Unacceptable Behaviour Policy

The UCD Academy are committed to providing a professional and fair service to everyone. In return we ask that students respect our teaching and non teaching staff. We will not tolerate threatening, abusive, or violent behaviour. Under these circumstances no member of staff should be required to or feel obliged to deal with any student either face to face, over the phone or in correspondence.

Purpose of this policy

This policy means we can manage unacceptable student behaviour consistently and fairly. It sets out clearly what we consider to be unacceptable and the steps we may take to deal with such behaviour. It applies to everyone who accesses our services.

The Equality Act 2010 protects individuals against discrimination, harassment, and victimisation. We meet the requirements of the Act through the following principles:

Definition of unacceptable behaviour

Unacceptable behaviour means acting in a way that is unreasonable, regardless of the level of someone’s stress, frustration, or anger. It may involve acts, words or physical gestures that could cause another person distress or discomfort.

Principles

You can expect that our employees will always:

treat everyone who contacts us with respect, empathy, and dignity
provide a fair, open, proportionate, and accessible service
listen and understand
behave professionally with respect and fairness

We expect students accessing our services to:

treat us with respect, empathy, and dignity
be courteous
engage with us in a way that does not hamper our ability to carry out our work effectively and efficiently for the benefit of all

Aggressive or abusive behaviour

This is behaviour or language (written or spoken) that could cause our staff to feel afraid, threatened or abused. This includes threatening emails, telephone calls, meetings, and comments on social media or elsewhere.

For example:

insulting or degrading language, including inappropriate humour, innuendo or malicious allegations
any form of physical violence or threats of physical violence
derogatory, racist, sexist, ageist, or homophobic remarks
comments relating to disability, perceived gender, religion, belief, or any other personal characteristics

How we will respond to incidents of unacceptable behaviour

We do not expect our staff to tolerate unacceptable behaviour when communicating with our students. When this happens, our staff have the right to:

place callers on hold
end all forms of communication
not reply to an abusive email or letter or conversation - we will only review these communications to ensure no new issues have been raised
expel students immediately

Before taking such action, we will always warn students that they are behaving in an unacceptable way to give them the chance to change their behaviour. However, a warning will not be given in extreme cases to protect our staff, for example, when a physical threat is made.

Where these circumstances arise, we will take the following steps:

we will ask students to modify their behaviour and explain why
if the behaviour continues to be unacceptable, our employees will remove themselves from the situation. If the communication is in a live classroom situation or via video-conferencing, we will remove the student immediately
the teaching staff will inform the UCD Academy who will keep a record of the incident. In all cases a UCD Academy manager will investigate the situation and decide what action to take. This could include expulsion of students from our courses
we will refer the matter to the police where a criminal offence has been threatened or committed

UCD academy