West Australian schools should be intervening in behaviour management sooner, advocates say, with new figures revealing primary school students are not being included in a program set up as a “last resort” to get students back on track.
The state’s education minister has also recognised that early intervention is key, with “violent behaviour starting to present itself more in the younger years”.
Data obtained by this masthead under freedom of information laws has revealed that in the past year and a half, the youngest students to attend the state government’s Alternative Learning Settings were in year 6.
The alternative settings – 12 in total across WA – were set up in an attempt to help schools deal with rising levels of classroom disruptions and behavioural challenges.
They are also aimed to help students, many of whom also lived with complex needs, instead of suspending or excluding them from education.
Symone Wheatley-Hey, founder of the group Square Peg Round Whole, said the feedback from parents of children who had attended these settings was that they worked.
But she said the intervention should come earlier.
“The data supports what we already know – younger children are falling through the cracks,” she said.
“Young people are being excluded in primary school more often and so why are they not being sent to these services?”
She said part of the problem was that the settings were only being offered to students at “crisis stage” and not early enough to intervene before things got worse.
“The ALS are trauma informed and culturally responsible, but they are only being offered at crisis stage,” Wheatley-Hey said.
“There should be intervention at the first sign of problems, which also means introducing some of the supports provided in these alternative settings in mainstream schooling.
“We need to look at what exactly is working and then scale it up. The narrative in the public space is that these alternative settings are punitive, but they are actually very supportive.”
Education Minister Sabine Winton agreed early intervention was key.
“It’s true to say that I hear some of the violent behaviour is starting to present itself more in the younger years, where traditionally we would have thought it was a remit of teenagers and high school kids,” she said.
“We want to try and intervene for young people before it escalates and exclusion happens because once that happens, for many young people, it’s challenging to come back.”
But Winton said she felt many schools were already achieving this without needing to implement ALS strategies, and that those settings were more of a “last resort”.
“There are schools who are doing a really great job in actually intervening and supporting young people – I’m interested in celebrating those and supporting other schools in taking up similar measures,” she said.
“Quite often the media or the public wants to talk about violence in schools and excluding kids and suspending kids, which I think is critically important – there’s zero tolerance – but we also need to actually address the underlying reasons why kids are behaving in certain ways, and they’re usually complex reasons.”
Wheatley-Hey said she was concerned it was the “zero-tolerance narrative” that was keeping ALS strategies from mainstream schooling.
“The public sometimes wants to feel that these kids are being punished, it’s not as popular a narrative to showcase rehabilitation,” she said.
Winton said under the better and fairer schools agreement, there was going to be “significant investment coming into the school system, specifically around supporting kids with complex needs”.
One initiative, trialled in WA schools last year, involved employing complex behaviour support coordinators to support students.
That initiative has been extended this year, with 64 coordinators employed across 192 WA public schools.
“That’s clearly the kind of support schools need to work with these students because whilst those alternative settings are short and sharp, those students still need support when they go back into those school settings,” Winton said.
“I know that’s what schools and teachers have asked for.”
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