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Scottish study finds need for better knowledge of positive behaviour strategies for children with learning disabilities

John Northfield

How staff supporting children with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour is clearly of major importance. This Scottish study set out to look at the knowledge that teaching staff had regarding definitions of and management of challenging behaviour displayed by children with learning disability.

They found that the levels of knowledge amongst staff levels were relatively low. Those participants in the sample were likely to define challenging behaviour by function or topography.

In terms of knowledge or understanding of responses to challenging behaviour, they found that the staff were largely unaware of positive programming strategies. The authors state their concern that this may mean staff are poorly equipped to appropriately manage challenging behaviour in the longer term.

They also found that staff attributions of challenging behaviour were associated with reduced helping behaviour and increased anger.

The authors conclude that their findings suggest the need for better training and support of teaching staff to ensure that they have better and more up to date knowledge of challenging behaviour and more positive attributions.

Teaching staff knowledge, attributions and confidence in relation to working with children with an intellectual disability and challenging behaviour, Rae, H., et al., in  British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 39: 295–301.

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Written by

After qualifying as a social worker, John worked in community learning disability teams before getting involved in a number of long-stay hospital closure programmes, working to develop individual plans for people moving into their own homes. He worked for BILD, helping to develop the Quality Network and was editorial lead for the NHS electronic library learning disabilities specialist collection. This led him to found the Learning Disabilities Elf site with Andre Tomlin as a way of making the evidence accessible to practitioners in health and social care. Most recently he has worked as part of Mencap's national quality team and also been involved in a number of national website developments, including the General Medical Council's learning disabilities site.

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  • John Northfield

    John Northfield

    14 years ago
    Hi James, Thanks for your comment. I guess this is where we need managers not just to manage, but also to be leaders, through enabling their staff to acquire knowledge through training, and to put that knowledge into practice on a daily basis and to support them if things go awry. john
  • James Hourihan

    James Hourihan

    14 years ago
    Hi Kate and John I totally agree that an understanding of what motivates behaviour is key in staff being able to cope and therefore provide a better service to those they're supporting. Far too often training only deals with managing behaviour and not understanding it. We have found over the years that people have common misconceptions of why people do things and forget that actually we ALL behave in a challenging way at times. Understanding root causes goes some way towards developing better management strategies. The sad fact is that many senior managers have lots of training in the field and most of their staff have little training and understanding of behaviour management strategies, this creates the perfect storm where due to the managers knowledge, the service becomes a "specialist challenging behaviour organisation" and sadly their staff are unqualified to know what to do. That's not to say they're bad people, they just suffer from lack of knowledge. James
  • John Northfield

    John Northfield

    14 years ago
    Hi Kate, Thanks for your really helpful comment on our post. There is a good deal of research to support the idea of early intervention and the need for common understanding and responses from families and supporters to behaviours. I agree that teachers need access to information and training such as that provided by the Challenging Behaviour Foundation as part of a wider strategy to develop a good knowledge base around understanding behaviour labelled as challenging and in order to develop skills in responding. People who are interested in contacting the foundation can follow this link http://www.thecbf.org.uk/ john.
  • Kate Sanger

    Kate Sanger

    14 years ago
    My nineteen year old daughter has a severe learning disability and will display behaviours that are described as challenging, she will also display self-injurious behaviour at times. I must agree that during her time at school (special needs school) the staff struggled to cope and understand the function of her challenging behaviour, I tried for many years to get information on why our children use this type of behaviour to get their needs met. A very good support group (pamis) put me in touch with the Challenging Behaviour Foundation who are based in Kent and this was the turning point not only in my daughters life but also her family and all those involved in her support. When I received their information pack it contained much needed information as to the reasons, and different setting in which may cause her to use challenging behaviours. Having attended their training I now have a behaviour support plan as part of her personal support plan, also all those involved in her care have also attended the their training workshops so everyone is doing the same thing. I now look at the behaviour and work out what she is trying to tell me, we also have to look at the way we respond. I wish I had access to this knowledge and skills years ago it would have saved a lot of heart ache. School staff should have access to this training instead of struggling and sometimes through lack of knowledge in this area making things worse. Early intervention is the best way forward as the behaviours become entrenched they are harder to change. I hope this information will help .