One of the things that teachers know, and newspaper commentators often seem to forget, is that schooling only happens by consent. Ultimately, if a kid decides to up sticks and walk off down the drive, two middle fingers aloft like he’s in a John Hughes movie (as once happened to me), there isn’t much you can do.
It is what the current attendance crisis springs from, with children and parents voting with their feet. And it’s why behaviour management is tied into the indefinable quality of a school’s culture, not just its rule book.
This has some important knock-on effects. It means that all the true impact in behaviour management lies in prevention, not punishment - in the culture that pre-empts transgression, not the culture that ties all its efforts up in sanctions.
Behaviour management
But it also means that somewhere, somehow, you have to draw the line. You have to set the boundaries of what is acceptable in the school environment - and you have to recognise that if you permit the unacceptable, it fast becomes the norm.
Much of teaching exists in spaces like this, where what seem like opposing ideas are paradoxically entwined. The paradox of behaviour management is that sanctions are necessary, but if you find yourself using them too much, something is wrong.
And yet we often miss this in educational discourse.
Exclusions in England
Recent research and statistics on exclusions have been shocking. But in the media and in the online spaces where we gather, the complexity is not recognised and these statistics are co opted instantly into two opposing narratives. One in which the school’s right to exclude is absolute and never mistaken, and another where every exclusion is a denial of unmet needs that should have been listened to.
In researching my book, Exam Nation, again and again I came across ways in which opposing tribes of teachers stake their claims to different sides in a needless debate by almost purposefully misunderstanding the terms that the “other side” use.
In this instance, the proponents of the school’s right to exclude emphasise that the connection between exclusion, on the one hand, and criminality and poor outcomes in adulthood, on the other, is a straightforward one of “bad kids” ending up as “bad adults”.
Outcomes from excluded pupils
Equally, those for whom excluding someone is the prime cause of their later criminality often propose that the answer is simply not excluding in the first place - as if an exclusion comes with no baggage of unacceptable behaviour to start with.
As with so many aspects of our profession, though, I think, underneath the bluster, we all understand that the truth is somewhere in between.
A system without exclusions is chaotic and dangerous. But, just as in the adult world we spend time and money on rehabilitation for people who have committed actual crimes, with the knowledge that in the long run it will save us time and money, so we should have a far greater degree of care and attention for the excluded, knowing that - whether through their conscious actions or the impetus of their trauma and unmet needs - not paying attention will cost us.
And that’s before we even make the basic acknowledgement that these are children, and the acts they have committed, while probably entirely worthy of exclusion, often would not pass the bar of criminal behaviour.
Better alternative provision
In Exam Nation I suggest five new stories that we need to tell about education to change it - and five concrete policies that will start to tell those stories.
One of the most immediate policies is to rise to the challenge that those exclusion statistics present us with, not by condemning children as criminals or by keeping unsafe pupils in mainstream schools, but by ensuring a proper, high-quality coverage of alternative provision (AP) across the country.
Because this is the scandal behind the statistics. What happens to those children next is the key determinant in whether exclusion becomes the wake-up call needed or the start of a downward spiral.
And yet there just aren’t enough spaces. Kids end up in limbo or are reintroduced into mainstream without any response to what went wrong in the first place. Curriculum is haphazard and interrupted by the constant churn of new intake.
In one of the APs I visited, I met a child who had been permanently excluded from two different schools within a year - and yet it was evident within minutes that this was someone carrying a baggage of trauma and emotional disturbance that made the intensity of the classroom impossible.
Teachers are not police officers - nor are schools courts. It is not our business to punish.
And yet by underfunding AP, and letting the availability of places be determined by the lottery of uncoordinated local provision, that is exactly what we do.
Schools do not exist in isolation. They need the ecosystem around them - social services, child and adolescent mental health services, and AP - to support what they cannot fix. And when this happens well, as I saw in so many places I visited, alternative does not have to mean second best.
Sammy Wright is author of Exam Nation and a head of school
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