Many parents have got in touch to tell me about their stories of their children being excluded from trips and the effect this had on them and how they felt about school. Most of them don’t want to post publicly to protect their young people. This story is particularly upsetting. This twelve-year-old boy tragically lost a parent to suicide last year, and everything about his life was affected. Their behaviour and ability to manage school deteriorated. That is because behaviour is one way in which children (and adults) communicate distress. Losing a parent to suicide is a particularly devastating and difficult thing to grieve. His school uses a behaviour app to track behaviour, and he finds it hard to concentrate in class. Concentration is particularly affected by loss and trauma and he gets a lot of behaviour points for not being on task. Behaviour apps aren’t great for nuance. They record the behaviour, but not the reasons. The boy feels like a problem and the behaviour points tell him that he is. It’s now end of year reward trip time, and he will be left behind at school with one other child for his ‘poor choices’. Too many behaviour points. Is this one of these cases where rules should be applied no matter what, because a good rule doesn’t need to be flexible? Or one where the child just needs to learn that ‘good behavioural choices’ mean that good things will happen to them and bad behaviour means the opposite? Humans need flexibility and understanding, no matter how old they are. You might not know what terrible thing has happened to someone when you assume that they are ‘making poor choices’.