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School-wide positive behavioural support in remote Australian schools: challenges in implementation

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Abstract

Providing behavioural support to all students is increasingly recognised as an integral part of teaching and learning in schools throughout the world. This small-scale, qualitative study reports on the perceived challenges faced by staff in implementing school-wide behavioural support at two remote Indigenous primary schools in Queensland, Australia. Individual semi-structured interviews held with two administrators and six teachers revealed implementation barriers to be clustered around four themes: staff turnover and leadership change; staff training; consistency in teaching and responding to student behaviour; and involvement of parents and remote community. These initial findings highlight the need to extend investigations into barriers associated with implementing and sustaining this behavioural approach in other remote schools throughout Australia, as student behaviour influences student learning, and lifting educational outcomes for Indigenous students is a national priority.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank participating administrators and teachers who made this research possible. They also wish to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land upon which this research was undertaken, and would like to pay respects to Elders, past, present and emerging.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University, Mt Gravatt, QLD, Australia

    Laura Loucks, Wendi Beamish, Stephen Hay & Mark Tyler

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  1. Laura Loucks
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  2. Wendi Beamish
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  4. Mark Tyler
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Contributions

The authors confirm contributions to the paper as follows: study conception and design: LL, WB, MT; data analysis: LL, WB; draft manuscript: all authors; refinement and approval of the final version: all authors.

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Correspondence to Laura Loucks.

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The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

This study was approved by Griffith University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (GU Ref No: 2019/1032).

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Loucks, L., Beamish, W., Hay, S. et al. School-wide positive behavioural support in remote Australian schools: challenges in implementation. Aust. Educ. Res. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00645-5

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