Schools - improving relationships and behaviour: progress report 2025

Theme 5: Reducing violence and harm in schools

Action 15: Identify supports for schools for situations where children and young people are not responsive to authoritative approaches and consequences.

The Association of Scottish Principal Educational Psychologists (ASPEP) are currently developing a paper outlining the range of approaches and services that educational psychologists can offer to support relationships and behaviour, at a school and local authority level, based on their five core functions of consultation, assessment, intervention, training, and research and policy development.

Preliminary work has been undertaken on guidance around staged intervention approaches, and this work will be further scoped and developed during phase 2.

Education Scotland held a stakeholder event, attended by around 450 practitioners, to initiate discussions around how to use a rights-based approach to decision making when responding to a variety of scenarios ranging from school exclusions to considering alternatives educational options for some children and young people who disrupt the learning of others.

Action 16: Support schools' development of clear protocols for both preventing and responding to violent incidents and incidents involving a weapon, including risk assessments, relevant to age and stage of child or young person.

In November 2024, the Scottish Government published Included, Engaged, Involved Part 3: A relationships and rights-based approach to physical intervention in Scottish schools. This guidance provides schools with the latest human rights-based advice on reducing distressed behaviour and minimising the use of restraint. A review to consider the effectiveness of the guidance will begin in autumn 2025.

A sub-group comprising members of SAGRABIS and Education Scotland’s Social, Emotional and Behaviour Needs Network has been established to develop guidance on risk assessments. This guidance will be published during 2025.

Action 17: Develop evidence base on factors underlying violence, and develop teaching resources to support children and young people.

The Violence Prevention Framework sets out the Scottish Government’s vision to prevent violence across Scotland, and when it does occur, to reduce its harm. While the Framework has a broader scope than schools, a number of activities carried out by funded partners to support its implementation directly relate to schools and therefore contribute to this action.

Activity undertaken as part of Violence Prevention Framework includes the 'Quit fighting for likes' campaign and accompanying school resources, which were launched in September 2024. The campaign and toolkit were developed in partnership between the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, Medics Against Violence and YouthLink Scotland to support young people to navigate social media safely and prevent violence. Resources and training sessions have been developed for practitioners to help support the delivery of the campaign messages to young people. Partners were encouraged to share the campaign over their own social media over 10th – 14th February 2025, to coincide with Safer Internet Day on 11th February 2025.

Other relevant activity, as set out in the progress report of the first year of the implementation of the Violence Prevention Framework, published in September 2024, includes:

• Medics Against Violence engaging with young people highlighting the consequences of knife carrying and knife injuries in primary schools, youth clubs and secondary schools.
• The Scottish Violence Reduction Unit work to develop a community of practice for over 100 police School Liaison Officers across Scotland, working directly in schools to engage early with young people and their families.
• The Scottish Violence Reduction Unit provided training to over 800 teachers in schools to provide young people with key messages on violence, reaching 19 local authorities across Scotland.
• YouthLink Scotland have delivered various online and face to face No Knives, Better Lives training sessions to 703 practitioners working with young people. In addition, the No Knives, Better Lives programme worked directly with 274 young people.
• Supporting Education Scotland to deliver the Mentors in Violence Prevention programme, in over 200 schools across all 32 local authorities. This included 5,800 senior pupil mentors delivering 7,733 violence prevention lessons to more young people.

SAGRABIS has also expanded its membership to include the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, to strengthen links with the broader efforts to address violence through the implementation of the Violence Prevention Framework for Scotland.