Standard 12: Management of Students' Behaviour

‍The Registration Requirement

Under the Guide to the registration standards and other requirements for non-government schools effective 1 January 2024, the Director General must be satisfied that your school has and implements comprehensive and clear procedures for managing student behaviour, including student discipline. Your school’s governing body and leadership team hold ultimate legal and operational accountability for ensuring that all disciplinary pathways are executed with strict transparency, consistency, and alignment with the principles of procedural fairness.

To satisfy this standard, your school must maintain a responsive, positive engagement framework. This involves holding clear student codes of conduct, implementing proactive anti-bullying structures, outlining precise escalating disciplinary interventions, and explicitly prohibiting any form of corporal punishment or degrading treatment within the institution.

💡 Expert Compliance Note: Standard 12 is a binary, zero tolerance standard during an initial registration review. For a brand new school entity, case managers cannot audit a history of live financial ledgers, active fee collection pipelines, or realised operational balance sheets. Instead, they will thoroughly examine your proposed business plans, blank fee schedule templates, forward looking cash flow projections, and parent financial contract packages. Planning to operate a single day of school operations without demonstrating a strict financial viability validation block, or failing to prove that the governing body maintains uncompromised control over strategic funding paths, will trigger an immediate compliance flag during your review. The templates in our system are engineered from the ground up to stop these issues before they start.

‍Official References

The application form and guide are available for download via the links below.

👉 Application for registration document.

‍ 👉 Guide to the registration standards and other requirements for non-government schools effective 1 January 2024‍ ‍

Your Downloadable Template Bundle

‍Your membership includes full access to our Management of Students' Behaviour Templates Bundle. This all in one ZIP file contains every document, policy, and register required to build a compliant framework.

👉 Download Management of Students' Behaviour Templates Bundle ZIP File

‍📌 Please Note: Not all of these templates will suit your school, but they give you a good range to get through registration.

‍Inside your download, you will find:

• Behaviour Management and Disciplinary Policies

  Managing Performance, Misconduct, and Absenteeism Policy and Procedure

  Student Behaviour Management Behaviour Engagement Policy

  Student Discipline Policy

• Preventative Frameworks and Student Conduct

  Anti-Bullying and Positive Relationships Policy

  Bullying Prevention Policy

  Code of Conduct Student Policy

  School Hours and Supervision Procedures

• Student Friendly and Visual Adaptations

  Student Friendly Version- Behaviour Management Behaviour Engagement Policy

  Student Friendly Version- Discipline Policy

  Young Student Friendly Code of Conduct Picture Board

Internal Proposed Evidence

Recommended Checklist for Part B Submission: To help build out your submission folder for Part B of the Application for initial registration, we recommend gathering these key internal files from your school records. Please note that while these specific documents are recommended to help evidence your compliance, this is a practical guide rather than an exhaustive checklist.

• Finalised Student Discipline Publications: Completed copies of your proposed Student Discipline Policy, Staff Handbooks, and Student Codes of Conduct explicitly detailing behavioural rules.

• Blank Centralised Behaviour Incident Register Template: A blank copy of your proposed central tracking log, proving it features separate fields for dates, behaviour categories, de-escalation actions, and parent notifications.

• Blank Individual Behaviour Support Plan (BSP) Frameworks: Pro-forma master templates demonstrating your planned approach for applying customised support matrices and adjusted learning pathways for high-needs enrolees.

• Blank Suspension and Exclusion Case Packets: Pro-forma template packets containing draft parent notification letters, executive review meeting minutes, and return to school integration strategy outlines.

• Proposed Student-Friendly Policy Dissemination Plans: Draft curriculum plans, homeroom lesson presentations, or visual assembly guides proving that plain language behavioural expectations will be actively taught to all year levels.

• Sample Image Layouts for Visual Campus Signage: High resolution digital mockups showing that young student picture boards and positive relationship guidelines are ready to be physically posted across early years blocks and playgrounds.

• Proposed Staff Professional Learning Schedule: A planned training agenda ensuring that 100% of future teaching staff and yard supervisors participate in professional learning covering positive de-escalation methods and standard duty of care lines during onboarding.

• Blank Restorative Justice and Mediation Log Layouts: Master templates recording peer to peer or student staff mediation sessions, including blank student reflection sheets and relationship repair templates.

• Blank Yard Duty and Playground Reflection Records: Pro-forma incident slips and timeout logs designed to track low-level playground interventions and capture early behavioural trends during unstructured school hours.

• Blank Individualised Risk Management Templates for Extreme Behaviours: Ready to use safety profile frameworks designed to map clear triggers, environmental adjustments, and strict line of sight supervision rules for severe cases.

Compliance Tips & Hidden Requirements

School registration reviews in WA have a few unique, specific traps that catch boards out. Make sure your team knows these hidden rules:

• The Absolute Corporal Punishment Prohibition Lock (Page 54): Your behaviour management documentation will instantly fail an initial review if it leaves any room for ambiguity regarding physical discipline. Standard 12 strictly mandates that the school must explicitly forbid the use of corporal punishment in any form. To clear an audit, this absolute prohibition must be clearly stated, and the terms explicitly defined, across all central school publications submitted in your Part B folder.

• The Degrading Punishment and Psychological Harm Ban (Page 54): Compliance tracking goes well beyond preventing physical striking. Under the Guide's explanatory notes for Standard 12, schools must explicitly forbid any practices that humiliate, degrade, or psychologically harm a student. Proposed disciplinary measures that involve public shaming, the intentional isolation of a student in a punitive manner without continuous supervision, or the restriction of basic developmental or physiological needs (such as food or bathroom access) represent immediate registration breaches.

• The Evidence-Based Positive Behaviour Support Framework (Page 54): Maintaining a purely reactive, punishment oriented discipline policy will trigger an immediate non-compliance ruling. Standard 12 requires schools to implement a documented, active framework that explicitly details how positive behaviour expectations are taught, modelled, and reinforced across all year groups. Case managers will audit your planned staff training logs to verify that personnel will be equipped with tier 1 preventative strategies and restorative practices rather than relying solely on late stage punitive sanctions.

• The Prescriptive Suspension and Exclusion Triage Protocol (Pages 54–55): When a student’s behaviour escalates to a level that threatens campus safety, the process of removing them from the learning environment must follow a strict, multi-stage administrative path. Your procedures must outline an uncompromised protocol for suspensions and exclusions that guarantees procedural fairness. The framework must mandate: written notification to parents detailing the exact grounds; an explicit opportunity for the student and their family to be formally heard and a clear, documented pathway for continuing the student's educational program off-site.

• The Complete 5-Field Centralised Register Layout (Page 55): Your proposed school’s behavioural database template must feature distinct tracking columns for 5 specific areas: the date, time, and location of the incident; the exact nature of the behaviour of concern; the localised de-escalation strategies or physical containment methods deployed (if any), the post-incident restorative or disciplinary outcomes implemented, and the specific dated notifications sent to parents or external statutory bodies.

• The Restrictive Practice and Unlawful Seclusion Boundary (Standard 5 / Standard 12 Intersect): When a student exhibits severe dysregulation, your physical environment under Standard 5 cannot be used as an impromptu holding cell. Standard 12 rules dictate that rooms or spaces must never be modified or utilised to forcefully seclude a student. If an initial floor plan or audit reveals that a school intends to use a locked storeroom, a sensory room with external handles, or an isolated space where a student is structurally prevented from leaving or is left unmonitored by staff, the school fails for a direct breach of basic child safety parameters and physical premises standards.

• The Independent 48-Hour Critical Incident Trigger (Standard 7 / Standard 12 Intersect): If a student behavioural escalation results in a serious injury requiring medical hospitalisation, involves weapon possession on campus, or requires the emergency deployment of the WA Police, it cannot be treated as a routine internal school matter. Your protocols must explicitly state that these specific behavioural thresholds instantly trigger the Standard 7 48 hour mandatory notification clock to the Director General.

• The Harmful Sexual Behaviour Multi-Agency Interface (Standard 10 / Standard 12 Intersect): If a student's behaviour involves sexually harmful actions against peers, the school cannot address the issue through standard playground disciplinary channels. Under Standard 10 and Standard 12, the school must explicitly cooperate in the Multi-Agency Protocol for Education Options for Young People Charged with Harmful Sexual Behaviours. Your procedures must document that a specialised risk assessment and management plan is immediately activated, ensuring that the student's continuing educational delivery is strictly managed to protect the broader school community.

• The Curriculum Provision Continuance Mandate (Standard 1 / Standard 12 Intersect): A common compliance gap is assuming that if a student is suspended or placed on a long-term exclusion track, the school’s curriculum obligations under Standard 1 are temporarily frozen. The Guide rules dictate that a school maintains its duty to provide a satisfactory standard of education even during disciplinary actions. Your procedures must prove that the moment a student is suspended for more than 3 consecutive school days, a formal arrangement is launched to deliver modified lesson plans and assessment pathways to their home environment.

House Operational Risk Tips (Not Explicitly in the Guide)

• Mask Internal Case File Metadata: When exporting your proposed software setups, blank digital registration logs, or volunteer data structures to your Part B evidence folder, maintain a strict privacy boundary. All system keys, individual routing codes, and private tracking identifiers must be completely masked or replaced with standard placeholders like [ID Number Redacted] to prevent tracking leaks.

• Remove Personal Names from Behaviour Support Layouts: Ensure your draft individualised behaviour plans, extreme behaviour risk templates, and parent-school compact samples utilise entirely neutral tags like Student A or Case Profile B instead of real personal names before being uploaded to an external folder.

• Enforce Secure Document Version Controls: Lock cell editing parameters or apply secure password encryption to your central behavioural incident database templates and procedural fairness checklists on your shared drive. This keeps casual administrative updates from accidentally modifying your board-approved baseline consequence metrics before they are evaluated by your case manager.

Compliance Quick Check

Before you finish, double check that your school leadership has completed and marked off these specific items required on the official initial application form:

• Have you itemised the exact school publications and their precise page or section numbers which explicitly forbid the use of any form of child abuse, corporal punishment, or other degrading punishment?

• Are all definitions for child abuse, corporal punishment, and degrading treatment written consistently with the registration standards across all listed documents?

• Have you attached complete copies of all school publications listed under your corporal punishment prohibition declaration?

• Is a blank copy of your proposed centralised behavioural incident register template formally attached to your Part B submission folder?

📌 Now don’t forget to save your evidence in your created folder in your school's shared drive (Google Drive or OneDrive).