Poverty, Scarcity, and Behaviour in Our Schools

A girl arrives late without breakfast, in trainers, with no homework and no PE kit. She gets a late detention and snaps at the receptionist. If money and stress at home sit behind a pattern like that, another sanction is unlikely to change it.

This course looks at poverty through the idea of scarcity. When money, time or calm are short, people have less mental bandwidth, so they make more mistakes, and each mistake costs them more. National data links deprivation to suspensions, hyperactivity and peer problems, and you'll turn the same lens on your own school. How many conditions does your uniform policy set, and what happens when a child can't meet them?

It's taught by a behaviour consultant whose book on why children are excluded puts poverty in chapter one. You'll come away asking whether your school could make things easier to achieve, rather than punishing them.