What Is Behaviour of Concern? A Guide for Support Workers

Picture a woman who throws things every afternoon, close to four o'clock, like clockwork. For months the file calls it attention-seeking. It isn't. It's shift changeover, a different face at the door with no warning it's about to happen. Once the team starts telling her fifteen minutes ahead that a new worker is coming, it drops away almost completely. Nobody runs a formal assessment to get there. Someone just starts asking what the behaviour is doing for her, instead of what's wrong with her.

That question, what is this doing for the person, is the entire shift this page is trying to make. It's a small reframe with a big effect on how a worker actually responds on shift.

What actually counts as behaviour of concern?

Behaviour of concern is behaviour that puts the person or others at risk, or that restricts their access to community, services, or relationships. It covers a wide range, property damage, aggression, self-injury, absconding, but also quieter things like persistent refusal or withdrawal that starts to close someone's life down. What makes it "of concern" isn't a single dramatic moment. It's usually frequency, intensity, and impact on the person's own quality of life.

It is worth saying plainly: a bad day is not behaviour of concern. Everyone gets frustrated, everyone has an off shift. The label is for patterns that are genuinely limiting someone's life or putting people at risk, not for ordinary human moods a worker happens to find inconvenient.

Why does behaviour of concern happen?

Function-of-behaviour thinking starts from one idea: behaviour is trying to achieve something. Practitioners commonly group that "something" into a handful of broad categories, escaping or avoiding a demand, seeking attention or connection, getting access to an item or activity, or meeting a sensory or internal need. A single behaviour can serve more than one of these at once, and the same behaviour can mean different things for different people.

The practical upshot for a worker is this. Asking "why is this happening" gets you somewhere useful far more often than asking "how do I make this stop." The first question opens up options. The second one usually narrows straight down to control, which rarely holds for long.

Noticing function versus assessing it, what's the difference?

This distinction matters and gets blurred often. Under the NDIS Behaviour Support Rules, only a registered NDIS behaviour support practitioner can carry out a formal functional behaviour assessment. That's specialist work, and it should be.

What a support worker can and should do is notice and report accurately, what happened right before the behaviour, what the behaviour looked like, and what happened straight after. That raw pattern data is what a practitioner actually needs to build a genuine picture. A worker who documents well is doing real, valuable work here, even without doing the assessment itself. For the compliance side of this, who is required to train workers in a specific plan and what implementing providers have to report, see our separate guide on positive behaviour support training.

How should a worker respond in the moment, and afterwards?

In the moment, safety comes first, for the person and for you. Try not to match rising energy with your own, and give space rather than closing it down. Afterwards is where the real value sits: write down what happened before, during and after, in plain factual language, not interpretation. CORA's Everyday Documentation course covers how to do that well. Report it to your team leader in line with your organisation's process, and flag it clearly if it felt like part of a pattern rather than a one-off.

What goes wrong when this gets misread?

The most common failure is a label that sticks and stops the questions. Once a behaviour gets filed as "attention-seeking" or "just how he is," workers tend to stop looking for what's actually driving it, and the person stops getting a genuine response to a genuine need. The other failure runs the opposite way, restricting someone's routine or environment to avoid a behaviour rather than addressing what's causing it. Any response that limits a person's rights or movement is a restrictive practice, and it must be authorised in a current behaviour support plan. Our guide on restrictive practices training covers what that requires.

How CORA's course fits into this

CORA's course Understanding Behaviour of Concern, part of the Behaviour Support & Crisis stream in the course library, walks workers through realistic scenarios built around function-of-behaviour thinking, not control. It builds understanding and judgement for the floor. It doesn't replace a behaviour support practitioner's assessment, and CORA doesn't certify or sign off a worker's competence, that call sits with your organisation.

If you're mapping what your whole team needs across this and the rest of the Behaviour Support stream, the Pathway Builder is a free tool that does it for you, no sign-up required. Or request a demo if you'd rather talk it through.

Sources and further reading

• Behaviour support and restrictive practices, NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission
• Positive Behaviour Support Capability Framework, NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission

This page is general information for support workers and providers, not clinical or diagnostic advice. Always follow the individual's current behaviour support plan and your organisation's policies.