What We Miss When We Focus Only On Behaviour

BABS launches the Integrated Brain Classroom™, bringing regulation, thinking and teaching into one practical framework for schools, families and professionals.

By the third time a teacher has asked a child to open the book, nobody is having a particularly good morning.

The lesson has started, thirty other children need attention and the child has heard the instruction. They may even know exactly what they are supposed to do. Yet the book remains closed.

In a classroom, that can look like refusal. At home, it may look like laziness, avoidance or the beginning of another homework battle when nobody has much patience left.

Sometimes children do push boundaries. That is part of being a child. But there are also times when the behaviour we see is only the visible part of what is happening.

The task may feel too large. The instruction may not have landed in the way it was given. The child may be overwhelmed by noise, unsure where to begin or using so much effort to hold themselves together that very little is left for the work in front of them.

The adult sees a child who will not start. The child may be sitting there with no idea how to find a way in.

Teachers and parents make these judgements under pressure. A teacher cannot pause a full classroom indefinitely while working out why one child has stopped. A parent standing in the kitchen at six in the evening is rarely approaching homework with endless time and emotional reserves. Most adults are doing the best they can with the information and tools available to them.

The problem is that behaviour is still too often treated as the whole story.

BABS, which stands for Breaking All Barriers, was created to help adults look at the wider picture. The Integrated Brain Classroom™ connects three areas that are often handled separately: what a child needs in order to regulate, how that child processes information and what the adult can change about the route into learning.

Calm. Think. Learn.

This does not mean that children must be perfectly calm before teaching can begin. It means that learning becomes harder when a child feels unsafe, overloaded, disconnected or unable to organise what is being asked of them.

Once adults begin to notice what may be blocking access, they can respond more deliberately.

One child may need the task broken into smaller steps. Another may need movement before sitting down. One may need to understand the reason behind the activity, while another may need connection before further instruction will land.

The goal does not have to be lowered simply because the route needs to change.

The Integrated Brain Classroom gives adults and children a shared way to understand those differences.

The Brain Friends™ help children recognise that people do not all approach thinking and learning in the same way. Some want to understand, some organise, some connect and some learn by trying.

The Calm Crew™ helps children name what they may need in a particular moment, whether that is movement, connection, clearer thinking or a more manageable plan.

The characters make the language accessible to children. Behind them sits a practical framework informed by established work in self-regulation, sensory processing, executive functioning, behaviour support and NBI-based thinking preferences.

BABS was founded by Lauren Kyte, Kate La Trobe and Nicola Killops, who arrived at the same problem from different parts of education and child support.

Kyte is an early years specialist, trained teacher and NBI practitioner. La Trobe is a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst and ADHD executive-functioning coach. Killops brings more than two decades in education, together with lived parent experience, neurodiversity advocacy and extensive work helping families, schools and professionals understand one another more clearly.

“We kept seeing children move between rooms where everybody cared about them, but everybody was working from a different version of what was happening,” says Killops.

“A teacher may see refusal. A parent may see a child who comes home completely spent. A professional may recognise sensory strain, executive-functioning difficulty or a processing mismatch. Those views do not necessarily contradict one another, but they are rarely brought together in a way that helps the child through the next school day.”

For Kyte, the work begins with recognising that children do not all process information in the same way.

“When we understand how a child tends to think and approach learning, we can make better choices about how we teach,” she says. “The child is still working towards the same learning. We are simply giving them a route they can actually use.”

La Trobe says the framework also helps adults avoid turning behaviour into a description of the child.

“If we decide too quickly that a child is lazy, difficult or defiant, we stop looking,” she says. “Behaviour gives us useful information, but we still need to ask what happened before it, what the child may need and whether the support we offered changed anything.”

The Integrated Brain Classroom is designed for use across schools, homes and professional settings. It gives teachers a practical way to connect regulation and learning in everyday classroom decisions, helps parents understand what may sit beneath familiar struggles and gives professionals language that can travel with the child beyond the therapy or consulting room.

The BABS website launches on 6 July 2026, bringing the work together publicly for the first time through dedicated information for schools, professionals and families.

At the centre of the work is a belief that sounds simple, but changes the questions adults ask.

The child sitting in front of the closed book may not need another reminder that the lesson has started. They may need an adult who can help them find the first step.

For more information, visit breakingallbarriers.co.uk

About BABS

BABS, Breaking All Barriers, helps schools, families and professionals understand how children regulate, think and learn. Through the Integrated Brain Classroom™, BABS connects regulation, processing and teaching through practical language that can be used across the child’s world.

Founded by Lauren Kyte, Kate La Trobe and Nicola Killops, BABS works to remove barriers to participation and learning by helping adults understand the child before deciding how to respond.

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