PBS: Power Before Sensitivity
This campaign series blog is written by a Guest Contributor, who is parent to two Neurodivergent young people. Their youngest, Jaimie, has always experienced difficulties accessing education, both mainstream and specialist and they reflect on the role Positive Behaviour Support has played in their family's experiences.
Positive Behaviour Support, or PBS, is a relatively new term for us as parents. It wasn’t until our Autistic young person, Jaimie, experienced cataclysmic burnout attending a specialist secondary placement, that we openly came across this term. Our awakening to PBS, born from trauma and crisis, hammered home the dark side of the ‘positive’ spin. There had, however, never been anything truly positive in PBS, in any of it’s many guises, only the constant repackaging of power before sensitivity to Jaimie’s needs.
Jaimie had struggled throughout mainstream: multiple placement breakdowns, exclusions, restraints. We had finally got an EHCP and a diagnosis by Year 5, but by then so much damage had been done and too much trauma experienced. We clung desperately to the idea that a specialist placement would provide new hope. Yet, signs of extreme overwhelm crept in only weeks into the first term. The phone call, half-expected, turned into a stream and then an all-consuming tide of contact. The calls always began the same way, “Jaimie had a good day, but…” We relived how much desperation and sinking despair a word like ‘but’ could foretell. It was a pattern of events all too familiar. From the age of 5, we had gone through versions of the same. We knew the narrative well. “Jaimie is the problem, you are the problem, we know best how to deal with problems.” Power before sensitively listening to Jaimie’s and our insights and thoughts, boxing up our experiences as a problem to fix, not seeing our human needs. We had been broken many times before.
As on previous occasions, it was at our lowest moment, when the power of the system reached its zenith, with it’s fierce defence of inhumanity, of physical restraints and the threatened and then enacted exclusions, that we had to muster enough energy to break free. A specialist setting, our envisioned lifeline to something different, had rapidly ended up being so much worse than anything that had gone before. The holds, the bruises, the scraped knees, the baths to heal, but how could a bath heal the fear in Jaimie’s eyes at the thought of return? Baths cannot heal trauma. We left, and in being at home, we again knew Jaimie was safe.
“ Our awakening to PBS, born from trauma and crisis, hammered home the dark side of the ‘positive’ spin.”
It was in the weeks thereafter, in the time of trying to rebuild, and the not knowing of what’s next, that we discovered PBS in earnest. In preparing our case against the school’s conduct, we carefully re-read their behaviour policies. PBS, along with it’s rewards and the punishments, was there in black and white for all to see. The license to control, where behaviour was the key, was subtext no longer. It dawned upon us that this was the same behaviourist approach we had always lived through, and which had failed us, so many times before. The horror we had known, now had a name. It was like coming face to face with the blueprint of our school-based trauma. Jaimie responded to empathy, care and love; not strict demands on how to achieve other people’s idea of ‘best’.
Rewards and punishments had been our entire experience of education. The cloud on the sunshine board from nursery, the removal of house points and ‘Do-Jos’, alongside the time-outs, internal exclusions, and missed breaktimes, we had experienced them all. All ways to teach expected ‘positive’ behaviour. In failing to meet these 'expectations', Jaimie had been labelled as ‘challenging’, ‘volatile’, yet from a different perspective who had really been challenging whom?
We looked at other specialist settings, and saw again, and again, the PBS mantra, named or implied, lurking in the detail of the glossy websites. Knowledge from ‘experts’ held court over what we could bring as experts by experience, and clearly only ‘typical’ was good enough. Furthermore, the deceit of pairing these ideals and aspirations, alongside the offer of trauma-informed provision, was overt and ironic. Any setting built on reinforcing behavioural norms offered the very opposite of sensitive, nurturing care. This one-size-fits-all and deeply dishonest educational agenda was absolute, crushing and everywhere.
When you start to see the true fabric of the world, how that framework has seeped covertly and unannounced into your life, the reality behind the matrix, it is impossible to unsee. In standing back, we realised that although escape would be hard, and require personal sacrifice and bravery, we knew that living an authentic life would be so much better than the trauma of constantly being defined. We prioritised Jaimie’s identity, put their wellbeing first, and said goodbye to PBS, and in doing so we reclaimed our agency, putting personhood before the system.
