Part 2

                                                                                            Cognitive and Behavioural Strategies
Having identified those children who are high in Psychoticism and lacking in social skills, we then need a means of teaching them to manage their impulsiveness and compulsiveness.

This where the concepts found in Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy can be of great help.

The Cognitive approach is of use in getting the children in question to be more aware of the consequences of their actions upon others. As RED, in its typical refusal to accept fault (as that would be shameful), blames others for anything untoward that happens to it, it is useful to challenge its worldview. For example, such challenges may help these children to appreciate that the teacher's unwanted response is a consequence of their actions. This may stimulate the emergence of other vMEMES - most likely BLUE.

Cathy Byrne, headteacher at The Parks Primary School in Hull, uses the technique of cognitive windback to get misbehaving children to go back in their minds through all the possible alternative behaviours they could have carried out, rather than the impulsive actions they took which landed them in trouble.

From the time children enter the nursery at The Parks, there is a strong emphasis on teaching them social and emotional skills - including teacher expectations of children's behaviour. One of Cathy's strategies is to have a (brave!) child call her “a stupid fat cow” in front of the school assembly. She then models two possible responses for the children: one that will result in punishment and one that won't.

As important as Cognitive strategies is using a Behaviourist approach to tackling the impulsiveness and compulsiveness Psychoticism creates. Following Skinner's (1938) principles, restraint should be rewarded and impulsiveness punished. As Skinner (1969) was at pains to emphasise in his later work, though, reward is a much more powerful strategy than punishment so the reward for restraint needs to be that much greater than the punishment for impulsiveness.

At The Parks Cathy and her staff make a point of heaping praise on children for doing *the right thing*, from their first day in the school's nursery through to their last in Year 6.

Thanks to the kind of Cognitive and Behavioural approaches The Parks employs, the school, set in an area of high deprivation and low parent expectation, has fewer behaviour issues than many comparable primaries. Thankfully more and more schools - both primary and secondary - are now taking this kind of 'Positive Discipline' approach.

Inevitably conditioned restraint will break down and there will be a reversion to instinctive impulsiveness. So, as at The Parks, the conditioning needs to be reinforced (behaviourally) while the children are indeed encouraged to think (cognitively) about consequences. As higher vMEMES emerge and schemas relating to order (BLUE) and longer-term ambition (ORANGE) form, these will enable the children to restrain their impulsiveness when so motivated.

Some of the strategies outlined in this article are being employed by various schools and social services departments in different parts of the country. Some, such as the testing for Psychoticism I have recommended, are extremely rare. What is needed is a cohesive and comprehensive programme to address the different factors - from poor parenting to innate Psychoticism - which combine to undermine the wants, desires and needs of a significant minority of children. Such a programme will be intensive, time-consuming and costly. However, it is necessary if we are to enable such children to rise above the disadvantages life has given them.

My grateful appreciation to Cathy Byrne for her input on the behaviour management techniques used at The Parks Primary School.