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Student displays challenging and difficult behaviour + Update

NAS80219

Hello everyone, we are asking for help on behalf of the staff team and parents of a student. 

This student is displaying some behaviour which is getting difficult to manage. The biggest issue is that she trusts very little staff, 5 max, therefore becomes unsettled when she doesn't have these staff. She is becoming controlling around this and is getting angry, sarcastic, and argumentative when she doesn't have the staff she trusts or can just tolerate. She is starting to make threats saying that after half term, if she doesn't get good staff and if her timetable isn't sorted out then we are going to have some serious issues. She says we don't care about what staff we give her and that we are setting her up to fail. We are giving her new staff and she agreed to this so she can hopefully build trust with these but it's not going well. 

She is becoming verbally aggressive towards staff and the past couple of days she has become disruptive ripping off display boards and ripping them into tiny pieces and chucking it on the floor and refuses to clean up and says it's our fault for not giving her good staff. She locked herself into the sensory room today and blocked the door with a chair so it couldn't be opened and put a mat up at the window so we couldn't see in which she knows isn't allowed. She was swearing and kept referring to the trust issues and staff and the timetable. She has stopped opening up to us and will now just scream when things go wrong. We are losing trust and it's hard to gain back. 

She is also blaming us for her actions. She will do something wrong and will say that maybe we should give her good staff then this wouldn't happen or that she wants to trust staff but how can she when we don't give her good staff. She knows we don't like it when she struggles so keeps saying that why give me rubbish staff if you know I'm going to struggle so obviously you don't care. Or it's, you know I've going to jump the fence or run off if I don't have good staff and that we'll have problems. Today she made the comment of, Well I'm sorry that I got upset and trashed the room because you gave me crap staff, in the most sarcastic way possible and gave us the worst look she has ever given us. She is starting to become very challenging.  She is very rude and has a lot of attitude towards all staff now and we are getting worried where things are heading.

So if anyone has any ideas, please let us know. Thank you

UPDATE: Another tricky day today. She didn't like either staff again today and went to our local shopping centre and walked round then sat on a sofa there and refused to leave because she didn't want those staff members to take her home. She than ran away from staff and is a fast runner so we did lose sight of her therefore parents were called, and police were searching for her aswell as security in the shopping centre were keeping an eye out. After 2 hours we had sight of her and she was happy, dancing, skipping, singing whilst walking round the town. We gave her space and kept as much distance as we could and she was fine.

Parents

  • All you've done here is describe her reactions, but there's no way to make suggestions because we don't know what she's reacting to.  

    Presumably if you're working in a school with a sensory room you deal with pupils with additional needs a lot.  You should remember that behaviour is communication, that outbursts hapoen when children are overwhelmed, and that every person is different.

    Without knowing the child in question, there's no way to say what's upsetting her.  All I can say is that she is clearly very upset and you need to get to the root cause of that and deal with it.  The one clue you mention is that she has difficulty trusting and that may indicate that someone has betrayed her trust.  Some of the things you mention could even be red flags for safeguarding concerns.

    I presume that you're asking here because she's autistic, so I would also like to suggest that her "threats" are just her way of stating how she sees things progressing.  She's still a child and learning how to express her needs amidst a lot of complex emotion.  She needs someone who will not take offence and just calmly support her.

Reply

  • All you've done here is describe her reactions, but there's no way to make suggestions because we don't know what she's reacting to.  

    Presumably if you're working in a school with a sensory room you deal with pupils with additional needs a lot.  You should remember that behaviour is communication, that outbursts hapoen when children are overwhelmed, and that every person is different.

    Without knowing the child in question, there's no way to say what's upsetting her.  All I can say is that she is clearly very upset and you need to get to the root cause of that and deal with it.  The one clue you mention is that she has difficulty trusting and that may indicate that someone has betrayed her trust.  Some of the things you mention could even be red flags for safeguarding concerns.

    I presume that you're asking here because she's autistic, so I would also like to suggest that her "threats" are just her way of stating how she sees things progressing.  She's still a child and learning how to express her needs amidst a lot of complex emotion.  She needs someone who will not take offence and just calmly support her.

Children
  • in reply to Glitter

    We do agree to what you are saying and we do apologise for not making it clear. The root of the problem is she doesn't trust or feel comfortable with the majority of staff and doesn't like her timetable and both of these are causing her distress so we are changing her timetable for after half term. We know it is just impossible for students to work with staff they don't know, trust, likes or feel comfortable with. She has told us she is struggling with both staff and timetable and we do our best to sort her staff out in particular but it's hard because it's hard to change students staff because it makes them upset and its not fair on them so options are very limited. 

    She has had a traumatic time with schools in the past therefore struggles to trust staff due to the past. Its also a defence mechanism because she knows that her preferred staff will leave at some point so why build even more trust when they will just leave causing her to be very upset. She's had quite a few preferred staff leave since joining us and since this we've realised she tried her best to not form working relationships with staff. I forgot to mention that another staff is leaving and this is the main one she talks to so this is also in the mix of things aswell as it being the last few days until half term. 

    She always seems lethargic or in an alerted state and never seems relaxed or regulated and this has been since her first day of joining us but we aren't sure why. She's constantly struggling and unsettled even when things are going smoothly, has her usual staff, schedules, everything is right but is just unsettled and is constantly pacing the school so obviously we aren't meeting her needs but we aren't sure what need this is, we've had professionals in to look at this but even they aren't sure.