Behaviour

(BBC Panorama: Britain's Strictest Schools)

I have been at the sharp end of behaviour for a good number of years. I am also writing this, sadly, some distance from the classroom now, and I’d ask you to consider that as you read. Before I say anything about the recent Panorama, I want to show you where I come from, because I think where a person stands on behaviour usually tells you where they have stood years before.

I first started teaching more than twenty years ago in a college, working with children at risk of exclusion from mainstream school. They were taking vocational courses, construction, motor mechanics, and, back then, that world was very boy-heavy, with very few girls. Alongside the vocational work they took either entry-level courses (this was before functional skills) or GCSEs. I honestly don’t remember much about the behaviour policy. In classes that small, it was fairly manageable.

My next role was as teacher-in-charge of a psychiatric inpatient service, working with children admitted with severe and enduring mental health needs; bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia nervosa. There, behaviour was entangled with the children’s mental health and wellbeing, but for the most part what happened in the classroom was fairly settled. That’s not to say there wasn’t a few spiky incidences such as when a kid, who towered above me, grabbed another child by the neck and pushed him against the wall, or another child that spat in my face when I asked him to do some work. In this setting I undertook my masters degrees ‘Writing a behavioural policy in psychiatric in-patient services’ .

A Cert Ed didn’t quite cut it in a psychiatric setting, so as I qualified as a teacher I was seconded to a large comprehensive in the East End of London. Around the same time, I was watching Phil Beadle on television, someone I am now lucky enough to call a friend. What strikes me looking back is that we weren’t really taught how to support children with their behaviour. It was very much follow the rules, ring home, detention. There didn’t seem to be any strategy for changing what was happening in the room, in that moment. Just follow the rules and things would come together.

I’ve held various roles since predominantly in Alternative Provision, but also a stint in an additional resource provision for primary-aged children with speech and language needs. I’ve worked with children involved with Youth Offending Services, with CAMHS, released from prison, on bail; children with ADHD, autism, delayed speech. Behaviour has been a core part of everything I’ve done.

What I haven’t done is manage behaviour at a senior level in a mainstream school. That, perhaps, is where my unease with the recent Panorama comes from, I feel like I have some contribution to make whilst I also feel not as credible as some responding. I am at unease.

The Panorama focused on the Athena Learning Trust, and its approach to behaviour has since prompted a Cornwall Council inquiry into how such policies affect children’s mental health. One of the details that stayed with me was the toilet policy: children not permitted to leave in the first and last fifteen minutes of a lesson, but able to go in between. On the face of it, it makes complete sense. You can see exactly the problem it is trying to solve.

But I keep returning to my own current PhD research, exploring young people’s experiences of Alternative Provision, and to one conversation in particular. A girl told me she never went back to school after she wasn’t allowed to use the toilet and wet herself. That was the moment where school ended for her.

I’ve also worked in settings where children leaving for the toilet at different times was a genuine risk factor. A little girl once had a seizure in a toilet, and I had no way of knowing how long she’d been in there. Children at risk of self-harming. And this is before we even reach anything that looks like “behaviour.”

So it makes sense to me ,and yet I wonder how the broad rules meant to manage the majority land on the minority. For some children, a rule like this becomes the precise moment they are disconnected. I wonder whether the people writing these policies ever sit with the thought that, given a year, everything that could go wrong probably has. Do we have the capacity, as leaders, to be that reflective, not only about the impact on the wider community, who want it quieter, calmer, with more learning taking place, but about the impact on the individual? And do school leaders have enough capacity, on top of everything else, to think about the children right on the edges?

There’s a flip side to this that I think we miss. Not every blanket rule is built for the majority at the expense of the few, some are built for the few and then imposed on everyone. Take the ruler held under each line as you read, or the whole class reading aloud together, tracking every word. For a child who needs that scaffold, who loses their place, who finds a wall of text overwhelming, it can be genuinely helpful. It was designed with them in mind, and that instinct is a good one.

However, when you mandate it for all thirty children in the room, you forget that most of them don’t need it. For them it isn’t support; it’s just another small, baffling rule to follow. It’s one more thing to get wrong, and one more hoop to jump. There’s a real irony in it: a practice introduced in the name of inclusion starts to feel like the opposite. The children who needed it can end up self-conscious about being the reason for it, and the children who didn’t quietly file it under “more nonsense to comply with.”

I’ve built my career with thinking about the children on the edges, the marginalised. So I come to this from that position, and I hope you recognise my limitations on talking about the ‘main’.

There is a stubbornly polarised view sitting underneath all of this, the idea that to get good results you must have strict behaviour rules. I don’t accept that it’s a choice. You can take a relational approach and get good results. That isn’t to say you throw out rules and boundaries; it’s that boundaries go hand in hand with relationship, rather than standing in opposition to it.

I find myself thinking about my own life here, and part of the reason I’m no longer in the classroom. With three children under the age of four, everything had to be routinised. Nothing could be left to chance, because the moment it was, everything tipped into chaos. So I understand why structure matters. Routine isn’t the enemy of a relational approach; it’s part of how you make one possible. The question is never whether to have boundaries. It’s whether we build them around the child in front of us, or expect every child to fold themselves around the rule and if we’re willing to notice who gets left on the margins when they can’t.