Help used to mean someone walking in.
The Derby High School put teamSOS Enterprise behind its de-escalation toolkit — so staff are coached through an incident instead of losing the room.
A note, a radio, and a room already lost
If no on-call member of staff was free on the same floor, a student runner carried a note to the nearest office. Administrators then raised the on-call team by radio.
Staff would use the help button in SIMS, but it was never good enough for us and didn’t prioritise anything. We knew we could do better, we just didn’t know how.
Deputy Headteacher, Inclusion and Learning
De-escalation first. teamSOS behind it
Derby’s philosophy is that a young person’s conduct is a form of communication. Staff work through a collaborative behaviour toolkit — guidelines and stages, student first — and only raise an incident when those steps are exhausted.
Real-time messaging lets a responder and a teacher apply the next toolkit step together — before any additional adult needs to enter the classroom.
Before teamSOS our response time was when somebody came in the room, potentially undermining the teacher. Now somebody can reply in seconds and offer a solution to a problem, or coach them through. We didn’t have that before.
Context before anyone moves
The more the team knows, the better the match: somebody nearer, or somebody better suited to that particular student.
Coaching new staff
Dermot plans to use the same messaging to coach newly qualified staff — an informal way to share and refine skills across the school.
Easy for every skill level
The worry was that it would be complicated for staff with differing technical confidence. Everyone found it very easy to use.
Part of the safeguarding toolkit
Anything that gets information out quickly and alerts the right people matters in a school — teamSOS is a very important part of that.
Fifth on the list was often the most urgent
We had to use multiple radio channels. If you were in the office you’d think we were in chaos. We couldn’t prioritise — you might get there ten minutes later because it was fifth on the list, and find it was the most important incident and should have been first.
Now every incident is triaged as it arrives, networking the right teams in with clear, precise messaging — and the order reflects what actually matters.
Senior time, spent well
All staff have a cost. Senior staff on call who cannot prioritise their workload are money spent ineffectively — fast prioritisation is the single biggest gain for Dermot.
Staff also think differently before raising a request, checking whether there is a step they can take first.
Numbers they never had
We didn’t keep a record of response times previously, but now we have them we want to learn from them. It helps us address issues with specific students at SLT level, as well as using the reports for training and CPD.
Selected staff first. Then the whole school
Derby began with a handful of people and quickly found they needed the bigger picture. Deploying across the school took no investment in hardware — staff used the devices they already had, and buy-in was immediate.
Evaluate what you have
Start by looking honestly at the current system and how teamSOS would be used.
Go whole-school
A pilot with selected staff only shows part of the picture, and the picture is the point.
Use existing devices
Available on mobile, Windows and web, so nothing new had to be bought or issued.
Just give it a go — that is what convinced us. We know straight away what the problem is, where our staff are, and can respond quickly. teamSOS has become part of what we do.
Our previous systems didn’t have the features teamSOS has. Our behavioural climate is in a better place and we’re moving back to the patterns and levels we had pre-Covid — teamSOS has definitely played a part in that.
See what this looks like in your school.
Book a 20-minute demo at teamsos.co.uk and we’ll show you teamSOS with your own de-escalation scenarios.
