Geraldine Jozefiak
Our schools are in crisis. The generation going through school right now struggles to concentrate and socialise. The effects of Covid and isolation have had a long and deep effect on how our children manage their feelings and behaviour around others. We call them The Anxious Generation.
The result of this is immense for your school.
As an education business, you need your school to perform well in the league tables to attract new families. You know that good league table results matter.Â
But supporting challenging students can affect this showing, whilst also rapidly diminishing your budget.
Students show up as challenging because theyâre anxious, disengaged, and struggling.
A side effect of disruptive behaviour
Many teachers have to interrupt the flow of their lessons. Theyâre not able to teach their own subject as they would like, because theyâre having to address and correct individual poor behaviour. They end up dealing out discipline when they should be delivering their subject!
And what of these disruptive studentsâ classmates, whose own learning potential gets diminished when their teachers need to step in with stress management advice?
This âsecondary fall-outâ can also be a slow drip feed into lower attainment and poorer results. Itâs an additional by-product of the core problem. Managing behaviour.
Calls on your budget and staffing
Many of these students who challenge your budget may not have completed the curriculum, so have less of an even chance of success when they do their exams. Â But for some, the exam room itself remains a step too far.
Their anxiety at being in a full exam room with others forces them to request 1:1 attention and separate invigilation. And as a school, that puts an added burden on you to meet these increasing administration and invigilation requirements.
Every extra 1:1 call on your specialist staff is costing you:
Every call for support needs investigation, psychometric testing, form filling and submission and extra staffing ratios.
Simply, calls on your pastoral staff to contain and control poor anxiety-based behaviour is a long-term drain on your budget.
Itâs a challenge that School leadership can no longer afford to ignore. This mix of challenging behaviour and poor learning achievements feeds through to your test results and league scores.
So whatâs the Cause?
Whatâs causing the problem? Itâs something thatâs often not spoken about in school when talking about our students, and thatâs stress.
Our young people are stressed. They need help to manage their fears, ease their anxieties and rub away the accumulated tarnish that hides their shine.
Itâs a truth that this generation are âsmart, but they donât test wellâ.
Whilst your students may be smart, they may not perform well at tests and exams. Youâve been teaching all the important concepts of the curriculum, but student grades and test scores arenât reflecting that.
Itâs not Your Fault. Itâs not Their Fault. The Root Cause of the problem ironically for both your bright students and your challenging students, is stress.Â
Get rid of the stress behind the problem and you allow your students to
They can have all the skills and information your teachers are teaching them but if stress gets in their way, your test scores wonât go up, no matter what you do.
Help them shift their anxiety and theyâll be able to show up as their best selves.
That will
Schools right now just arenât equipped to deal with this. You may think you have the answer but are still failing to address the root cause of the problem â how these children feel about themselves and their ability to do well.
And what if you fail to fix the problem by looking at the root cause?
Each month you delay addressing the problem, will become even more expensive as another year group of anxious students joins those already in this spiral.
As things get nearer to test and exam time, you may see still be seeing poor test results, unless you start to break down the barriers theyâve put up to hide their anxiety.
The problem is, no-one's teaching the solution the right way. No-oneâs showing you the solutions.
Do it the right way and you shift the stress that causes the behaviour challenge and that can change everything.
A solution that feeds into your test results
Think of the solution as the nursey rhyme ââ the house that Jack Builtâ. One thing leads to another. We work from the ground up, building new foundations that teach your students how to think, act, work and do well.
We do it step by step. Layer by layer.
I can help you, your students and teachers to get back their mojo. And, by doing that, strip back and heal the very things that are blocking their ability to show up as their best selves, wherever they are on their learning path in school.
Doing this now will help them change how they think about themselves. If you donât intervene, theyâll continue to be dis-engaged and remain on the edge of relationships and of being a valued part of your community, and ultimately, our society.
They can glow again. You can help them do that, and I can show you how.
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