Adele Bates
The gap between a school’s behaviour policy and what actually works for pupils with SEMH needs costs schools their most experienced staff. A teacher who cannot distinguish wilful defiance from an unmet emotional need responds in ways that make the situation worse. Schools lose those teachers, and then lose the pupils.
Adele Bates gives school leaders and teachers practical, evidence-informed frameworks for inclusive behaviour and SEMH, grounded in more than 20 years of frontline teaching across mainstream schools, pupil referral units, and alternative provision.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Adele Bates
- Her classroom experience covers every major UK school setting: mainstream primary and secondary, pupil referral units, alternative provision, and special schools. School leaders can bring her to a mixed-audience CPD day knowing the examples hold up across every context in the room.
- Her approach is informed by funded comparative international research. In 2019, she received a full grant to research Finland’s inclusive education system. Research in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica followed. What she recommends draws on documented practice from functioning systems across three countries.
- Her book, published by Corwin/SAGE, has been used by headteachers to rewrite whole-school behaviour policies from scratch. It provides a structured, chapter-by-chapter framework that school leaders can put to immediate institutional use.
- She writes for TES, SecEd, and Headteacher Update, reaching school leaders at scale. Audiences in her sessions often arrive knowing her work, which changes the quality of the conversation.
- Her TEDx 2020 talk and BBC Radio 4 appearances as the network’s expert on teenagers and behaviour give her name recognition well beyond the education conference circuit.
Biography highlights
- Author, “Miss, I Don’t Give A Sh*t”: Engaging with Challenging Behaviour in Schools (Corwin/SAGE)
- TEDx 2020 speaker
- BBC Radio 4 expert on teenagers and behaviour
- Trainer for the National Education Union and Amnesty International Education
- WeAreTheCity Rising Star Award, Education category
- Funded international researcher in behaviour and inclusion: Finland (2019), Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica
Biography
Behaviour policies give teachers a sequence of steps. They rarely explain what to do when those steps stop working. For more than 20 years, Adele Bates taught in the settings where that gap matters most: mainstream primary and secondary schools, pupil referral units, alternative provision, and special schools.
Her book, “Miss, I Don’t Give A Sh*t”: Engaging with Challenging Behaviour in Schools, is published by Corwin/SAGE. It gives school leaders a structured framework for rebuilding behaviour culture from the ground up. Headteachers have used it to rewrite their school’s behaviour policy from scratch.
In 2019, she received a full grant to research Finland’s inclusive education system, observing classes and interviewing teachers across several schools. She has since carried out school-based research in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica. Those visits inform how she frames what is achievable, with reference to systems that have solved problems UK schools are still working through.
She is BBC Radio 4’s expert on teenagers and behaviour and gave a TEDx talk in 2020. She writes regularly for TES, SecEd, and Headteacher Update. She trains for the National Education Union and Amnesty International Education. School leaders who book her often know her work before she arrives.
Key speaking topics
- Inclusive behaviour in schools
- Social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) in education
- Trauma-informed practice
- Whole-school behaviour culture and consistency
- Pupil engagement and relationship-led teaching
- Equality, bias, and inclusion in education
- Staff confidence and wellbeing in schools
Ideal for
- Headteachers and senior leadership teams in mainstream and specialist schools
- Classroom teachers and subject leaders seeking practical behaviour frameworks
- Multi-academy trust (MAT) CPD and professional development leads
- National education organisations and education conference organisers
Audience outcomes
- A clearer account of why SEMH-driven behaviour does not respond to sanctions, and what the evidence suggests actually works
- Practical strategies for rebuilding positive relationships with disengaged pupils, applicable from the next lesson
- A framework for evaluating whether a school’s behaviour policy is built to support or to separate
- A sharper understanding of how equality, bias, and inclusion connect to behaviour patterns across a whole school
- Tools for strengthening staff confidence and consistency in challenging classroom situations
Talks
Unpacks the relationship between teenage brain development and classroom behaviour, giving educators a clearer basis for responding in ways that help young people engage rather than withdraw.
Key takeaways:
- Why teenage brain development creates specific patterns of classroom behaviour
- How to distinguish strong reactions from defiance, and why that distinction changes how a teacher should respond
- Practical approaches for supporting teenagers to engage constructively with school and social expectations
Draws on the author’s Corwin/SAGE-published book to give educators and school leaders practical strategies for improving behaviour, rebuilding positive relationships, and embedding consistent approaches across classrooms or whole schools.
Key takeaways:
- Practical behaviour management strategies drawn from more than 20 years of classroom experience
- Tools for strengthening positive relationships between staff and pupils
- A framework for aligning classroom practice with whole-school behaviour culture
A direct examination of how equality, privilege, and bias connect to behaviour, engagement, and outcomes for staff and pupils.
Key takeaways:
- How equality and bias shape behaviour outcomes across a school
- Practical tools for embedding inclusive approaches in classroom and school-policy decisions
- The connection between inclusion culture, staff wellbeing, and pupil learning outcomes
An evidence-informed exploration of why emotional wellbeing underpins academic progress and school culture, with practical guidance for embedding it at every level.
Key takeaways:
- The evidence base for why emotional wellbeing is a prerequisite for academic progress
- Practical approaches for structuring wellbeing across a school, from classroom routines to whole-school policy
- Ways to explicitly teach and support emotional regulation for both pupils and staff
A focused session on understanding SEMH and extreme behavioural needs: what drives dysregulation in pupils and how to differentiate learning environments so that all pupils can engage.
Key takeaways:
- What SEMH means in practice and how it manifests in classroom behaviour
- Differentiation strategies for supporting pupils with extreme behavioural needs
- How to maintain positive relationships and learning focus while supporting pupils with complex needs