What are positive behaviour support strategies?

In short: positive behaviour support strategies are the specific, individualised actions set out in a behaviour support plan to prevent behaviours of concern, respond to them safely, and teach the person better ways to meet the same need. They are chosen from a Functional Behaviour Assessment, never applied as a one-size-fits-all checklist.

If you’ve been told your family member needs a behaviour support plan, you’ve probably also heard the word “strategies”, and wondered what that actually means in practice. Will someone hand you a list of things to do? Will it work? And what happens at home, when the practitioner isn’t in the room? These are fair questions. Here, we discuss the strategies, how they’re chosen, and what they look like on a day-to-day basis.

What positive behaviour support strategies are

The defining feature of a PBS strategy is that it is matched to a specific person and a specific reason for their behaviour, not pulled from a standard list. When people hear “strategies” they often picture generic techniques that could apply to anyone; PBS strategies are the oppose of that. Each one is an adjustment or intervention written into an individual’s behaiouvr support plan, and it only makes sense in the context of that person’s life.

What makes them specific is where they come from. Every strategy in a PBS plan comes from a Functional Behaviour Assessment. That assessment works out what a behaviour is for – what need it’s meeting, what tends to trigger it, and what keeps it going. The strategies are then chosen to address those specific findings for that specific person.

This is the single most important thing to understand about PBS strategies: they are built around the individual, not around the label.

Strategies generally fall into three groups. Proactive strategies aim to prevent a behaviour from happening in the first place. Reactive strategies guide how the team responds safely when a behaviour does occur. And alongside both, a good plan teaches replacement skills – better, safer ways for the person to meet the same need. We’ll walk through each one.

Common positive behaviour support strategies include:

• Environmental modifications – changing the physical or social environment to reduce triggers
• Routine and predictability – visual schedules and transition warnings
• Communication support – including augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)
• Demand modification – adjusting how and when tasks are presented
• Teaching replacement skills – functional communication, self-regulation, and social skills
• Reinforcement-based approaches that build quality of life rather than rely on restrictive practices
• Reactive and de-escalation responses for when a behaviour does occur

A quick note on terminology: you may also see these called “behaviour management strategies” or “behaviour support plan strategies.” “Behaviour management” is the older term. Current NDIS-aligned practice uses “positive behaviour support,” which reflects an important shift away from simply managing or suppressing behaviour, and towards understanding why it happens and improving the person’s overall quality of life using the least restrictive approach.

Proactive strategies: preventing the behaviour

Proactive strategies address the conditions that make a behaviour more likely. Rather than waiting for something to happen and reacting, they change the environment or the interaction so the behaviour is less likely to occur at all. These are usually the most powerful strategies in a plan, because they work upstream of the behaviour.

Common types include:

Environmental modifications

Changes to the physical or social environment that reduce triggers by lowering sensory stimulation, creating a calm space someone can retreat to, or reorganising a shared living environment.

Routine and predictability

Many behaviours are triggered by unexpected change. Visual schedules, transition warnings (“five minutes until we leave”), and consistent routines help the person anticipate what’s coming next, which reduces anxiety and the behaviour that comes with it.

Communication support

When a behaviour is driven by communication difficulty, the focus is on giving the person accessible ways to express their needs. That might involve augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools, or training the people around them to recognise and respond to the communication attempts the person is already making.

Demand modification

Where a behaviour is about avoiding a task, proactive strategies adjust how demands are presented, such as breaking a task into smaller steps, offering genuine choice, or matching what’s asked to the person’s capacity on the day.

Relationship and engagement

Building positive relationships between the person and their support team lowers background stress and increases tolerance for demands and change. Simple, but consistently one of the most effective proactive strategies available.

Reactive strategies: responding safely when a behaviour occurs

Reactive strategies are the agreed responses for when a behaviour does happen. They are not about punishment, and they are not about escalation. Their purpose is to keep everyone safe, de-escalate the situation, and avoid accidentally reinforcing the behaviour.

Effective reactive strategies follow a few key principles:

• Respond to early warning signs early. The sooner the team steps in during an escalation, the more effectively they can bring things back down.
• Reduce demands during escalation. Adding pressure in the middle of a behaviour episode almost always makes it worse.
• Keep everyone safe. The priority is the safety of the person and everyone else in the environment.
• Don’t reinforce the behaviour. If a behaviour is maintained by attention or by escaping a situation, reactive strategies are designed so those outcomes don’t reliably follow it.
• Debrief and document. After a significant episode, the team records what happened and how they responded. That information feeds back into reviewing and refining the plan.

Teaching replacement skills

Here’s a principle that sits at the heart of PBS: behaviour serves a function. If you remove a behaviour without teaching another way to meet the same need, a different behaviour usually appears in its place.

That’s why teaching replacement skills matters. It means identifying what need the behaviour is serving, and then teaching a more effective, safer way to meet it.

Common replacement skills include:

• Functional communication – for example, teaching someone to request a break verbally or through AAC, rather than escalating in order to leave a situation.
• Self-regulation – supporting a person to recognise their own distress signals early and use a calming activity before things escalate.
• Social skills – for example, learning how to initiate interaction without imposing on others.
• Task completion skills – where avoidance is tied to a task being too hard or the expectations being unclear.

Why one-size-fits-all doesn’t work

This is what makes PBS fundamentally different from generic behaviour management advice. A good practitioner doesn’t apply a standard set of strategies to a diagnosis. They start with the assessment findings and ask: what function is this behaviour serving? What reliably triggers it?

What’s maintaining it? The strategies have to address those specific factors, or they won’t work. Under the NDIS Quality and Safeguards framework, strategies must also be the least restrictive option that will work, and aimed at improving the person’s quality of life rather than simply reducing a behaviour.

The best strategies are also practical. A strategy is only as good as the people implementing it, so it has to be clearly written, properly trained, and used consistently by the people who support the person every day. A brilliant strategy nobody applies consistently isn’t a brilliant strategy.
And when strategies aren’t producing the expected outcomes, a skilled practitioner doesn’t just push harder. They revisit the assessment, ask whether the original analysis of the behaviour’s function was right, and adjust the plan accordingly. PBS is an ongoing process, not a one-off document.

What strategies look like in practice

To make this concrete, here’s a de-identified example of how strategies follow from an assessment.

A young person was regularly becoming distressed and leaving the classroom during group activities. It would have been easy to treat “leaving the room” as the problem to stop. But the assessment found the behaviour was serving a clear function: escaping a noisy, unpredictable environment that the young person found overwhelming. Leaving the room worked – it gave them relief – so it kept happening.

The strategies addressed that function directly. Proactively, the team reduced the sensory load of group activities and gave advance warning before transitions. They taught a replacement skill – requesting a short break using a card – so the young person had a safe, acceptable way to get the relief they needed. And the reactive plan ensured that when distress did appear, staff reduced demands and supported a calm exit rather than adding pressure. Within a term, the unplanned exits had dropped, and the break requests had taken their place.

Notice that no part of that plan would transfer automatically to another child. A different young person leaving the same classroom for a different reason – to get attention, say, rather than to escape – would need a completely different set of strategies. That’s the point.

How families and carers can support strategies at home

Strategies don’t only belong to the practitioner. They work best when the people around the person every day understand them and apply them consistently, and that includes families and carers, particularly when supporting someone with challenging behaviours.

Here are some practical ways to help:

• Learn the plan, not just the rules. Understanding why a strategy is there – what function it’s addressing – makes it far easier to apply well and to adapt it sensibly in the moment.
• Keep it consistent across settings. A behaviour rarely respects boundaries between home, school, and the community. When everyone responds in broadly the same way, the person learns faster and feels safer. Consistency across settings is one of the biggest factors in whether strategies actually work.
• Use the replacement skill yourself. If the plan teaches a break-request card, prompt and honour it at home too. Replacement skills only stick when they reliably get the result the person is after, everywhere.
• Notice the early signs. Families often know the earliest warning signals better than anyone. Responding to those early – before things escalate – is exactly what the reactive plan asks for.
• Tell your practitioner what you’re seeing. Your observations are data. If something isn’t working, or a trigger appears that nobody anticipated, that feedback is what allows the plan to be refined.

How Target Behaviour Services develops strategies

We don’t work from templates. Every strategy we put in a behaviour support plan is built from the individual’s Functional Behaviour Assessment, designed around the function their behaviour is serving and the realities of their day-to-day life.

Positive behaviour support is a long-term commitment (meaningful change usually takes at least six months) and we’re upfront about that from the start.

We also write strategies to be used, not filed away. That means plain language, proper training for the people implementing them, and regular review so the plan keeps pace with the person’s progress. And because our practitioners stay with us – in an industry where high turnover is the norm – the people you start with are generally the people you continue with, which makes consistency far easier to achieve.

Our plans are developed by NDIS-registered behaviour support practitioners experienced in working across the full spectrum of complexity, in homes, schools, and the wider community throughout Perth, regional WA, and Australia as a whole.