Research emphasises the importance of school-wide supports that include proactive strategies for defining, teaching, and supporting appropriate student behaviours in classroom and non-classroom environments. The following is a snapshot of the how one school went about implementating supports to improve students’ behaviour on the corridors.

1. The Positive Behaviour Strategy Team gathered staff opinion on student behaviour using the NBSS school questionnaire the results of which identified one area that most staff saw as needing attention - behaviour on the corridors. Staff recognised that student behaviour outside of class was contributing greatly to the disruptive behaviour inside of class.
2. NBSS personnel worked with the whole staff in researching, planning and implementating supports to encourage positive behaviour in the corridors. In planning these supports the teachers, in teams, toured the school building with a map in hand and scored out of ten, students’ behaviour in different areas of the corridors and hallways, at particular times of the day. This resulted in being able to identify throughout the school building the ‘hot spots’, as well as times during the school day that corridor behaviour was at its most challenging.  The student council, also engaged in this task.
3. At this initial planning session the staff also discussed and named the type of behaviour that they would value and appreciate in non-teaching areas of the school and listed those corridor behaviours that were acceptable to all staff.
4. In order to communicate to students what was acceptable corridor behaviour members of the Positive Behaviour Strategy Team developed a set of lesson plans and resource materials to explicitly teach all students the desired corridor behaviours. These lessons were explicitly taught by the tutor of each class group but all teachers worked to encourage these desired behaviour, at all times, by noticing and naming the good behaviours when they saw them.
5. To keep staff informed of how these new supports were working a newsletter was developed.
6. With these new supports and strategies in place the Positive Strategy Team  then looked to how supervision was organised around the school building and what other approaches could be adopted to promote positive behaviour in the corridors. Ideas such as assigning a wall to each year group, where samples and photos of student work could be displayed were discussed. The idea here was to create school corridors that were  ‘learning zones’ that communicated to students the message that they are appreciated and supported to be and do their best in this school.

After addressing one area of concern at whole school level this Positive Behaviour Strategy Team wanted to maintain momentum and decided to focus on punctuality between classes, an area also identified through the whole school questionnaire by staff as needing attention.