The Nurture Principle is the best thing going in Scottish education, day-to-day.
When you hear how successful it is in schools you wish it had been part of schools for generations. At its simplest, it’s the ideology of kindness, patience and not taking things personally as a teacher when a child kicks off.
It’s understanding what goes on in the brain when a child is emotionally deregulated and doesn’t come in with a pencil, or hasn’t got uniform. I live and breathe it.
I’ve not always been a poster boy for it. My previous school had a long way to go, because shouting at students was still quite normal at that place. Part of nurture is helping young people have a space to come down from their emotion and do whatever they need to do to get back into the classroom.
It means never shouting at kids, and understanding that if you do that they will either laugh, shout back, freeze, run away or cry.
Within all that, it’s helping young people access and understand boundaries. It doesn’t mean that you become Miss Honey from Matilda and you let the kids do anything they want. If a child is having a big, overwhelming moment where there’s a fight, or they’re shouting and swearing, you still need to be very firm and remove them from that environment for the benefit of others.
