‘The Coppice Way’ is the cornerstone of our Behaviour Policy. It is a behaviour curriculum that teaches the children the expectations, routines and habits that ensures our school is a calm, safe, happy place where everyone has the conditions they need to learn and thrive without distraction, and where everyone has equal respect for one another, both adults and children.
We believe that children need to be taught and not just told how to behave. We want to ensure that all of our children have a clear and consistent behaviour approach and expectation that they all understand. Importantly, we spend a lot of time explaining to the children WHY we have the routines, rules and expectations that we have as a school.
The whole system is based around ensuring that our children understand exactly what our values of being ‘Ready, Responsible and Respectful’ mean and what they look like in all aspects of school life.
Our behaviour lessons form the basis of the first week of school at the start of every academic year. In these lessons, we give detailed expectations for how children should behave and conduct themselves in different situations around school. These lessons incorporate our whole-school values and memorable acronyms that we are using in school every day e.g. ‘GLASS’ greetings, ‘Dress to impress’ ‘Fantastic walking’ and ‘First time every time’ so that the children hear the same consistent messages every day. It also enables expectations to be embedded school-wide, from Nursery through to Year 6.
Where children may have a particular need that makes the meeting of all expectations difficult, we will make appropriate adaptations within the classroom. However, even when adaptations are made, we still maintain a very expectation of behaviour and conduct from all of our children.
In summary, we endeavour to always make our school a place where it is easy for the children to behave and hard not to. We think extremely highly of our Coppice children and genuinely believe that our behaviour culture in school should be excellent if children are to achieve their full potential.
