‘A promising, practical solution': Sydney's new schools-based therapy changes how teachers and parents deal with bullying

The Guardian

5 hours ago

When children began at Ingleburn public school in south-west Sydney with disruptive behaviour, parents often laid blame with the teachers and their educating style. Then the school opened a world-first behavioural clinic that brought families into the school grounds – with 'dramatic results', according to the school's principal, Graeme Green.
He says that after 25 years on the job seeing many programs with varying results, 'I've never seen such a calm, beautiful school operating'.
'I believe that every area should have a hub,' he says.
Late in May, the federal government opened submissions for a review into bullying at Australian schools, noting its 'significant detrimental impacts' on student mental health and wellbeing, including attendance, engagement and learning outcomes.
According to the Australian Council for Educational Research (Acer), Australia's disciplinary climate – how often disruptive behaviour means students miss out on learning opportunities – is significantly worse than the OECD average. Exposure to bullying is higher in Australian classrooms (which scored -0.2) than all comparison countries (average 0.04), except Latvia.
The review aims to develop a nationally consistent response to the issue. But some schools are already implementing highly effective behaviour programs, which they say with funding could be replicated at a larger scale.
The Ingleburn hub was developed by Eva Kimonis, a clinical psychologist and UNSW professor, to help manage aggressive and disruptive student behaviour using an enhanced version of parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT). Students are referred via school-wide screening, teacher referral or their transition to school program.
Instead of a therapist working in a room with a child, they coach parents from behind a one-way mirror using a in-ear device. Over 21 weeks, parents receive intensive training to implement strategies to address disruption.
Teachers are also involved, embedding the strategies taught in the clinic into the classroom. The program's first trial worked with 69 prep and year 1 students in south-west Sydney, running across 17 schools, through two fixed on-site clinics. Kimonis says 91% of children who had shown disruptive, aggressive or destructive behaviour afterwards showed a return to typical behaviour levels.
She recently received federal funding to scale up the program to more schools and regions over the next two years.
'Schools are telling us loud and clear: student behaviour is deteriorating, and teachers are struggling to cope,' Kimonis says. 'School PCIT offers a promising, practical solution to a growing crisis.'
She says PCIT, which focuses on children aged two to seven, works as an 'innovative early intervention'.
Green's clinic, the first to open in mid-2019, was built using the school's own funding. Since then, students from six local schools and kindergartens in the area have attended sessions on-site.
'When a child comes in with issues, we want to work with the parent,' Green says. 'Sometimes parents can think [a student's behaviour] might be the school's fault, but PCIT brings us all together.
Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email
'The biggest plus for me is the relationship with the community … a parent who might have been thinking 'what's the school doing?' is now working with us.'
Melissa Anderson, a psychologist and PCIT clinician at Ingleburn, says PCIT is one of the most effective programs for managing emotional and behavioural problems in young children. Developed in the 1970s by American professor Sheila Eyberg, it did not emerge in Australia until the early 2000s. More than 20 clinics now operate nationwide.
What Kimonis's approach has done differently – and for the first time – is deliver the program at school.
'With PCIT in a school setting, we can also involve the teachers and teach them some of these skills to use with the kids.' It's 'a whole-systems approach' that gives kids much-needed consistency, Anderson says.
Káti Gapaillard, the CEO of Australian charity The Fathering Project, says aggressive behaviour often starts before school – before children have the tools to regulate their emotions. The charity's research has found children whose fathers use consistent, warm parenting styles show fewer emotional and behavioural problems.
Supporting fathers from the early days of parenting, Gapaillard says, '[creates] ripple effects that reduce bullying and improve wellbeing across whole communities'.
Research suggests bullying arises from the complexity of children's relationships, including within the school, but families play an especially important role. So too do personal characteristics – including gender. While physical bullying is more common among boys, girls are more likely to experience cyberbullying.
Cliche or not, the saying 'It takes a village to raise a child' rings true for educators. The president and executive director of the Australian Secondary Principals' Association (Aspa), Andy Mison, has been urging governments to better engage teachers and principals in policy design – and for a broader community approach.
'Schools want to improve,' Mison says, 'and we want to do the best job we can, but we can't do it alone.'
On Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, the 'village' has come together to fund evidence-based programs in nine local schools with low rankings on the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage.
The cluster of schools has been supported by the Mornington Peninsula Foundation for around a decade to train teachers in evidence-based instruction and intervention, including phonics – years before it was rolled out in curriculums.
This year, participating school Western Port Secondary College (WPSC) started using Dr Tim McDonald's Classroom Mastery program to inform classroom behaviour management.
The intervention, funded by more than 200 individuals, families and trusts, focuses on scripted routines and predictability in the classroom to reduce students' cognitive load so they are more free to learn.
For instance, the bell is a signal for the teacher, not students. They wait to be told to stand behind their chair, tidy their area and check there's no rubbish on the floor, and put their chairs up before being dismissed row by row.
If the routines aren't working and the class is misbehaving, they are taken outside, have the purpose of the teacher's script explained to them, and start again – sometimes multiple times.
WPSC's principal, Chris Quinn, says during the program's short timeframe, disruptions have drastically reduced.
'When the teacher owns their space and owns the entry, there's an increase in learning time. And that's what we've seen,' he says.
Students, especially senior students, initially saw the program as 'babyish', he says. 'But they've actually found that it's really benefited them, because they just know exactly what's going to happen.'
For Quinn, behaviour management is fundamentally about politeness.
'Behaviour is something that's not innate, it's learned,' he says.
'If we want young people to learn something, then we've got to model it. When exiting the classroom, we see students and teachers thanking each other at the door … rather than putting on a PowerPoint lesson on respect, which can often go in one ear and out the other … it's actually the lived experience of what it looks like.'