INSIGHT: If you don’t have relationships in your classroom, you’re never going to crack behaviour

Former teacher and Vice Chair of the Campaign for State Education, Dr Tom Mann, discusses the impact of behavioural policies that are performative, cost-effective and lazy

I taught for 35 years both in the UK and abroad in comprehensive schools, special schools and pupil referral units. Personally, I would say behaviour has changed rather than got worse. Knife crime has got more prevalent over my years of teaching, for instance, but fights in school haven’t.

Really, the biggest issue facing schools is reduced funding and resources, and as a result, some of the behavioural policies we’re seeing today are lazy.

I use this word advisedly, because I wouldn’t accuse teachers or senior leaders of being lazy, because it’s an incredibly difficult job. But it’s much easier to shout at, demonise and make a big example of a kid in front of the class than it is to spend money on people going in and remediating poor behaviour and coming to a solution where nobody loses too much dignity. 

To run an effective behaviour management programme, you need well-qualified, well-experienced behaviour support workers and they should all be working from the policy that you need to deal with the issues presented rather than demonise the individual. 

So if you’re going to use detentions I’d say this is what they should be used for: the kid and teacher are both there, they talk about the issue and talk about what needs to happen. You work to resolve the issue, in order that the kid is allowed back into the class. 

Schools have to accept that there are going to be poor behaviours.  It’s how you address them and try to keep those students engaged that’s the issue. But it’s discipline with care that seems to be missing now, with the approach instead being: let’s give these kids a type of punishment that’s so harsh, it puts the others off from even going there.

But the places I’ve worked at that had an effective approach put much more emphasis on rewarding good behaviour, while the poor behaviour is properly dealt with. It was never just accepted and there was a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to certain behaviours, but it’s zero tolerance with a heart, with engagement at its core and based on the belief that nobody should end up on the rubbish heap.

I’ve seen first-hand the trail of kids who’ve failed, to allow for the success of others. There are schools now that will just internally exclude [i.e, put children in detention/isolation], pull the parents in, demonise their kid, internally exclude again until eventually they exclude them permanently.

My last job was at a school in North London, and we ended up with an autistic boy with poor behaviours who’d been excluded from a particularly strict school. They had said, ‘it’s not your autism, it’s your behaviour’, when it was his autism causing his behaviour and if you dealt with the autistic part of his behaviours, you actually could engage him. But they didn’t seem prepared to do that, because he wasn’t toeing the line.

Ultimately, if you don’t have the relationships in your classroom then you’re never really going to crack behaviour. When I was working at Hendon School for instance, it was absolutely brilliant. We had a headteacher who was very heavy on the discipline but great on relationships. And so we had very few exclusions, our staff retention rate was high, our staff sickness rate was low, we kept really good teachers and they were led in a way that allowed them to do their job properly. We were in the top second percentile in terms of progress.

But when you’ve got a very high turnover of staff, those relationships that are key – particularly to the vulnerable kids – don’t get made, because they’re always in front of someone else. And we’re in a situation today where lots of teachers are leaving the profession, new ones are coming in, unqualified teachers are coming in, cover supervisors are taking lessons and that transient staffing structure absolutely leads to disruptive schools.

Another problem we have today is the form of population-cleansing that’s going on in schools: I’ve seen it in action and it’s terrible. There was one school I worked at in North London where they would try and discourage parents of certain kids from applying. They’d say, “Oh your kid’s got dyslexia? We’re not very good at that, you’re better off going to that school.” Or, “oh we don’t have teaching assistants in class to help with that.” And a lot of schools will do that because kids with SEN are more expensive to educate, they generally pull your data down and they’re more intensive as a group.

It’s unrealistic to say the academisation programme should be reversed, but there has to be local democratic control of schools. By allowing academy schools to operate without local jurisdiction we’re in a situation now where schools can just say, “if you’re not happy, take your kid to another school.” It tends to be the mantra: It’s easy, it’s time-saving and they’ve got enough kids on their waiting list. But this inability to engage when you’re taking funding with public money is desperate.