Incident Reporting and Recording

By Dean Cotton, Managing Director, Behaviour Smart Ltd

Most schools and children's home recognise the importance of good incident recording and reporting, but what is the point? We asked 100s of staff why they think recording incidents is important and we were very surprised at the answers we got. The answers range from "Because we have too" to "In case there is an allegation". Whilst both these answers are true we got the feeling that people were somewhat missing the point.

We know that people need to protect themselves and good incident recording should capture the main key points of an incident to give the reader a clear idea of the situation and the circumstances of the event. Incident reports are used regularly by investigating teams, not just when allegations are made but when further information is required when finding the best setting for our children and young people. For this reason it is important that incident reports give a clear reflection of the individuals needs. Unfortunately I have come across fabricated reports which aim to get the individual out of their current service for the wrong reasons. With inclusion a priority we know that schools and children homes sometimes struggle to provide the best quality care and education for some of our young people, we also know that some children are wrongly placed, but exaggerated claims about an individuals behaviour can lead to children being placed in services that are less suitable, this can have a long term impact on the individuals behaviour, mental health and ultimately their entire life.

Good incident recording should also highlight training needs. We are not perfect, we all make mistakes. Mistakes should not be seen as a failure, mistakes should be, to an extent, celebrated and always learned from. In his amazing book 'Black Box Thinking', Matthew Syed explains how people who recognise their mistakes improve their practice tenfold and become far superior practitioners than those who keep their mistake to themselves. We live in a strange world where nothing less than perfect is not good enough. Ideas like this could be a major factor to why so many newly qualified teachers leave the profession within the first three years, and why the social care system is significantly struggling to retain staff, but I digress.

So why do we record incidents? For us here at Behaviour Smart the answer is simple. We record incidents to provide better quality care and education for our children and young people.

There are many incident recording systems on the market and some are better than others but Behaviour Smart is different. Why? I hear you ask. Well to start with Behaviour Smart was developed by experts in behaviour, not a softwear company. This is important. You see most incident recording systems are developed by software companies who know a lot about software but very little about behaviour, yes they listen to what you want and add it to their system immediately but thats not always a good thing and is fraught with problems. One service I support told the developers of their incident recording system that they often stand children in a corner with a hat on if they had been 'naughty', they requested a tick box on their system for this technique. Within minuets the technique was added. Here at Behaviour Smart we do listen to our customers request for other questions or tick boxes to be added to the system, but such request are shared with our development team and our legal team before they get the green light.

In 2002 the Guidance for Restrictive Physical Intervention stated that staff should use a structured recording for the record incidents. Some incident recording systems could be in breach of this guidance due to a lack of structured questions. The Behaviour Smart system not only asks structured questions, the questions have been very carefully designed to be structured and inline with guidance and legislation. The carefully thought out questions do something else though, they help (or make) staff reflect and consider other options that might have been used and what might be used the next time a similar incident occurs.

Now for the cool bit! The moment an incident report written on Behaviour Smart has been completed the individuals behaviour plan is updated. Staff no longer need to spend hours analysing incident report to produce behaviour plans, it's done for you! The plans easily show any patterns in behaviour and can highlight where we are going wrong. The plans can be edited and shared with key partners and they are very powerful and effective (or is it affective) I always get that mixed up!

We have just added a new feature to Behaviour Smart which allows users to log other behaviours, including positive behaviour, this too can be easily added to the plan should you wish.

Finally let me tell you about the Behaviour Smart analytics features. If you want to know how many times 'Child A' was involved in an incident with 'Child B' in the dinning room, whist 'Staff member C' was on duty, it's simple. If you want to know how many incidents you have had where the low level behaviour was tapping on a table, thats simple too. The analytics system within Behaviour Smart is beyond cool!

So now for the sale pitch 😂

If you would like to see what Behaviour Smart can do for your service please get in touch or you download a free copy here to try for a few months. Let me know what you think.