dix's book; consequently, there have been no costs involved but the results we have seen have been transformational and have demonstrated high impact. We understand that the culture in our school is set by the way the adults behave. We will continue on our journey using Paul Dix's highly commended book to ensure that we are continue to develop positive behaviour practice.