What is Positive Behaviour Support?
Positive behaviour support (also known as PBS) is a framework that aims to decrease behaviours which challenge, alongside increasing skills, opportunities and environments that improve quality of life.
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It is an approach used to understand what triggers, or leads to behaviours of distress so that strategies can be developed to prevent the behaviour whilst providing the person with alternative communication and skills to get their needs met.
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The core principles of PBS include:
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Understanding Behaviour
It is crucial to understand what the behaviour is communicating in order to ensure that effective strategies are introduced. PBS uses a variety of data collection methods to work out what the behaviour is communicating and then, strategies are derived from this.
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Proactive strategies
PBS focuses on preventing behaviours that challenge through proactive measures, meaning that we aim to put strategies in place before the behaviours happen to prevent them from happening, rather than trying to make changes to them in the moment. Although no strategy anyone can introduce will guarantee to stop behaviours completely or forever, proactive strategies can change the environment around a young person and help teach the skills the person needs so that behaviours can be reduced.
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Teaching New Skills
A significant part of reducing behaviours involves teaching a person alternative skills to replace these behaviours. PBS is a strength-based approach, which focuses on teaching skills by utilising a person's current skillset to enhance their communication.
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Data Driven
All decisions made around the support your young person gets will be data driven, and completely person-centered. We will continually monitor and assess our strategies through-out our work to inform us on whether they are effective or not and make changes based on this information.
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How do we define "Behaviours of Distress?"
Behaviours of distress (also known as "behaviours that challenge"/"behaviour of concern") can be described as:
“behaviour(s) of such intensity, frequency or duration that the physical safety of the person or others is likely to be placed in serious jeopardy, or behaviour which is likely seriously limit use of, or result in the person being denied access to ordinary community facilities.” (Emerson, 2011).
This quote is very important as it helps us to define what behaviours we would consider supporting someone to change, and what ones we wouldn't want to. Our ethos is to ensure that any behaviours in which are identified for support are those which are impacting the persons quality of life directly in some way, and we will work collaboratively alongside both the parents and as much as possible, the young person, to ensure that our work is encompassing changes that are benefitting the person themselves and are meaningful to their life.
Language and terminology is always developing, and we will always try and use the language you would prefer to describe behaviours at home. At ENA Behaviour Consultancy, we currently just use the term "behaviour" to describe the concerning, or distressing behaviours at home that you may be seeking support for. Once we are working together, we may label the behaviour speficially (such as hitting, or kicking) but often we avoid using any other words when describing the behaviour. This is because all behaviour is different, and some behaviours may be distressing to some people but not others; some people might find another person's behaviour challenging where as the person themselves is more than happy doing that specific behaviour and does not find it challenging at all.
For example, some behaviours, especially those described as stimming behaviours, may often serve an important purpose for a person and often do not need to be changed or replaced. This is very important for us at ENA Behaviour Consultancy and we would never set a goal around changing a behaviour that appears for the young person to be helpful to them in some way such as helping them to regulate.
If you have any further questions about our work and our goals,
please feel free to contact us
Is Positive Behaviour Support right for my family?
There is strong evidence base to suggest that Positive Behaviour Support is effective at improving quality of life and proactively supporting young people that may present distressing or concerning behaviours.
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PBS focused on introducing strategies proactively - meaning that strategies are put in place to prevent behaviours from happening. This is done in a variety of ways including making changes to the environment and teaching skills. When introducing these, PBS focuses on increasing these alternative behaviours by using reinforcement. "Reinforcement" is a term which describes something that follows a behaviour that increases its frequency in the future. Traditional parenting often involves using "punishment" which in PBS terms refers to something that follows a behaviour which is likely to decrease the future frequency of that behaviour. Strategies of this nature may include removal of a preferred item, or a "time-out".
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These strategies are not going to be suggested at ENA Behaviour Consultancy.
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Using reinforcement based strategies may be quite different to previous strategies that you have used in the past, so we ask that parents and carers come into our session with an open mind, and potentially willing to also change their own behaviour so we can adapt the environment around our young person to better support them and their needs.
This specialised approach requires commitment and consistency, and therefore we ask that families ensure that they feel ready to engage with the work fully prior to beginning.​
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If you would like to know more about PBS then we would recommend looking at the following links:
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