Recording behaviour and recognition

An entry carries a category, a sub-category and a level, alongside the student and the date. Recognition is a category in its own right rather than an afterthought, because a behaviour record that only holds problems describes a child badly.

• Category separates an incident from a recognition.
• Level records severity, and is what pastoral staff triage on.
• The entry is attributed to whoever wrote it — behaviour records are read months later, when memory has gone.

Staff see everything in their school. Families and students do not, and the rule is narrow: they receive an entry only if it has been shared, or if it is a recognition.

Everything else is a private pastoral note. That default matters — a half-formed observation written on a difficult afternoon should not reach a parent because somebody forgot to mark it private.

Pastoral staff work the list by level rather than by date, so the serious entries surface regardless of when they were written. Alongside it sits the student concerns inbox — the things students raised themselves, which is a different queue with a different urgency.

One entry is an event. The same child appearing across several weeks, or the same class appearing across several children, is the thing worth acting on — and it is only visible once entries are recorded consistently.

This is why recognition matters operationally as well as ethically: a record containing only incidents cannot show you a child who turned a term around.