What are they trying to say?

There is a moment in almost every educator’s career when a child’s behaviour asks more of us than our behaviour-management toolkit can provide.

A child refuses. A young person shouts. Someone walks out of a classroom, pushes another student, shuts down completely, or

seemingly chooses the very behaviour they know will bring a consequence.

Our first instinct can be to ask:

How do we stop this behaviour?

But I wonder whether there is a more important question:

What is this child trying to tell us?

That question has increasingly shaped the way I think about education, leadership and school culture. Because children do not arrive at our classroom doors as isolated learners. They arrive carrying relationships, experiences, family stories, strengths, fears, successes and sometimes adversity. If we only respond to the behaviour we can see, we risk missing the child standing underneath it.

Relationships are not separate from learning

Dr Pamela Cantor’s work on Whole-Child Design challenges us to understand development as deeply relational. Children develop within environments and relationships. The experiences surrounding a child influence how they learn, how they regulate, how they trust and how they understand themselves.

This matters enormously in schools.

Sometimes we speak about relationships as though they are the softer part of education—the thing we do before the “real” learning begins.

I would argue that relationships are part of the architecture that makes learning possible.

A child who feels known is more likely to take a risk.

A child who feels safe is more able to make a mistake.

A child who trusts the adults around them is more likely to accept correction.

And perhaps most importantly, a child who believes someone will listen is more likely to use their voice rather than their behaviour to communicate distress.

This does not mean lowering expectations. It means creating the conditions in which children have a greater chance of meeting them.

Looking underneath behaviour

The Berry Street Education Model provides a powerful lens for this.

Its trauma-informed, strengths-based approach asks educators to consider regulation, relationships, stamina, engagement and character as capacities that enable children to be ready to learn. Berry Street describes trauma-informed education not as excusing unsafe or disruptive behaviour, but as combining high expectations with the relational support, predictability and scaffolding children need to succeed.

This distinction matters.

Understanding behaviour is not the same as accepting behaviour.

We can say:

“That behaviour cannot happen here.”

while simultaneously communicating:

“You still belong here, and I want to understand what happened.”

Those two statements can coexist.

In fact, I think some of our most powerful educational work happens in the space between them.

The image from Berry Street that prompted this reflection captures it beautifully: what appears to be defiance may sometimes be a survival strategy. When we become curious about stress responses rather than simply categorising children according to their choices, our response changes.

Punishment asks, What consequence does this behaviour deserve?

Relationship asks, What does this child need to learn so that next time can be different?

But relationships also need boundaries

This is where I find Tom Bennett’s Running the Room an important companion to relational and trauma-informed practice.

At first glance, Bennett’s emphasis on routines, expectations and behaviour culture might seem to sit in tension with approaches such as Whole-Child Design or Berry Street.

I don’t believe it does.

Children need relationships, but they also need certainty.

They need adults who are warm and predictable.

They need classrooms where expectations do not depend on which adult is present or what mood that adult happens to be in.

A relational school should not be an unpredictable school.

Berry Street similarly identifies predictable routines, clear expectations and consistent boundaries as important elements of creating safety and reducing unnecessary cognitive and emotional load.

Structure, therefore, can itself be relational.

When I calmly hold a boundary, I am communicating: I will keep this space safe.

When I follow through consistently, I am communicating: You can trust what I say.

When I repair a relationship after something has gone wrong, I am communicating perhaps the most important message of all:

What happened matters—but it has not removed you from this community.

And then there are families

We cannot genuinely claim to work relationally with children while keeping their families at arm’s length.

Families hold knowledge about children that schools simply cannot possess.

They know histories we haven't lived.

They recognise subtle changes we may not notice.

They understand what helps their child feel safe, what frightens them, what motivates them and what may sit behind a response that appears inexplicable at school.

Yet too often our relationship with families becomes strongest when something has gone wrong.

A phone call about behaviour.

An attendance concern.

A learning difficulty.

A meeting.

A consequence.

Imagine what it feels like to be a parent when the school number appears on your phone and your immediate thought is:

What has my child done now?

That is not partnership.

Working alongside families means deliberately building relational credit before we need to draw upon it.

It means calling home with good news.

It means asking, “What do you notice at home?”

It means beginning meetings with the strengths of the child rather than a catalogue of concerns.

And it means remembering that families themselves may carry complicated histories with schooling. Walking through our gates may not feel safe for every parent or carer.

If we want them to trust us with their child, we must first demonstrate that we see them as partners rather than problems to be managed.

Berry Street’s own school approach reflects this by including families and carers in student support planning while encouraging students themselves to advocate for their needs.

The child must remain at the centre

There is another voice that can easily disappear when adults begin discussing behaviour.

The child's.

We can hold meetings about children without children ever feeling that anyone has actually listened to them.

Being heard does not mean getting your own way.

Student voice does not mean removing adult authority.

It means communicating:

Your experience matters.

I want to understand.

You are more than the worst thing that happened today.

This is particularly important for children whose behaviour communicates dysregulation or distress.

Before asking a child to explain themselves, we may first need to help them regulate. Berry Street emphasises co-regulation, emotional literacy and predictable relational responses because a highly stressed child may simply not have access to the reflective capacities we are demanding in that moment.

Perhaps the conversation can happen later.

Perhaps repair comes after regulation.

Perhaps listening needs to come before lecturing.

From doing

to

families, to working

with

families

I keep returning to the word with.

We work with children.

We work with families.

We work with colleagues.

Schools become relational communities when we stop positioning expertise as something held exclusively by the professionals in the building.

Teachers bring pedagogical expertise.

Families bring deep knowledge of their child.

Children bring knowledge of their own lived experience.

None is sufficient alone.

The strongest support emerges when those perspectives meet.

This requires humility from educators. Sometimes a family's interpretation will challenge ours. Sometimes a child will tell us that an interaction we believed was supportive did not feel supportive to them.

Our intention matters.

But so does their experience.

The culture children remember

Ultimately, school culture is created in thousands of small relational moments.

It is created in how we greet a child after yesterday was difficult.

It is created in whether we contact home only when something goes wrong.

It is created in the tone we use when correcting behaviour.

It is created when a dysregulated child discovers that an adult can hold a boundary without withdrawing their care.

And it is created when families realise that the school does not simply want their cooperation—we genuinely value their knowledge.

Cantor's work reminds us that human development is relational. Berry Street reminds us to look beneath behaviour and build the capacities children need to flourish. Bennett reminds us that strong cultures require adults to explicitly teach, model and maintain expectations.

Perhaps the challenge for schools is not choosing between these ideas.

Perhaps it is holding them together.

High expectations and deep compassion.

Boundaries and belonging.

Structure and curiosity.

Adult leadership and student voice.

Because the question should never simply be, “How do we get this child to behave?”

Maybe the more powerful questions are:

Does this child know they belong here?

Do they believe there is an adult who will hear them?

Does their family believe we are alongside them?

And when things go wrong—as they inevitably will—have we built enough trust to find our way back to one another?

That, for me, is where the real work of education begins.