Nursery World - Best practice: Behaviour charts

Emma Davis considers the need to rethink how early years settings manage children’s behaviour and the language that is commonly used around it

Behaviour charts are still commonly used, but the evidence is that they are ineffective

There is often much talk about the need to ‘manage behaviour’ in the early years. Educators have a host of strategies that can be employed to promote positive behaviour, one of them being the use of charts in the setting or classroom, which come in many different forms. You might have seen traffic-light behaviour charts, happy and sad clouds, rockets, rainbows, or emojis.

The premise behind them, no matter what the design, remains the same – reward and punishment. If children do something deemed worthy by an adult, they are moved up the chart. However, inappropriate behaviour means a child is moved down or to the ‘sad side’. The idea is that the chart is seen as an incentive to encourage ‘good behaviour’, with children conforming to what is considered acceptable.

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