Don't play politics with behaviour

Why good behaviour in schools transcends party politics

People cannot resist pigeon-holing others into neat, tribal boxes. I recently enjoyed an exchange I had online with a stalwart from Scotland who took issue with the advice I’d been posting to the Scottish education department on how to avoid continuously crashing behaviour in schools like a clown-car derby. ‘We don’t want your English solutions,’ he replied to me, a Scot, living in Scotland. As if good ideas were tainted by their ethnic or geographical origins. But people do think like this: research repeatedly shows how quickly we form positive or negative biases about ideas depending on whether they come from an ally or an enemy.

I see this in my work with English education, when occasionally some genius takes issue with the fact that I work for a department under a government that they may or may not agree with. And I always ponder, what do you want me to do? Wait until the Glorious Revolution when your candidate ascends to Downing Street? When there is work to be done, when it needs to be done now? Activism in opposition sometimes rots the brain. It is easy to take the moral high ground when one is never in a position to improve anything. I’d rather be a pragmatist and work with whatever party asks in order to help children and teachers succeed together.

Or sometimes the activists take their defeatism to greater heights. ‘There’s no point rewriting behaviour guidance for schools when children are in poverty,’ they say, as if that was an excuse to do nothing. ‘Fix nothing until you can fix everything,’ is the desperate rallying cry of the hopeless.

I was on a behaviour panel once where someone said something so very odd my eyebrows nearly flew off my forehead. ‘Detentions are a form of violence,’ quoth the academic who had never taught. So I thought about all the circumstances that her judgement immediately condemned: chats about child protection issues, polite requests to finish off homework; conversations where I explained how unacceptable racist language was in the classroom, and so on. All condemned as ‘violence’. Such oddities are often the preserve of people who have never taught or had to deal with challenging classrooms. Detentions are just one tool in your behaviour box, but my goodness, in the box they are. 

In the Great debate of education, few things invite such controversy as one’s views on good behaviour in schools. Fair enough. Debate is healthy. It is often torturously partisan; it can divide people like a canyon, instantly. But one thing it should not, never be, is about party politics.

To clarify, in one sense, lots of things could be seen as politics, if we take that to mean the study of power. But more than that, I mean that behaviour has nothing to do with party politics. It is neither an exclusively left-wing, nor a right-wing concern. It is also neither wholly traditionalist nor progressive. Behaviour as a subject maps neatly to neither, despite the best efforts of some to contrive that they do.

Ideologically, socialism focuses on equity; conservatism on security; liberalism on freedom. All of these very fine ambitions can be secured, at least in part, by a careful attendance to the behaviour in one’s lessons. None of them declare that ‘do what you wilt’ should be the whole of the law. Marx, Burke and Rawls all had traditional academic educations at institutions where they were most certainly expected to behave very well indeed. From Martin Luther King to Mahatma Gandhi, revolutionaries throughout history have remade the world using not just their will, but their wit, built in part at schools and universities that demanded enormous levels of self regulation, industry and focus. Party Conservatives are no more married to good behaviour than career Labourites, as tabloids will often testify. No manifesto makes much of behaviour, and even the recent interest from the government has been a modern evolution in taking behaviour seriously.

Nor is the trad/ prog debate sufficient to encapsulate behaviour entirely. Because whatever ambition you have for children, and whatever aim you value for education, it is served best by a clear and focussed behaviour strategy. Do you see children as future employees, fitting cleanly into jobs that haven't been invented yet? Jobs need skills and knowledge, and mucking around doesn't achieve that. Do you want children to leave as monkish scholars, clutching sheafs of exam coupons so they can progress to the next level in Super Mario University 64? Then they better get busy behaving. Do you see schools as imaginariums, crucibles of creativity and ingenuity? No creative endeavour or mind ever achieved so much as a potato painting without the knowledge and skills of the field, whether it be sculpture, ballet or architecture. Creative geniuses aren't born; they’re grown in greenhouses of diligence and craft. Whether you self flagellate yourself with Walk-thrus, or read paragraphs from Ken Robinson out at beat poetry evenings, whatever you want, requires calm, ordered classrooms.

One of the most pressing concerns I see in classrooms and schools is how uneven the focus on good behaviour is. There are many schools where behaviour is excellent, and many fine professionals teaching, training, and leading in this matter. But my concern is that this is neither evenly spread, or guaranteed in every school. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit around 900 schools in my career, and I’ve been struck by the enormous variety of success schools have in creating positive, nurturing environments where children can flourish as scholars and people.

That's not to say they don't try. I've never seen a school that didn't try its best to maintain civil and purposeful conduct amongst its staff and students. But mileage varies. One thing that every school should have in common, is the desire to create a healthy culture where good behaviour is encouraged and bad, discouraged, and prohibited. People are social animals; even outcasts cleave to other outcasts. We take enormous cues from how to behave from other people in our community. This culture, this ‘how we do things around here’ will happen whether you create it consciously or not. The bad news with that is that you allow the culture to evolve in ways that may not optimise the flourishing of children; children may develop bad habits rather than good. The good news is that adult intervention, boundaries, taught behaviours, consequence systems and role-models can work wonders. I’ve seen schools in all circumstances, build wonderful cultures that valued kindness, achievement, industry and cooperation. If you've ever worked in one of these schools, you will know how nurturing such places are for all who inhabit them. If you’ve done the same in the opposite, you know what it feels like working under aerial bombardment.

Good behaviour isn't the preserve of one ideology or party; it is a basic requirement for the success of all human endeavour. Let’s argue about what those endeavours should aim towards. But let’s not argue anymore whether or not children should behave. Because while they wait for us to settle our ideological differences, they're waiting to learn in classrooms that are safe and calm.