‘Am I Making the Right Choice?'

► At St. James’s School we believe that every child is a gift from God, made in His image and likeness and therefore entitled to be valued and respected as a unique individual.

Our Approach

Developing children’s understanding of the right choice is achieved by:

• Children signing a class charter at the beginning of the academic year.

• All staff using and modelling the language of right choices.

• All staff modelling excellent social and emotional skills through their language, verbal and non-verbal behaviours.

• All staff having high expectations of all children’s behaviour, language, verbal and non-verbal behaviours.

• Systematically teaching all children at the start, and throughout the school year, the school values and aims.

• Teaching and using the language of the Zones of Regulation, to enable children to recognise the causes of their behaviour and give choices and strategies to manage this themselves.

• All staff actively and consistently supporting children to make the right choices through:

  • Systems and routines that support excellent behaviour

  • Use of behaviour/classroom management strategies to pre-empt possible issues

  • Sharing this Behaviour Policy with and making it available to parents/carers

  • Encouraging parents/carers to contribute to the school’s positive behaviour and ethos

Recognising Right Choices

Regularly recognising, celebrating and recording when children are making the right choices should outweigh the recognition of wrong choices. There are many ways to recognise the right choices that all staff can use.

Free and frequent:

• Smile
• Warm eye contact
• Well done
• Thank you
• Describing exactly what they are doing right
• Using a child as an exemplar
• Recognising all of the children who are making the right choice
• Giving stickers, stamps, smiley faces etc.
• ‘Great day’ to parent/carer (this may be via a phone call/email if the child travels to school independently)

Class based systems:

Each class should have a system agreed with the children to recognise right choices e.g. House Points (Whole School), Stickers, Tidy Table Awards, Class Rewards, Notes Home.

Whole School Systems

► St James’s ‘BEatitudes’. These aspects have been chosen to encourage and give value to behaviours which develop children’s social/emotional skills and learning skills and also makes the school a harmonious and pleasant environment to be in.

House Points

We use House Points to reward children for their BEatitudes. The children have been divided up into six houses:

• St. Alban,
• St. Edward
• St. Hilda
• St. John Fisher
• St. Margaret
• St. Thomas Moore

Each team’s points are counted up at the end of each week, and the winning house announced in collective worship. Pupil council have decided the reward should be an additional play time. We expect children to encourage members of their team to try their best in every aspect of school life. Our Year 6 children will have an additional reward system in place, promoting pupil leadership and preparing the children for secondary school transition.

Year 6 Tuck Shop Rewards

There is a ‘tuck shop’ reward for Year 6 linked to their tokens.  Pupil council have decided that the tokens can be exchanged in the ‘tuck shop’ for rewards such as:

• Sitting next to a friend for a day
• St James’s stationery
• Book tokens
• Extra play