The State of Education part 1: The Dark Ages

My first lecture to the University of Notre Dame Australia

I’ve had the pleasure of spending two weeks touring schools, meeting educators and doing some press in Australia, and as I write, I am currently decompressing in Heathrow airport waiting for my last flight back to lovely rainy Scotland.

I was invited by Notre Dame University Australia to give a series of three lectures, one for each of their campus sites in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Called ‘The State of Education’, it was a personal reflection on where we currently were with behaviour management, how we had got there, and where we could go in the future. It was a real honour for me, and I am deeply indebted to the university, and to David de Carvalho for inviting me.

Out of an abundance of preparation, I wrote out my first speech in advance in its entirety. On the evening, I played jazz with it somewhat, but I thought it might be nice for me to post the original text here. I’ll write about the subsequent lectures this week sometime if I can.

Notre Dame Education Lecture Series

The State of Education

1. The Dark Ages

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s an honour to be invited to speak to you in this first of three lectures hosted by Notre Dame university, with the next two in Sydney and Melbourne. I’d like to address a topic that has animated and engrossed me for twenty years: behaviour in classrooms and schools. My position is this: behaviour is the most important factor in the success of children in schools that we have significant influence over, but it is one that has been shamefully misunderstood, mishandled and mismanaged by successive generations not only in the UK, but in every national I have ever visited.

I have worked in some of the most challenging schools in inner London for 14 years, visited almost 1000 schools in 16 countries to study their behaviour cultures, and advised the UK government on behaviour for almost ten years, writing national behaviour policies and several books along the way. I hope that this entitles me to some say in the matter. Everything I have learned about behaviour is rooted in what experts at managing behaviour have told me, or I have observed them doing. Because this is the most important crucible of expertise: the classroom, especially the challenging classroom.

Behaviour is vital. But historically, too frequently its management has either been taught badly or not at all. As a subject it is still ignored, misunderstood, mistaught, and riddled with myths and almost religious levels of faith-based practice. For decades this has meant that generations of children have had their life chances diminished when they should have been launched into success. We have been in the Dark Ages for too long. To expand upon what that means, I will begin with a personal narrative.

In at the deep end

Two decades ago I was taught to teach, although I didn’t learn to do so, so it is hard to say that it had been taught. I took a one year bridging postgraduate course that entitled me to be a teacher: entitled, but didn’t prepare, although I didn’t know it at the time. I trusted that my trainers knew what they were doing. Wrongly, it seems.

Like many of my comrades, we entered classrooms often bristling with enthusiasm and good intentions, but little else. We spent a good part of the year in classrooms, and a smaller part in lectures where our lessons veered between extremes: we studied educational theory one day, and how to build a PowerPoint or make a poster in the next. In one memorable lesson we were encouraged to sit in a circle and say something complimentary about the person next to us. In many of them, we were supposed to bring back what we had learned from out classroom shadow experiences, and share them.

‘But when do we learn how to teach?’ I wondered. And like a child, I was certain that any day now, it would happen, that the curtains would be pulled back and the sacred knowledge shared.

But it never happened. We were supposed to watch teachers at work, and then somehow discern what they did: novices watching experts, trying to decipher their expertise from our positions of amateurism. We were like couch potatoes sent to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to work out how Rudolph Nureyev managed to be such a virtuoso ballet dancer. Worse, we were expected to not only discern the structure of his skill, but to imitate it. Instead, we mimicked it, like chimps copying a salute without understanding it.

In one early training experience, I was given a stack of exam papers to mark. Never having seen an exam paper, I wasn’t sure how to do this. ‘Well,’ my mentor said impatiently, ‘What would you give this question out of ten?’ ‘I have no idea,’ I replied truthfully. I didn’t know what a ten looked like. I didn’t know what zero looked like. I had no idea. Of course I didn’t. My mentor scorned my lack of innate inability, and I wondered what was wrong with me.

So much for pedagogy and assessment. But it was behaviour management I really feared. My training school had been certified inadequate, because of cratering results, violence and poor attendance. I was told that student teachers wouldn’t be placed in such an environment, but they did it anyway, justifying it on the grounds that ‘I used to work in nightclubs.’

The children behaved like they had collectively agreed to haze me. Half of them literally ignored everything I asked them to do. I tried humour, I tried kindness, I tried easy lessons, hard lessons, watching films, group activities, debates: nothing. Nothing worked. The ones who wanted to do some work did, those who didn’t, didn’t. I was merely the delivery man. The very first lesson I had with my very first class, my mentor nipped out after five minutes, at which point they all started to walk about and sit on each other’s desks. Five minutes after that a boy came in and started dealing drugs at the back of the room, and when I asked him not to, he told me to fuck off, and carried on. It was not going well.

I went home every night consumed with guilt and stress and feelings of worthlessness. I constantly felt like a failure. When I asked for help with behaviour, I was told to ‘come up with my own solutions,’ and ‘build a relationship with the class.’ But no one could tell me how. Other teachers sympathised, and said things like, ‘You just have to be teaching them for a few years and then they realise you’re not going anywhere and they give you a break.’ But this made it sound like I was on trial, with no guarantee of parole. Was I simply to wear them down until they accepted me as a mascot or a necessary inconvenience?

Other teachers said, ‘What can you expect from kids like this?’ and when they did so half of them meant it sympathetically towards the kids, and the other half meant it derogatorily. But both groups meant that kids from tough backgrounds wouldn’t, couldn’t achieve much, so I shouldn’t feel bad for trying and failing. But this seemed to be a doomed philosophy that damned the children to their fates, and condemned me as an onlooker.

Why is behaviour so important?

The experience battered me, and it taught me my first lesson: if children weren’t behaving the right way, nothing else was possible. When the room was chaotic, nobody was learning; no one was safe, no one could relax, no one could ask, ponder or wonder or blossom. Literally nothing worth doing in a classroom could be done when people were ignoring you, shouting over you, like trying to build a house of cards in a hurricane. Nothing complicated, fragile or sophisticated can be done in chaos. We could not have this lecture were every single one of you not attending so wonderfully, as you are. I was right to be worried about behaviour, we all were.

Why do children do well in some schools but not in others? The answer, somewhat obviously, is how they behave in those schools. If they turn up, try hard, listen, take notes, ask questions, listen to one another and so on, of course they will do better than I environments where they do not. Knowledge and skills are not magical gifts granted to us by the fairies in our crib. The marvels we learn in school are not inhaled intuitively, or teased out by love alone. We are taught. And teaching, and learning, requires a magazine of behaviours that make both more or less likely. The statue of David is not waiting in the marble, waiting to be revealed. It is carved. It is designed and built and chiselled. Or to put it another way, no child flourishes in chaos. Nobody. Such environments favour only the opportunistic or vicious, the predatory and cruel.

Demographics matter

I left my first placement no better at managing classes, although I had become used to accepting chaos as the norm. My second placement was in a high performing school, in a wealthy part of London, and the behaviour was much better. But I was doing exactly what I had done in my previous position. And that was my second lesson: the behaviour of the children was highly dependent on the demographic composition of the cohort. I left this school as insensible about behaviour management as I ever was.

Then I started my first full time position in a challenging inner-city school, where I encountered the same problems; some students were happy to work and others were not. If you tried to engage with them, they treated you with pity..

And after a few years the third lesson slowly emerged: I had never been taught how to manage behaviour. There was nothing wrong with me; my training had never prepared me to do one of the most important things in my job: to ensure that the classroom was safe, calm and dignified.

That led to the fourth lesson: the people who had trained me didn’t really know either. They stumbled along in the dark and did what seemed to work for them, and the ones who survived, stayed. It was survivor bias writ large: in at the deep end as the basis of professional training: if you drowned, you drowned. If you made it to the end of the pool, you were a winner and you got to do it again tomorrow.

So far, so unlucky. Perhaps I had just been cursed with a bad experience. Then I started to write a regular column in teacher newspapers, like the Times Educational Supplement, answering questions from new teachers, many of whom seemed to share my difficulties, so I advised them as best I could. The most common problem was low level disruption, and the next was that they couldn’t manage behaviour and the school didn’t seem to be able to help. It seemed I was not the only one, and my school was not the only cold spot.

The problem no one talked about

Then I started to work with teachers across London and found they too had similar problems. It didn’t seem to be me. I found there were broadly two categories of teachers: those who worked in challenging schools and said that behaviour was a huge problem, and those who had more fragrant experiences, who worked with smaller groups, more affluent communities or children from more secure backgrounds.

See this was the funny thing: when you asked the Department of Education what behaviour was like, they didn’t really keep or track data. Ofsted, the school inspectorate would tell you that 85% of schools were rated good OR BETTER for behaviour. No one spoke about it in public. There were no forums in which to do so. So why was it, everywhere I went, teachers told me they had gruelling experiences in the classroom?

Social media split that conspiracy of silence wide open; teachers in the UK started to pour out their experiences. Now, their voices could reach beyond the staffroom, and it was liberating. Still it was denied by agencies and authorities whose status relied on everything being fine. For actual people in classrooms, things were often anything but fine, and they couldn’t afford to live in a fantasy world. Their worlds were too real, and the consequences for wishful thinking were too bitter, for them and for their children.

Domain elites and domain experts

This was a common theme I would keep coming back to in my investigations: how the people with the least experience of challenging classrooms were often the ones with the least practical, most useless opinions on how to manage challenging classes. And they often had influence. Perhaps that isn’t so surprising.

But I have noticed that in multiple countries, the ones tasked with leading on behaviour at a policy level or an academic one, or a training one, were often the ones who came up with the most outlandish theories about how ot manage behaviour. Of course they did. These people are often domain elites, rather than domain experts. For them, the consequences of their stupid philosophies are remote or invisible to them. The cost of failure to them is nothing. To the impoverished child from a chaotic environment, for whom school is their only chance at a better future, it means everything. When we get behaviour wrong, kids get punched in the face, abused, harassed, bullied, harrowed and humiliated, their life chances tied to an anchor and cast into the ocean. This is one of the reasons I choose not to mince my words on this matter; because of how much it matters.

The national picture

Years later and I was leading national reviews in the UK, trying to understand how teachers were being taught to manage classrooms. The Carter Review a year before mine, had determined that there were significant gaps in teacher training, behaviour being one of them. My job was to look closer, and to see what was happening on the ground across the country. After a six-month investigation the answer was clear: not much. Hardly any teacher training institution was delivering anything like a substantial component of teacher training. Not a single institution could submit to us any form of syllabus or curriculum of skills or knowledge that had to be taught in behaviour management.

Many of them of course, had behaviour management down on their course descriptions; it was timetabled and categorised as a necessary requirement to cover. It was, after all, part of our national teaching standards. But there wasn’t a scrap of detail about how this would be delivered, what was to be covered, how competence was to be established, and how we would know if someone could do it or not. It was a ghost qualification; if you finished your course, you were deemed to have studied it. And the training provider was deemed to have delivered it successfully.

Some, of course, delivered perhaps a perfunctory half-hour lecture on the matter- I remember my own- but it was useless, and full of platitudes about inspiration and engagement. And of course, ‘building a relationship’. Which is in many ways a true thing to say, but terrible advice, akin to advising a comedian to ‘be funny.’ We know what the words mean, but unless you know how to do it, you simply can’t.

Later, I led reviews into the leadership of behaviour management and found things were even worse. Were you to be a leader of a school we found that it was practically guaranteed that you would not have been trained at all in the systematic implementation of behaviour management at an institutional level. Many leaders were teachers, promoted. But competence in one domain does not imply competence in the next. I was a walking example of this when, a competent bartender, I had been reassigned to management in a battlefield promotion. Years later, when I went into school leadership, I was asked to move from things I was reasonably good at- teaching lessons, marking etc- to something I had no idea about- line management, training, curriculum design etc. And most of all, managing the behaviour of my teams let alone children.

Why was teacher training in behaviour so terrible?

I had thought my experiences were singular-but they were universal. Poor training in behaviour management was not a bug, but a feature of the system. Why? I will outline a few of the reasons:

1. Many of the people who were responsible for training others in behaviour were themselves unskilled in behaviour management, and therefore lacked the ability to communicate and impart that wisdom to others. Some of them hadn’t been near a classroom in decades. Some of them had only ever taught privileged communities, small classes, highly regulated children, for short periods, which brings to mind influential thinkers in this area like John Dewey, or more recently Alfie Kohn, who for some reason are regularly cited as experts in behaviour.

2. Much of what passed as behaviour management was simply a patchwork quilt of half-baked ideas, folklore, personal experience, childish therapy, wishful thinking, and progressive philosophy that was already old by the time Queen Victoria closed her eyes for the last time. I have seen students spend more time on reading constructivism, or Foucault, or Paulo Freire, than how to manage misbehaviour. In training, if you asked for advice, what you got might be wise, or witless. Everything depended on luck, not a professional body of knowledge and skill, shared in a meaningful, memorable and guaranteed way.

The Myths of Behaviour

For example: you might be told to build a relationship, but without guidance about what this means, you end up placating the class, or trying to please them, or endlessly trying to avoid upsetting them so you make the lessons as easy as possible; or devise excruciating ways to make the lessons relevant to their lives, or fun, or exciting. But doing so only teaches children that you are there to amuse them rather than educate; that the only work they need to do is when it is pleasing to them, or interests them, or is easy enough to be distracting rather than challenging. But this hollows out the habits of a child, until they are unable to cope with anything hard, or sustained, requiring effort and focus. Is there a more certain way to guarantee a child leaves school less capable than they were at the beginning of their education? The teacher, if aiming at being liked, ends up a children’s entertainer to a room full of child Napoleons, terrified of upsetting their child-emperors.

Or you may be told that all behaviour should be managed using entirely restorative methods, despite restorative processes having an incredibly weak evidence base of utility in challenging school environments as a whole school process. Restorative practice, which in its modern incarnation comes to us from the justice system is a fine tool in some circumstances, but nowhere in life can it be evidenced as working at scale. There is a reason that traffic wardens don’t hand out restorative justice tickets, or when you try to get into a sold-out concert without a ticket the admissions staff don’t ask you to consider the feelings of the community. RP is a tool, and like any tools, they have great utility in very specific circumstances. But they are not a replacement for boundaries and consequences, and schools that attempt to do so find themselves working twice as hard for half the result. I am weary of working with schools that have leaned so hard into restorative practice they fell over, and need to be rebooted because behaviour is so chaotic.

Restorative practice feels right; it appeals to our sense that, with enough discussion everyone will realise they should do the right thing. But it relies on a central fallacy; that people are innately kind and cooperative, and all that is needed to unlock this behaviour is to facilitate it through restorative conversations, circles and so on. But this is not true, and relying on such simplistic and erroneous first principles leads to nothing but error at every subsequent stage in our calculations. Children like all adults are capable of being kind, cruel, calm, and chaotic, but many of us act unkindly or selfishly or aggressively because we want to, not because we have made an error of judgement. You cannot reason away every misbehaviour. And even if you could, teachers cannot do this in the classroom, nor are they usually capable of it even in lengthy extra-class discussions. Restorative practice is impractical as a primary mechanism of behaviour management. It suggests that teachers be therapists and telepaths and magicians. But I’m afraid we are in short supply of those. All we have are human beings, doing their best.

Or you might encounter a behaviour model that suggest we should be trauma informed. And of course, who doesn’t want to be trauma-informed? It’s a great title, because if you say anything against it, you sound like a brute who doesn’t care about children’s trauma. But any theory that considers itself unassailable or holy is not a theory any more, but a holy article of faith. And the view that all, or even most misbehaviour emerges from some form of trauma is both wrong and ironically a very great insult to the children who have been through traumas, which can be real and devastating. The word trauma itself has gone through an enormous definitional journey: originally it referred to the effects of head injuries on soldiers in the first world war, until it moved to encompass horrific life events, and then eventually to commonplace but upsetting ones, like the divorce of one’s parents at an early age. And what does it mean to be trauma informed? The way some use it, it means ‘to excuse any child any misbehaviour, no matter how awful, as long as they have some hardship in their life to offset it.’ But trauma is not a fixed concept or quantity: some children go through tremendous difficulties and emerge unscathed, and others go through the same experience or less, and are devastated by it.

Understanding trauma means understanding several things: the classroom teacher is not equipped to be a therapist, especially during a lessons; and also, if we assume that trauma is behind even commonplace misbehaviour, we are simply mistaken. If a child throws a pen at another, should I start to investigate their psychology? Or reprimand and respond? Of course, schools must attempt to understand causes of behaviour where possible, but this is normally done outside of the classroom, not during, and not in every event of misbehaviour or you get swamped.

There are other myths of course: the myth that every misbehaviour is the result of an unmet need, which is unfalsifiable; another article of faith found in the spell books of people who frequently have little experience in challenging classrooms.

Or The myth that sanctions and reprimands are inherently wrong or counterproductive, which will come to a surprise to everyone who decided not to park in a no-park zone because they knew they would get clamped or towed.

Or The myth that all behaviour is really trying to tell you something or communicating something. That can be true in a sense of course, but it’s not always meaningful or important communication. When a child tells you to fuck off, should we ask, ‘I wonder what he really means?’ Or should we deal with it? Which doesn’t mean we are incurious to the causes, merely that we understand that for most children, most of the time, their behaviour emerges from a perfectly normal spectrum of desires, vices, and qualities of human nature, like the desire to amuse oneself or impress their friends.

And the greatest myth of all: the myth that children are born perfect, and only subsequently corrupted by society; that school itself, and society, and our rules and expectations, corrupt them and cause them to misbehave. This is frequently credited to thinkers like John-Jacques Rousseau, a man who famously, had 5 children and abandoned every single one of them to the orphanage. The idols of progressive behaviour management are so frequently false ones, but they are worshipped everywhere, and just like in ancient times, children are the preferred sacrifice.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are the annals of the Dark Ages of Behaviour Management. It is a near-recent history and in many ways still a current one. Everywhere I go, I see this darkness, this faith medicine, this folk-teaching dominate. It permeates every pore of the sector, from teacher training to the academy, to classroom partnerships. There are noble exceptions to each and every one of these, there are always schools, organisations, teacher training institutions, that defy this, and always have. I have found good practice in so many places. But their light flickers so frequently against a greater gloom that surrounds it.

The problem is everywhere

At first I thought the darkness was only in me; then I realised it was around me; then I thought it was only my school, until I saw that it was everywhere. It was systematic. It was not only national, but international. Every country I have been to- and I have seen over 1000 schools in 16 different countries- has problems with these paradigms, and no country has completely rid itself from the chaos of the past.

In the UK, it was remarkable how opinions varied dramatically about behaviour depending on who you asked.

In 2013 in the Teachers Voice Omnibus, a national sample of teacher attitudes:

• 23% of teachers believed that behaviour wasn’t at least good

• one in eight teachers did not feel well equipped to deal with student behaviour

• half felt that appropriate training was not available in their school to deal with behaviour

• 30% felt they could not discuss behaviour problems with other members of staff

• 1 in 5 teachers left teaching within 5 years, frequently citing behaviour as a reason

Translate those statistics medicine. If one in eight doctors didn’t feel trained to deal with general practice. It’s like saying, ‘only one of my fingers has gangrene, my hands are mostly fine.’

So why had things become so bad?

A reminder:

1. Teacher training: Carter Review (2015)- significant deficit in teacher training in behaviour management

2. Ofsted/ LAs: there were severe inspectorate penalties for high suspensions and exclusions (assumption was they were always a bad thing)

3. Progressive pedagogical models: ‘Managing behaviour’ was low priority- what mattered was lesson quality and relationships

• My review of ITT and leadership confirmed this

• It was worse if you were a leader

• It was worse still if you worked with the most challenging children, eg Tas.

Now consider this quote:

“[In this country] teachers are prevented from reporting all of the incidents. They’re expected to contain children who are exhibiting those issues. Local authorities measure headteachers by the number of exclusions. If you have a lot of exclusions, you’re considered a poor headteacher, so they avoid exclusions to avoid getting a black mark against their name.

Teachers are encouraged not to make complaints about youngsters because, if there are no complaints, then the authorities don’t have to deal with them. Teachers are covering up the problem of bad behaviour because it’s a black mark against them if an exclusion happens.”

Seamus Searson, SSTA union general secretary 2022

Does this sound familiar?

My studies initially focussed of course on the United Kingdom, and then took me to other countries. And I would strongly invite you to consider how this narrative fits your own context. Because Australia is of course facing up to its own behaviour crisis. In 2023 the OECD assessed Australia's classrooms to be among the most disruptive and disorderly in the world — ranking at 69th out of 76 school systems. And the Australian Senate has responded with its own assessment of this provocation. I should add that I was also asked briefly to apply for the role of NSW Behaviour Advisor…..

Does any of this resonate here? I think it does. I see Australian educators with integrity and courage face up to the systematic and historical fragility of the systems by which we manage behaviour in schools, and say, ‘enough.’ We can improve this. Australian teachers and leaders are as good as any in the world. And the best of what they do, is already great. That greatness needs to be identified, understood and nurtured more so everyone can share in it.

Everywhere I go, cultures and values are often different, but it would blow your mind how much they also align. Because the thing every educational system has in common, is children, and their finite psychology, and how they bloom and grow, and their frailties, and what makes them move. Children are what we have in common, Our humanity is what we have in common. And children behave in many very similar ways from schools in the West Bank, to KwaZulu Natal, from Vancouver to Singapore.

In my next two lectures I will look at- first of all- the Enlightenment- what schools and teachers have done who have woken up to the problem, faced up to the limitations of their religions, and emerged with new, powerful and effective processes that help children to flourish. In my third and final lecture I will look (and you’ll forgive my anachronism here) at the Renaissance. What can we do in the future? What needs to change? Where do we go from here? Because I always like to end on a New Hope.

But to paraphrase the AA, the first step on recovery is to acknowledge that there is a problem. Only once we admit that it’s dark, can we decide it’s time turn on the lights.

I am deeply grateful to the University of Notre Dame for the honour of being allowed to speak to you, to you for listening and honouring me with your attention, and to everyone in the whole sector for the great invisible ocean of effort that goes into nurturing our children.

Thank you. I’m now happy to take questions.