This article originally appeared in the 28 February 2020 edition of Tes magazine under the headline “Is consistency even possible?”

“Consistency [in behaviour management] is overrated,” states US educationalist Alfie Kohn, in a typically matter-of-fact way.

And a typical reaction from his critics would be to dismiss his point as oppositional and out of touch - Kohn is known for very progressive views on behaviour management and his challengers are known for waving them away without even a cursory glance.

But on this, you might think that those critics have a point: for years, consistency of approach has been promoted as the holy grail for achieving good behaviour and thereby creating a good learning environment.

The 1989 government inquiry report Discipline in Schools by Lord Elton mentions consistency more than 50 times, while a 2005 school behaviour report by Sir Alan Steer also promotes it heavily: “Pupils need to experience a degree of consistency of experience if they are to learn how to learn and to learn how to behave.”

More recently, in 2017, government behaviour tsar Tom Bennett highlighted the importance of consistency as a linchpin for good behaviour management in a report for the Department for Education, while Ofsted reinforced this view in its January 2019 Education Inspection Framework research overview: “Consistency across practices is important for pupils, who benefit from clear expectations of what is typically going to happen in lessons and of what is expected of them behaviourally.”

But what exactly is consistency? And is there any evidence to suggest that Kohn might be right in his assertion that it is “overrated”?

Behaviour in schools: is consistency really key?

Consistency, according to its simplest interpretation, is doing the same thing repeatedly. For example, you can be consistently a great friend, a good partner or a bad sleeper.

In behaviour management, it is generally interpreted as meaning the same reaction to any action: if you cross boundary A, you will receive punishment B. In this way, the pupils know what is expected of them, and what will happen if they don’t meet those expectations. No grey areas, no debate: those are the rules and every teacher will enforce them. Theoretically, this makes sense, according to the research.

“Children need structure and consistency in the responses and expectations of adults around them, whether that is at home or in schools or playgrounds - wherever,” says J Ron Nelson, the Larry and Sharon Roos family professor of special education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “It’s a fundamental knowledge base of anyone working with children.”

He has been involved in numerous studies on the positive impact of consistency and has plenty of anecdotal evidence, too.

For example, while working as a consultant helping schools with behavioural issues in the 1990s, Nelson visited a school in Los Angeles that had a serious gang problem. The pupils regularly wore caps that would, depending on how they were worn, represent an affiliation with the gang they were in. The school had a no-caps policy as part of an attempt to create a consistent approach to tackling the issue and improving behaviour.

You can imagine Nelson’s surprise, then, when, in his work to uncover why behaviour was still such an issue in the school, he discovered that some teachers were allowing pupils to wear their caps in lessons, ignoring the school’s policy.

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He says this kind of occurrence was common in schools he visited that had behaviour issues: consistency had disappeared. “I got so tired of thinking, ‘Why do I have to come in and tell you it’s important for expectations to be consistent?’ I would say, ‘I can just tell you over the phone what to do, I don’t have to visit.’”

So consistency is clear: everyone does what the behaviour policy states, no arguments. But when you translate that into reality, is it really what teachers think consistency is?

The caps example is a relatively simple rule to enforce. What about more subjective rules? What about when there are grey areas in terms of what enforcement looks like? And what about exceptions?

For example: if you are a consistently bad sleeper, does that mean you never have a decent night’s sleep?

Or if you are in the classroom, does consistency mean enforcing the lunchtime detention for forgetting a pen, even when the child in question has extenuating circumstances? Or what about an immediate warning for shouting out? Does it matter what is shouted, how loud, in what context?

It’s this nuance that has led some academics to claim that a looser definition of consistency is what is really required in schools.

Taking comfort from predictability

H Jerome Freiburg, John and Rebecca Moores university professor in the College of Education at the University of Houston, has studied ideas around consistency in education for some 50 years. He has even set up the Consistency Management and Cooperative Discipline (CMCD) programme, designed to help pupils and teachers set guidelines around behaviour to boost learning potential.

Freiburg believes consistency is a fundamental ideal for schools. However, he says too many in education misinterpret it.

“People think consistency is doing the same thing over and over again, and that means you get better results,” he explains. “But really, consistency is predictability, knowing what is going to happen next - and once students get a sense of comfort from that predictability, you can build from there.”

Cathy Little, senior lecturer in special education at the University of Sydney, agrees with this definition.

“A consistent approach is not a hard and fast set of rules, but rather flexible guidelines for behaviour that allow for recognition of individual needs and representation of desired behaviours,” she says.

So, by this argument, consistency is not about always doing the same thing but usually doing the same thing and adapting to special cases. If you talk to teachers, most concede that this is generally what consistency looks like, even if it is not defined as such in a school context. And finding the balance with flexibility to make the behaviour policy work, they say, is tough.

“Consistency is absolutely key to making any policy work,” explains Keziah Featherstone, headteacher at Q3 Academy Tipton in the West Midlands and co-founder of WomenEd. “It must be clear, coherent and be embedded in practice.

“[However], within that you would want teachers to be able to exercise some common-sense flexibility; often this comes from experience.

“Unfortunately, you cannot trust that every teacher has developed the ability to read minds, and so teachers applying common-sense exceptions is not as easy as it sounds.

“For example, not letting children out of lessons to go to the toilet is a fairly common policy - kids should exercise some self-control, be able to wait until breaks and shouldn’t miss learning. But what about the child too scared to use the loo at break because of bullies, who is now desperate? What of the girl who has unexpectedly started her period?

“Some flexibility has to be employed and when it isn’t, something terrible may happen. At the same time, if a teacher lets out a student to use the loo, and they then smoke a cigarette, which sets off the whole school fire alarm, that is incredibly unhelpful.”

The right level of flexibility

Amy Forrester, English teacher and director of pastoral care (key stage 4) at Cockermouth School in Cumbria, and Tes behaviour columnist, agrees that consistency in flexibility is incredibly difficult to get right. She argues that a case-by-case approach, with discussions with the senior leadership team, is the only way it can realistically work.

“Adding in too much flexibility only increases the extent to which behaviour is dealt with in an inconsistent way,” she says. “However, there should always be a place for professional judgement when working with children and behaviour. An ideal approach would be to ensure that anything that requires flexibility also requires a discussion with line managers or SLT to ensure that there is a genuine need for consistency, rather than consistency occurring because it is a convenient opt-out of difficult or challenging conversations with children.”

If a rule is bent, she believes, transparency is crucial. “In my experience, having frank and open conversations with students about this is key,” Forrester explains. “Children have a keen sense of justice and will find it hard to accept when someone else is perceived to get away with something that they were sanctioned for. It is important that this is acknowledged with the student, who is directly involved, so that they can see how they are being treated in a fair way.

“Ultimately, the message needs to be that school leaders are in charge of the application of rules and sanctions, and any decisions they make are to be respected.”

“There should always be a place for professional judgement when working with children and behaviour”

Schools that get behaviour right do seem to adopt this selective consistency approach, according to a 2016 government report looking at the behaviour management practices in schools rated “outstanding”. It identified that the schools that balanced consistency with flexibility were achieving the best results.

“Rules were set, but individual incidents received tailored approaches. Individual teachers could deal with behaviour issues differently - including in terms of rewards and sanctions - but students needed to feel that all teachers dealt with pupils fairly and consistently,” the report said.

And Nelson would argue that there will be natural variability anyway; aiming for 100 per cent consistency is naive.

“You take, say, 70 staff and 500 pupils and you’re going to get a huge mixture of perspectives and individuals,” he says.

“Even under the best conditions, you’re going to have some [teachers] that don’t care, some that are passive-aggressive about implementing it, some that are too dogmatic on certain behaviours where others are not.”

Nelson believes that schools need at least 80 per cent of staff supporting and implementing a behaviour policy for it have a chance of success. “You can weather the 20 per cent,” he adds.

But even with this more relaxed definition, is consistency really as important as some of the authors of research literature and teachers seem to think? Is it overrated?

Ruth Payne, an academic at the University of Leeds and a former secondary school teacher, certainly questions the value of consistency and how it plays out in schools. She relates a story of a student who was walking up some stairs behind her to another lesson. The student accidentally stood on Payne’s shoe and it fell down the stairs. The student apologised and immediately turned to retrieve the shoe, going in the opposite direction of others on the stairs. As the student did so, they were admonished loudly by a deputy head who saw this “transgression” of going the “wrong way”. Despite student and teacher attempting to explain the situation, there was no leeway or interest in the circumstances.

“When I saw the student later, I said, ‘You must have felt really shaken by that,’ ” Payne relates. “And he just said, ‘It doesn’t matter, Miss,’ and explained that the pupils were used to being spoken to in this way and knew the system was going to run like this whatever had happened, and so their response was just to stay quiet.”

The question of fairness

Citing another example, Payne says she witnessed a child being told off for shouting out the answer to a question that had stumped the entire class, after working it out in a “eureka moment”. Rather than being praised, the child was told off because it was against the school’s policy to shout out, even though Payne says that the interjection was in no way disruptive.

“You could really see the wind knocked out of the student,” she says.

Payne questions whether consistency really provides a good learning environment for children, as it runs counter to many other, more progressive approaches in education that seek to give children more agency and involvement in their own learning process.

“I don’t think you will find a teacher in the UK who says that whole-class detention is a fair thing, so we understand the principle of not treating pupils as if they are the same … [So] the idea of dealing with people en masse is just not fair,” she adds.

Sam Carr, senior lecturer in the department of education at the University of Bath, also believes consistency is overemphasised. He notes that many of the ideas around consistency are based on the idea that pupils can be treated as a singular entity, and their attitudes and actions controlled as one.

This view stems in part from behaviourism research, which suggests that humans can be conditioned into certain behaviours. Carr argues that this approach is long out of date.

“Education is a lot more complicated,” he says. “With animals, we can’t gauge the reason they are doing something, but children may have lots of different reasons for doing something in a certain way, and these can be complex. It may be because of a trauma they are experiencing or they may be dealing with complex emotional problems at home.”

Or, he acknowledges, it might just be because the child is bored and acting out.

The trouble, Carr says, is that education remains rooted in traditional approaches like consistency to the point where the idea of any other method seems unthinkable - because it is overrated, he argues, we don’t try anything else.

“Many teachers have been socialised into a system that really does think of it in a behaviourist way, which is ‘my job is to stamp out bad behaviours and promote good ones’,” he says. “The big issue is that we realise more and more now in education that children are not just a set of behaviours: they are also a set of feelings, emotions, motives - and behaviours are just the tip of the iceberg. If we don’t care about that, we don’t care about them at all.”

Is this more where Kohn was going with his “overrated” comment? Actually, he would push it even further. “Anyone whose goals are more ambitious than eliciting compliance - who wants kids to be critical thinkers, enthusiastic learners, morally sophisticated members of a caring community - soon begins to question not only an overemphasis on consistency but also the whole idea of behavioural management,” he says.

Pupils governing their own behaviour?

That may seem like advocacy of anarchy to some teachers. What would it mean practically? Self-governance of behaviour by the pupils?

Interestingly, that is something that many support, at least in part.

Ofsted’s Education Inspection Framework research overview acknowledges this as a potential way to improve behaviour. “Involving pupils in setting rules can enhance ownership and thus buy-in, and typically does not result in less stringency, as sometimes feared,” it states.

This is hardly a ringing endorsement, but it supports consideration of the idea as a possibility. Indeed, Freiburg has regularly worked with UK schools to get them to understand that this approach can have positive outcomes.

“The whole idea is that pupils take responsibility for the classroom,” he says, outlining that this includes reaching consensus on good behaviours and how lessons will be conducted, and even getting pupils to take on roles that facilitate the smooth running of classes.

“[The CMCD works] with schools to create ‘Magna Carta’ for the classroom that each pupil signs to agree on what they want the classroom to be … [And] they have jobs [in the classroom] - they fill out applications, they go for interviews with teachers and they rotate every six weeks or so, and what that does is build an ownership of engagement in the classroom.”

“Children learn to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions”

He explains that at one school he worked with, around £25,000 had been spent on fixing windows smashed by pupils. This was reduced to zero in around two years by implementing these sorts of strategies because they changed the relationship pupils had with the school.

“[The smashed windows are] an indicator of how kids perceive their role in that school, so you need to move their experience away from that and make their school a place where they want to be,” he says.

Kohn is all for it. “Children learn to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions. That’s the reason to have them more involved - not just in formulating behavioural policies but in deciding together how they want their classrooms to be and how to make that happen,” he says.

Yet, would that still not require a degree of consistency if it were to be effective, even if those rules and the enforcement came from the children themselves? Much of the research into consistency stresses that it works because children and teenagers have a keen sense of fairness.

Great expectations

However flexible a system might be, and whoever enforces it, it seems clear from the literature that consistency is linked to perceptions of fairness and, thus, is important.

Perhaps the problem with consistency is not what it is, then, but how it is interpreted in schools. When we talk about consistency, we are making assumptions that everyone agrees what it means, what it looks like and what the caveats to it are, or could be.

In reality, those assumptions appear problematic. Many teachers who advocate consistency, for example, would never see it as applicable to the negative situations that Carr and Payne describe and, in fact, would see it more as those academics see behaviour management working.

Even among those who seem to share a clear view of what consistency is, you will get huge variations in when and why they might bend that consistent approach.

Another problem is expecting too much from consistency: clearly, from what Nelson has found, 100 per cent compliance is unrealistic. And, as Featherstone argues, some flexibility is needed to enable professional teacher judgement.

So, should we be talking of consistency at all? If leaders and teachers - and, for that matter, researchers and policy creators - do want to use it, it would seem sensible that they define exactly what they mean, and in what context, first.

Consistency may not be overrated, as Kohn suggests - teachers being aligned in actions is obviously important - but the word clearly over-reaches in its capacity to define behaviour management. And it is underdefined as a concept to such an extent that it is unlikely to be as useful as some hope.