At Chesterton, we had a paper based system of rewarding hard work and tracking incidents of poor behaviour, the Good News / Bad News slip system.
It worked – but created lots of paperwork and admin.
Writing out the slips was time consuming – discouraging teachers from giving the rewards the students deserved.
Tracking and filing the copies was more time consuming – copies to Heads of Faculty and Heads of Year were a good record of a pupil’s behaviour record but took too much time to file.
Due to the time consuming nature of the task – the recording of Good and Bad news only kicked in for higher level incidents – meaning lower level information was never recorded or shared.
In reviewing our behaviour policy we recognised the need for consistency across the College so we agreed a levelled system for both good and bad news and and gave examples of types of behaviour and its consequences or rewards. This was backed with further training and coaching on delivering consistency and interpretting the new policy.
What was really needed was a means of simply tracking communicating and analysing the events at the various levels.
Having the good fortune to be a partner to the emerging software group ISIS software from collaboration work on their excellent assessment system, worked with ISIS to develop a simple software application which would allow us to fully implement our new behaviour policy and get the most out of the information.
The result of this collaboration is IsisBehave . Now fully implemented across the college, the software gives us all the information we need at the click of a mouse.
