Preventing Disruptive Behaviour in Schools

Abstract

This paper describes a consultancy service to whole-school systems that is offered by a small team of educational psychologists employed by a Local Education Authority in the south-west of England. Starting from an approach to service delivery that is essentially systems-orientated, the South Devon Psychological Service team has developed a working model for helping secondary schools to combat disruptive behaviour by students and develop their own effective and caring discipline policies. In developing this essentially preventative model, the team has incorporated its own outside consultant from the local university. The main focus of the paper is on the process involved in moving from clientcentred to systems consultancy work, particularly within the context of the English educational system where educational psychologists rarely work with ratios of less than 1:5000 and where it is expected that they will cover an age range of 0-19.