Tony Osgood

Tony Osgood recently retired from working as Senior Lecturer in Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities at the University of Kent’s Tizard Centre. From 2004 until 2019 he taught both undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of topics including challenging behaviour, person centred approaches, and positive behaviour support.

Before working in academia Tony was employed in an NHS psychology service, as well as in the third sector, in both managerial and direct support roles. He now consults and writes full-time.

Tony has worked for nearly thirty years in intellectual disabilities, autism, mental health and physical disability provision. Tony has written numerous accessible articles, taught across the UK, spoken at conferences and lectured internationally. His is married, has four children, and could do with a shave and losing weight, though these four things are not correlated.

We often think of challenging behaviour in terms of aggression or self-harm. But it can be any behaviour if done in unexpected places, too often or too hard. A child asking one question in class may receive praise, but if they ask half a dozen, they receive a punishment.

These behaviours may be shocking and frightening, but hidden in plain sight is a message we can learn from: behaviour is lawful even when awful, and it communicates something about the person’s life. We need to listen to the person’s behaviour as much as their words.

When Tony began writing these books and chapters he had one clear message in mind: “It’s important to be on the person’s side, not on their case,” Tony explains. “Understandably, when challenging behaviour happens, people are distressed. There’s a lot of doubt and blame. This is because nobody understands initially what the hell is happening. But behaviour is a language we can learn to understand.”

Challenging behaviour is not the determining aspect of anybody’s life, even if it dominates how we think about them.

“Challenging behaviour is simply a symptom of an unquiet life, of a fellow human in distress,” Tony says. “That’s the real story. I wanted to share the stories of people I’ve spent time with over the years, the stories of people with severe reputations. Many of these stories show how small changes to how we think about and support people truly make huge differences.”