Herdding our puppils. A lightly confusing introduction to pastoral and behaviour management

I was not the only one who got a bit stunned when reading “meeting with the Pastoral Manager” in our training programme. After leaving my intuitions out to understand the meaning of the term “pastoral”, I did decide to google it. Poor me! I didn't research enough to realise it means more that one thing in English. So automatically I started wondering “what the h*** is a priest doing in a state-funded school?”. Poor me again, with all my secular prejudices!

Nothing further from the truth. The role of a Pastoral manager in an English school is something akin to our “orientador escolar”. And actually, Claire – whom we have the pleasure to meet- was great. Sometimes it is much easier to ask the people what they do in their jobs than to study the official tasks they're suppose to do.  

Pastoral managers in BVG are responsible for any single students' concern that goes besides academic stuff. Just to mention some of them: groups tutoring, avoiding bullying and other forms of violence, integrating new students in the everyday school life, controlling attendance and punctuality and so on and so force.

Something interesting that showed up in the conversation was the organisation model they have built up. Unlike the horizontal system of tutoring we're use to, BVG has adopted a scheme that has become popular in the country during the last few years. The full student body is divided into seven “houses” that are named after a famous female intellectual to encourage them. There are no special criteria for the initial assignment to a house but to spread out the students with special need and to not separate members from the same family. Then, each house is divided again in groups formed by members of every year(vertical system) . This groups are meeting everyday for half an hour. During that time, a bunch of activities are done: from dealing with daily cohabitation  problems to project-based works. It would be interesting to study the advantages and problems of this model by comparing it to the classic horizontal one. But I don't want to get annoying with long reflections.

Besides the meeting I just wrote about, we had a seminar session in college about behaviour management. Two excellent teachers provided us with some techniques for avoiding misbehaviour in class and then, we did some role-playing. Even if nothing too new comes into pitch, it was a clever, humorous synthesis of many strategies we have learnt this year. 

Just to sum up, it's been a week with some very interesting experiences. I would like to thank all the Bradford College's and BVG's staff that are collaborating with us.

Antonio Yuste