Phil

← All courses

Five-session mentoring course

Anger management

Who it's for

Consider this course for a pupil showing:

  • Frequent verbal outbursts, shouting or slamming doors when frustrated, without necessarily becoming physical
  • Difficulty tolerating frustration in academic tasks, giving up, tearing up work, or storming out of the room
  • Anger spilling into relationships with peers, staff or family, beyond the specific classroom incident
  • Says things in anger they later regret, and struggles to identify what set them off in the moment

What it works towards

  • Build a wider vocabulary for naming anger and its intensity, beyond a single word like 'fine' or 'angry'
  • Understand the gap between feeling angry and acting on it, and practise lengthening that gap
  • Practise expressing frustration assertively, in words, rather than through outbursts or shutdown
  • Transfer strategies to real settings across the school day, not just to a single crisis moment

The five sessions

  1. Session 1 Naming the anger, not just the blow-up Pupil can name at least three different intensities of anger (for example annoyed, frustrated, furious) rather than one label.
  2. Session 2 What sets me off Pupil identifies personal triggers across settings and separates 'big' from 'small' triggers.
  3. Session 3 The gap between feeling and doing Pupil can describe and practise at least one strategy to create a pause before reacting.
  4. Session 4 Speaking up assertively Pupil can practise expressing frustration assertively rather than aggressively or by shutting down.
  5. Session 5 My anger-management plan Pupil has a personalised, written anger-management plan and understands what happens next.

A sixth session follows, without the pupil: the mentor writes the support plan and agrees next steps.

The approach, and where it comes from

This module builds on core CBT-informed anger-management techniques used across UK SEMH and pastoral provision, and follows the relational, consistent, low-arousal approach set out in the DfE's Behaviour in Schools advice for headteachers and school staff, which recommends helping pupils understand and regulate their own behaviour rather than relying on sanctions alone. It is focused on frustration tolerance and verbal or relational anger rather than physical incidents specifically, and works well as a standalone course, or as a broader follow-on to Physical aggression (Module 1) for pupils whose anger shows up more in words, relationships and academic frustration than in physical outbursts. It also supports the calm, respectful conduct expected under Ofsted's attendance and behaviour evaluation area.

Try it with a small group

Three weeks free, no card, up to three staff and ten pupils. Everything recorded during the trial carries over if you continue.

Start the free pilot

Or read the white paper, which sets out the evidence behind each of the twenty courses.

The other courses