A new hope? Or repeating the mistakes of history?
My response to the Scottish national action plan on relationships and behaviour in schools: 2024 - 2027
Good behaviour in schools is fundamental to every other success criteria we can imagine. If classrooms aren’t calm, safe and dignified spaces, everyone suffers, especially the least advantaged. No child flourishes in chaos, and children from chaotic circumstances need order and predictability more than any. This is why I have devoted the last 15 years to trying to understand what schools can do to ensure that this happens.
But you can’t solve a problem until you admit you have one, and many people in charge of education in Scotland have denied that there is anything seriously wrong with the behaviour in Scottish schools. This has played a significant part in preventing attempts to remedy the issue.
Which is why there is something to be hopeful about in the recent resurgence in interest in behaviour in Scottish schools. Unfortunately to a large extent this interest has not been driven by institutional processes, unfortunately. There has been no systematic understanding of the worsening behaviour climate, no monitoring system that has sounded the alarm. No, the warning bells have come from the muffled voices of teachers, anonymously whistleblowing from calamitous classrooms, from unions, dutifully feeding back the concerns of their members, from teachers striking in chaotic schools, fearful of violence. These are voices I talk to all the time, and try to amplify if I can.
Finally, some reality has bled into the national policy agenda. This week saw the launch of the National Action Plan on Relationships and Behaviour in schools, in response to the burgeoning tide of voices crying out for help. That in itself is significant. Doing something about it rather than nothing has the advantage of acknowledging that there is an it about which something must be done. I’ve worked in policy long enough to know that every win, however small, is ground gained.
But is it enough? And is the plan the right one? TL; DR: I think that there are green shoots of hope in it; some of it is sensible; some of it relies on doubling down on strategies that haven’t worked. I think it has high hopes but insufficient detail, a fact that may be explained by the fact that phase one of the three-year mission is to provide exactly that. I think that some of the ambitions that are baked into the project demonstrate a lack of coherent understanding of what needs to be done.
It mentions (at last!) a realisation that children need boundaries (or limits, as it describes them), in response to the 2023 research that told them that teachers felt that boundaries and consequences were too vague to implement. It even shatters a national taboo and for once acknowledges the need to exclude at times, although this is mentioned and moved on from in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. 1
Other articles of hope: it mentions the fact that children need to be kept safe; that teachers struggle with behaviour at present; that more needs to be done. This is no small thing; this is how empires topple. The presumption of infallibility is the first thing to go. It admits that the ‘relational approach’ hasn’t worked out very well- but more of that later.
It mentions ‘high warmth and high expectations’ systems, which is good news to those of us who advocate exactly this. Students need to know that they are cared for; that they matter. And (not but) they also need to know that we expect a good deal from them, possibly far more than they think themselves capable of. You must have both approaches. Too little regard and they think you’re a tyrant; too much and you become Mr Tumble. You can be grave (Mr Bronson) or giddy (Ms Honey) but they have to know they matter, that what they do matters. And what you expect them to do also has to matter.
But it doubles and triples down on the presumption that the relational approach is still the best model to base the system on. This is the very common assumption that behaviour management is all about relationships, and to some extent it is, to the point that many even decry using the term behaviour management as focussing on the physical actions of the student and not the relationship between the student and the teacher.
The problem with the relational approach is that it sounds great (who doesn’t want great relationships?) but it is often misinterpreted as ‘the kids have to like you; don’t upset them.’ teachers make their lessons easier; permit misbehaviour; attempt to entertain rather than teach and lead, all because they want to build a relationship. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of that a relationship is, or how to build one. A relationship is how two or more people behave with one another, and how they view one another. There is no mystery about it. And not all relationships are equally valuable- some are toxic, for example, so simply building one isn’t the goal. We are trying to build the right relationship. And what is that? A series of shared, expected behaviours and values, that help the student to flourish as a learner and a human being in an institutional setting. And this means teaching the right behaviour, or the Behaviour Curriculum as I call it. It means letting children know they are valued, without mistakenly conveying the idea that they are more valuable than anyone else. If every child matters, then every child matters, including their peers, and disruption won’t be tolerated, or violence or rudeness etc. The rules and standards of society protect everyone, including (or especially) the child from chaotic or disadvantaged circumstances.
So it is meaningless to talk about relational approaches without defining clearly what relationships are and how to obtain good ones. And that includes boundaries, and boundaries includes consequences, and some of those consequences need to be sanctions, or a minority of students won’t see them as boundaries, but merely decorations, lines painted on the floor they can skip gaily over, This is why traffic wardens don’t hand out restorative conversation tickets, but fines and penalty points. Because sanctions are a necessary and vital part of the system that creates boundaries, which creates safety and helps generate civility. They are not the core- taught behavioural expectations are- but without them, everything falls apart. You simply cannot have a school or national system that deemphasises them, or treats them as something unmentionable or undesirable. They are necessary, and necessity trumps the agitated sensibilities of those who wish that children would all respond instantly and perfectly to a kind word and a clear instruction. Many do, but many do not, and it’s enough to detonate the calmest of classrooms. It only takes a couple of determined and defiant students to turn a classroom into a circus, or worse, a gauntlet.
But the action plan makes it clear that the relational approach will be central to the development of the plan. The details in this will be vital to the quality of its success. If it sufficiently de-emphasises the restorative approach to behaviour management (which is unworkable in real time, and has limited utility in most contexts; it is an approach that has been galactically hyped-up beyond the evidence base or the experience of teachers) and admits that trauma-informed relational approaches are similarly limited in use (most children are not traumatised; most misbehaviour has nothing to do with trauma or mental illness; TIRA are not something a classroom teacher can use in real time while teaching number bonds) then it might go somewhere useful. The action plan itself states that the relational approaches have had limited impact, and that more is needed, so perhaps there is some hope. But one would want to see this made more explicit throughout the rest of the plan, which it simply hasn't.
Other unconnected observations:
COVID has made behaviour worse in every country I have visited. But it is not the primary cause of misbehaviour, and the problems Scottish schools face predate lockdowns. Acknowledging this is important. COVID is not an excuse to save face.
Tracking behaviour data nationally and externally is a hugely welcome step. Yes it draws attention to the scale and nature of the problem, but if leadership cannot define or admit the problem, then what use are they? The adult thing to do here is to lift the stone and see what is underneath.
Directing schools to have clear behaviour (and relationship) policies is an important part of a healthy system. Taking the lead on what that might look like is an important- maybe core- part of what this action plan could achieve. Too vague, and it will be no help at all.
Student voice is important; helping children develop the capacity to make independent and moral decisions is a core part of education. But this does not mean that we delegate decision making to the child. Children, by their nature, need adult instruction and direction. Adult authority is paramount to the safety and wellbeing of children. Schools that congratulate themselves on being ‘UN rights-respecting’ spaces must be careful not to make this approach the central basis of their behaviour management. Adults have rights too, as do the peers of the aggressive or disruptive child. The right to an education means that schools must be safe, and that means at times limiting the rights of the disruptive child (for example by removal, suspension, sanction) to optimise the rights of all. If you were to design a behaviour management system for teachers to actually use, you wouldn’t start with a rights as a method; you recognise it as an outcome.
Endlessly recommending ‘more support’ for children with disruptive behaviour is unfalsifiable, because who wouldn’t advocate such a thing? But it is important not to let this become a gaseous platitude. Schools have very finite resources. They cannot unpick every dysfunctional stitch of children’s lives. The support they can offer most readily is a calm, safe learning environment with clear expectations of behaviour, and consequences for those who struggle to meet the expectations. That is the fundamental model of good school behaviour. It is not a minor thing; it is the foundation of its mission. Additional support for children with learning difficulties is important, as are mechanisms for children with severe behavioural problems. But schools are engines of the possible, not the perfect, and they cannot solve or resolve the causes of every child’s misbehaviour, particularly those with extreme misbehaviours. Which is why we need an enormous refocus on specialist school environments, not as a sign of failure, but of success. These spaces are intensive care units for children who need it the most. Only a minority of children will need them, and most children with additional needs can be accommodated in the mainstream estate. But for that minority it is vital they obtain the help they need.
There is much more to say, but I’ll summarise that there is much to like about this action plan, but the lack of detail means that until phase one can tell us more about the direction of travel, it is very hard to evaluate how successful it will be. Will it purge the patient or poison it? Time will tell, and time is running out for children who need help now.
In Scotland the concept of exclusions have become so taboo that trainee teachers are told that if you say the word three times at midnight into a mirror, the devil will appear.