Better out than in?

Why sometimes, the right thing to do is remove a student from the classroom

Every teacher has done this: sent a student out into the corridor. And sometimes that’s the right thing to do. And sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes NOT sending them out is the wrong thing to do.

Students should not, in general, be sent out to the corridor, except in very specific circumstances. Many teachers are tempted to do so, and it’s easy to see why. Students become, temporarily, invisible, and no longer such an active irritant. But they have been swept under the carpet, or out of the room. The problem has not been resolved; it has been displaced.

Students in the corridor are unsupervised, which means they are no longer being kept safe. They can get up to mischief, disturbing other lessons, wandering off, committing vandalism, writing poetry etc. They are not receiving an education, which means re-integration becomes much harder, especially if they have missed a vital learning step.

Of course, some teachers abuse this strategy enormously, and send students out for long periods of time, until the student decides to wander off, bored to tears. And sadly, some teachers intend exactly this. Their immediate problem has gone, wandering off down the corridors, vanished.

This is the teacher equivalent of borrowing from a loan shark to pay off a bank loan- the problem only gets worse. The only circumstances in which a student should be asked to stand outside in the corridor are:

·      They are upset and need a moment to calm down or gather themselves.

·      For a brief and immediate conversation with the teacher about something that cannot be discussed in the classroom

·      In an emergency

Apart from these circumstances, all other instances should be avoided. Some students are cunning enough to coordinate their sending out to coincide with that of other students, and they make a picnic of it. Some students deliberately provoke a sending out in order to avoid a lesson that irks them. Some students are tempted into greater acts of social mischief, setting off fire alarms or tormenting extinguishers. Unsupervised, scolded students are more prone to hijinks than occupied and observed ones.

The corridor is not magic. It does not possess healing properties, Students do not go into the corridor thinking ‘Oh no, not the corridor.’ The corridor is not a sanction, or a deterrent or a moral lesson, or a Buddhist temple. It’s just ‘somewhere else.’

If a student needs to be removed from the lesson for more than a minute or two, then they must be removed to an exit room (more on this later); somewhere formally designated as a removal zone. And it must then be for a significant period of time. The student should not be allowed back in immediately- if their behaviour was so grievous as to warrant a removal, then allowing them to return creates a strong signal to them that their actions had no consequences, and why not do it again?

One strategy to be strenuously avoided is where an attending senior member of staff removes a student from the lesson from you, only to return them five minutes later, usually with a comment like ‘Billy is ready to learn now,’ as if that was the sole factor of importance.

What normally transpires is that the student has been taken to the office of a senior member of staff who have themselves been unaffected by the student’s rudeness or disruption. They therefore feel no sense of the gravity of their actions.

Then the student sells their partial and biased perspective (‘I got told off just because I asked a question!’) or demonstrates some heart-wrenching mitigative circumstance (‘I’ve been really stressed in this lesson.’) and the senior leader decides to take their story at face value. They also decide that nothing more need be done, and everything can just be forgotten and forgiven. Then they return the student, who has usually by this point had a cup of sweet tea and a block of Turkish Delight that the head teacher saves for kids who tell his staff to f*ck off. ‘He’s ready to come back and learn now,’ they say, as if they have magically healed the moment, and this is all that matters. ‘He’s calm now.’

But there has been no healing. The child has pitted the leader against their teacher, and they have fallen for it. Because it is easier. It is easier to just say yes to everyone who demands something, even if it means that you undermine the staff member. Because they are not ready to let Billy return, and not because they are heartless, but because they (correctly) know they have been undermined.

Here is my advice to all senior staff, pastoral team members or on-call personnel: if a staff member requests a student removal, BACK THAT SOUL UP. Remove the student as requested. Default to believing your staff if you genuinely want to support them. Then, if any mistake has been made by the staff member- perhaps they are too trigger-happy with removals; perhaps they could have done something else first- then that is a separate professional conversation to be had with them.

But the solution does not lie in undermining them. The minute you do this, the rest of the school community finds out, seemingly, instantly. ‘If you just tell the head teacher how mean the teachers are, he believes you and you get out of trouble.’ This is the opposite of holding the line for your staff. This is running away and abandoning them. It is cowardly, and harms the culture that keeps children safe. But it is easier in the moment. For you.

As with everything else in a school culture, removing a student must be deliberate. Which means it must be predictable. Which means it must be trained. Train staff to exit a student in a routine and predictable way. Make it obvious to the student that an exit is imminent if they pursue a particular behaviour. Make it unsurprising when it happens. The only way to create that culture of expectation is by making it easy to imagine and hard to imagine anything else. Staff must act consistently and predictably, which means training. Consistency between staff (and particularly in any staff member’s personal behaviour) is only achieved by systematising and training the behaviour.

And that- like everything in a school- come back to leadership. And if making tough decisions doesn't appeal to you, and if all you want is a life where everyone applauds you and approves of you, then it might be better if you were out of school, rather than in.

This is an excerpt from my next book, Running the School- behaviour systems for school leaders. It will be finished later this year, and it’s a study of the most effective head teachers, their systems and processes and strategies, that I have seen internationally, in almost 1000 schools in 16 countries. Watch this space for more details….