BaRT

BaRT is our Behaviour and Rewards Tracker. It is a unique system designed specifically for our school and encompasses both rewards and consequences. In essence, BaRT is an electronic ‘star chart’ so that teachers of all lessons can positively influence behaviour of their students and reward them for this. Good behaviour results in stars. The highest star earner last year earned over 7000 stars! That’s a lot of hard work and determination in lessons!

As students accumulate these stars over the weeks and months, they are converted to credits and held in their own version of an on-line bank account. From here, students can access the SOLAR Store (our very own on-line shop) to buy selected items ranging in ‘price’. The basic idea behind this is that the more students behave positively, the more stars they will earn and the more items they can purchase. This, we feel, is an important lesson in life and encourages consistent hard work. Equally important is the experience and knowledge of on-line shopping followed by personal collection of their items from our shop (run by some of our Sixth formers at lunch times). The rewards items range from small items of stationery to tablets, digital cameras and smart phones!

Rewards are a big part of the school ethos when dealing with challenging behaviour, but equally important is the consistent application of consequences when wrong choices are made. Alongside stars, BaRT also give teachers the ability to record ‘dots’, which is our way of reminding students that their behaviour in the lesson is unacceptable. These dots result in a range of consequences from ‘Restoration meetings’ with teachers (whereby the teacher will discuss the issues that arose in that particular lesson), to ‘reports’ that are issued when a student is flagged up for receiving more dots in a week than is deemed acceptable.

As a result of the information inputted by our teachers (in the form of stars and dots), every student has a comprehensive ‘profile’ that shows us, at the touch of a button, how they have been behaving in all of their lessons this year. This then allows us to track their progress and implement rewards and interventions where necessary.