Conflict Management Children

Children - teachers, assistants and youth workers in schools, residential care,
detention centres, special needs

managing behaviour

Some 48% of primary teachers reported pupils being physically aggressive in the Association of Teachers and Lecturers' 2010 poll of more than 1,000 teachers. This compared to a fifth of secondary school teachers. Over a quarter of school and college staff have had to deal with physical violence from a student, and just over a third had been confronted by an aggressive parent or guardian, the survey said..

Using its expertise in conflict management, Maybo has worked to find ways forward to assist staff in children’s services to manage the risks they face.

Course content for safer working with children and young adults

Effective conflict management requires action at organisational and individual level. Maybo’s conflict management programme addresses action at all levels. The programme helps staff develop skills to reduce the likelihood of incidents and to manage them effectively if they do occur.

Key content areas are:

Understanding and planning responses to challenging behaviour

Understanding factors that can escalate and de-escalate conflict

Using effective verbal and non-verbal communication skills to defuse potentially violent situations

What the law says about the use of force

What to do after an incident of challenging behaviour

SAFERchildren programme results

Following Maybo training in a school with resourced provision for children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties,

The number of incidents of challenging behaviour reduced by nearly 40%

Pupil behaviour improved (reward time earned increased by more than 10%)

The number of incidents of seriously challenging behaviour (that required more than 30 minutes to resolve) dropped by 80%

The number of incidents of physical intervention dropped by more than 80%

Why the Maybo SAFERchildren programme worked

This numerical evidence of effectiveness is further supported by observation of how staff behaviour changed following the training. For example,

Staff made more use of effective proactive prevention techniques, rather than just relying on strategies to handle conflict when it occurred

Staff changed their body language, to help them remain more calm, and to avoid sending accidentally aggressive signals

Staff gave children more options and more responsibility to enable them to find their own resolution to difficulties.

Meeting the needs of all children’s services staff

Maybo tailors its conflict management course to meet the need and experiences of different groups of staff:

Staff that work directly with children and young people have the opportunity to improve their understanding of conflict and develop their face-to-face skills

Managers and policy developers learn about organisational approaches to reducing conflict and violence. They also develop skills in how to support their front line staff during and after an incident

Administrators, teachers and support staff will learn about skills that help in dealing with parents and carers of children and young people

In educational and residential settings where teachers and staff face physical attacks or abuse the Maybo physical intervention skills set for children is recommended.