Everything's fine

Leaders need to remember that giving staff too much autonomy can be disastrous

How not to run whole school behaviour

¹I visit a lot of schools and here’s a problem I see a lot. I visited one last year where I was asked to workshop with three groups: leader, middle leaders and new staff. I wasn’t really doing diagnostic work, but it’s impossible NOT to notice patterns and issues as you spend some time in an environment. It was an interesting contrast, as these things often are.

When I spoke to the leaders, we had a great time, and we discussed issues with implementation and taking staff with you on a journey. Their sense was that behaviour was pretty good, and senior staff were pretty proud of that- as they should be, when they have worked hard ot achieve it.

Then I worked with the middle leaders- heads of year, and heads of faculty. These people, it turned out, were the engines of the day-to-day behaviour system. They line managed the classroom teachers, and followed up with all behaviour issues that couldn’t be dealt with in class.

Classroom teachers were expected to deal with misbehaviour in the first instance, and if they needed support, it was escalated to the middle leaders. So far, so perfectly normal. Then I asked a simple, probing question designed to stress test reality. ‘What do teachers do when a student misbehaves? Say, they’re rude to the teacher or they’re late. What is the procedure?’ I asked this because I wanted to get a sense of the procedures, processes and systems that underpinned their behaviour. As regular readers will know, my preference is for these processes to be clear, straightforward and consistent.

‘Oh, we don’t have a set process for teachers,’ one middle leader said, proudly. ‘We encourage teachers to devise their own solutions, and give them agency to build their relationships with the class.’ This sounded very much like the teachers had no systems in place. It sounded like they had been abandoned to their own devices, which is often hell for teachers who don’t know what to do.

‘Does…does this work?’ I said, trying not to sound surprised. I wanted to explore a bit, and I was regretting not being able to do more of a tour.

‘Oh yes,’ they replied proudly. ‘It really does’.

‘What if the behaviour escalates or the teacher can’t handle it?’ I asked.

‘Then we make a judgement about what needs to happen next,’ they said.

I was, for the first time in a long time, a little thrown. The behaviour I had seen so far was pretty good. The classes I had popped into for a few seconds had all been quiet at least. But here was this line manager telling me that teachers ‘just work it out for themselves’ and ‘build relationships’. Normally when I walk onto schools, I have a lot of my assumptions confirmed, over and over again. The systems I think that should work, tend to work. The ones I don’t, tend not to. Was I at last in the presence of a counter example that disproved my hypothesis, that schools need clear processes? Was it all actually just letting teachers figure it out on the spot?

Then I workshopped with new staff. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘What are your issues with behaviour? What do you want to discuss?’ One teacher put her hand up. ‘I’ve been teaching in another school for ten years, and then I came here,’ she said. ‘It was really clear, lots of rules and boundaries. Behaviour was great and kids really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. I came here a few months ago and there aren’t any rules about how to behave. The behaviour in my lessons is really bad. Kids are quite rude to me, don’t work, and turn up late. When I try to get them on task, they refuse to listen. When I ask them to come back at the end of the day, they don’t come. When I report it to my line manager, he asks me what I said to the kids for them to be so disruptive. There’s no follow up. There are no sanctions. I’m really struggling.’

And another. ‘And when I try to do a call out no one comes. Five times this week I’m asked for a call out, for student to be removed. But each time no one has come. So I’ve stopped doing call outs. And the kids know it. It’s so humiliating.’

And another. ‘Every time I get a child removed for rudeness or disruption, they get returned to me five minutes later, even when the call out does happen. It’s so upsetting, because they’ve usually been really rude to me, and they know I’m not ready to take them back yet.’

This is a common problem, and one that explained the seeming contradiction indicated above. It’s easy to think behaviour is good when:

1. You don’t teach, or teach much, or teach top sets with mature students

2. You have high status.

3. You have a low standard of behaviour, so that even rudeness seems fine to you

4. You don’t experience the misbehaviour yourself. It is easy to not put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

This demonstrates the following problems:

1. Novices do not think like experts. New teachers should not be allowed to ‘come up with their own solutions.’ They should be given clear systems they can use. Unless you do this, you’re not empowering them; you’re abandoning them.

2. Systems need to happen, or they don’t exist. Call out and removal is a vital system for every school to have in extreme circumstances. If it happens only erratically, then people won’t use it, and the system disintegrates. People stop calling for help, and leaders think there are no problems, when in fact the problem has increased.

3. A removal is incredibly serious. If a student is removed, they should remain out of the lesson for the rest of the day. Of course, they should be placed in a high-quality destination, such as a removal room, staffed and supervised and provided with meaningful work. And yes, this is less than ideal for their education. But they have removed themselves from the ideal place already provided for them. Everyone else matters too.

4. Leaders can be blind to the reality of the challenging classroom, if they are not careful.

The sad thing is that this school had only recently introduced this model, where teachers were expected to figure it out entirely by themselves. Historically the behaviour had been pretty good, under a previous regime that was more systematic and understood institutions need to run on process as much as personality. ‘I like the idea of the new system,’ one veteran told me, ‘But in reality I just think the kids are starting to think they can do what they like. And it’s getting worse.’

1. This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Running the School: a leader’s guide to managing school behaviour.