Severe Behaviour Service

Ministry of Education, Special Education (GSE) behaviour specialists work with children in the early childhood sector whose behaviour is disruptive towards others, and with children and young people in schools who display severe and challenging behaviour. This is behaviour that may endanger themselves or others, damage property, or affect the child or young person's social interactions and learning.

Services may be available for students with disabilities under the Ongoing and Reviewable Resourcing Schemes (ORRS), as well as other students presenting with challenging behaviour. Behaviour services are usually provided to students Year 10 and below, unless they are ORRS funded and eligible to receive services until they leave school,

The effectiveness of the GSE behaviour service is reliant on working with the child or young person's whānau or family and those educators who have day to day contact with them.

The focus of the behaviour service is to work with these people to understand the reason for a child or young person's difficult behaviour and develop programmes and interventions that enable them to learn new and more positive behaviours and ways of being with others.

Service provision for children and young people with severe behaviour difficulties often requires short term strategies to manage the most difficult behaviours while strategies to develop long term positive change are developed.

Service provision is guided by well documented service standards and GSE is always working to improve and refine their behaviour service in line with best international practice.

Early childhood services and schools report growing numbers of children who are displaying severe behaviour difficulties at an earlier age. This means that an increasing number of children are starting school with disruptive behaviour and deficits in essential language skills that are necessary to successfully engage with the school academic curriculum. These children display both social and academic difficulties, they have problems forming social relationships and are often rejected by their peers.

Early behaviour difficulties that predict long term problems are easily identifiable. Studies show that effective early intervention programmes stop progression onto more serious difficulties.

Parenting of children with behaviour difficulties is challenging. A range of parenting programmes have been developed to help parents develop more effective skills to intervene earlier with children who experience these difficulties.

Cognitive-behaviour parenting programmes have consistently been found to be more effective with younger children, when child problems and parenting patterns are less well established and when parents can still more easily influence their children's behaviour. One programme series that time and again shows evidence of effectiveness across a variety of settings and countries is called the Incredible Years.

The Incredible Years programme series

Incredible Years has three parts. These developmentally-based programmes for parents, teachers and children are designed to promote emotional and social competence and to prevent, reduce, and treat behavioural and emotional problems in young children.

The programmes' goals are to strengthen families by improving parenting skills, increase teacher competencies and home-school links and develop children's social and problem solving skills in order to reduce severe behaviour difficulties.

The Incredible Years programme targets children aged two to eight years who are at risk for and/or presenting with behaviour problems (defined as high rates of aggression, defiance, oppositional and impulsive behaviours).

All GSE districts are currently building their capability to deliver parent programmes. Once these are well established around the country GSE will look at developing their capability to deliver the other parts of the Incredible Years programme series.

In some districts GSE is offering the Incredible Years parent programme in partnership with local agencies or Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. Children for the programme are identified through the GSE referral process and through working with schools, early childhood education centres and other agencies.

The core of the programme for parents emphasises increasing their skills such as: how to play with children, helping children to learn, effective praise and incentives, effective limit-setting, and strategies to handle difficult behaviour.

Evidence of the programme's effectiveness has been measured on a number of scales across a range of cultural settings. Studies of effectiveness have found the following improvements in the child and their environment:

• increases in positive parenting and decreases in the use of discipline by parents
• reductions in behaviour problems and increases in the child's social competence
• increases in children's positive behaviour and cooperation
• reduction in aggression by other children towards the child.

Studies also show these positive changes are sustained over time.

Finding those children who need help most

Presently GSE is working to select an early intervention screening tool for children aged three to eight years of age. The focus on children aged three to eight years is to enable service provision to occur at the time in a child's life where it will make the greatest difference. The selected tool will be tested before being piloted during the first quarter of 2008.

By adopting and using a well-known screening tool, information about children can be easily understood by a range of professionals and will lessen the risk of children being tested by a range of agencies. It will also assist agencies to work together to build an integrated intervention plan for those children most at risk.

For further information:

• phone your nearest GSE office
• phone the Special Education Information Line 0800 622 222
• or you can email special.education@minedu.govt.nz.