Today, Tes has reported insider claims that the behaviour system used by Outwood Grange Academies Trust has run into difficulties following changes made to it last September.

However, Outwood’s “consequences” system has been at the centre of controversy for a much longer period.

The system involves issuing children with warnings for misbehaviour, which mount up and result in stricter punishments if pupils fail to improve their conduct. These penalties can culminate in a child being sent to the “consequences room”, where pupils have to sit silently in booths or with a child receiving a fixed-term exclusion.

Investigation: Outwood Grange behaviour system ‘falling down’ after changes

Read: Insiders allege Outwood Grange ‘ritually humiliated’ pupils

Read: Teaching at ‘flattening the grass’ school ‘felt like being a prison warden’ 

Even before the recent changes, some teachers questioned the effectiveness of the system.

One former Outwood teacher - who asked not to be named - told Tes: “For some kids, it’s just an easier life for them to act up, because they don’t want to be in school and they know they can just waste their life away in a consequences room.”

Another former Outwood teacher from a different school - who also preferred not to be identified - told Tes that the consequences room worked for some pupils but not others. “It worked for some,” they said. “Some students went in, did a day and were like, ‘I’m never going to do that again.’

“But then you had some students who were just in there all the time every day, and it didn’t bother them - it didn’t bother them if they were sent home and they were back in the following day.”

But as Tes reported today, three teachers currently working in three different Outwood schools have said that the changes to the system introduced in September have had knock-on consequences for behaviour. The teachers all believed the new policy was motivated by a desire to reduce exclusions in response to increasing scrutiny from Ofsted and the press.

A teacher at Outwood Academy City Fields in Wakefield said behaviour had deteriorated in the school. In a bid to clamp down on the number of children ending up in the consequences room, they said teachers had lost the ability to send pupils there themselves.

Behaviour ‘getting worse’

“They have to email learning managers and senior staff to get permission to put them in consequences room because there are too many people in. This has had a trickle-down effect and it means that behaviour in the classroom is getting bad,” they said.

The teacher stressed that they were not a particular believer in a “dictatorial” behaviour approach or exclusions. But they said that once Outwood reduced the prospect of exclusion, the model didn’t work, because it had an “ethos based on threat”.

“The problem seems to be - not that there was anything particularly good with excluding kids… but that was their policy, and that did seem to work.

“When we were Wakefield City Academy, we had a completely different ethos to that, and the ethos worked.

“But as soon as you take the teeth away, because [Outwood has] an ethos based on threat… once that threat’s gone, the whole thing falls down.

They added: “[Outwood] take a dictatorial approach but the teeth have been removed with this change… as soon as you remove the exclusions at the top, you need a brand new complete - from the ground up - behaviour policy, which they’re not doing. It’s sickening to see what’s happened to an ‘outstanding’ school.”

A senior leader at an Outwood school on Teesside agreed with the analysis that the multi-academy trust’s discipline system no longer worked once exclusions were taken away. They told Tes that teachers were not reporting pupils who failed to turn up to detentions, to keep them out of the consequences system.

“The consequences system has lost its teeth because they’re too scared to exclude…what we’re doing is shifting it down further to the detentions then basically trying to make detentions go away,” they said.

Speaking about Outwood’s general approach, the senior leader said that the trust had experienced success in improving behaviour standards in the schools it took over, because it would flood them with MAT staff to enforce stricter discipline.

But they said that the model was unsustainable, because once this extra support was withdrawn, it relied on school senior leaders constantly patrolling the corridors themselves.

“What they do is they support the behaviour system with lots and lots of people and then, as you improve, they take all the people away.

“The system only works when there’s lots and lots of people. As senior leaders, we’re not allowed a lunchtime, we’re not allowed a breaktime, we’re on duty for every single lesson. We don’t get planning, preparation and assessment time because the only way to make the system run is by having us in corridors.

“I think the behaviour system isn’t effective, but the problem is they’ve marketed and sold it so much now to other schools that they can’t not use that consequence system.”

The senior leader said Outwood was at a “critical juncture as a trust, because we don’t live in the world that was there when Sir Michael Wilkins [Outwood’s founding CEO] built the trust”.

They said there had to be another way of operating an effective behaviour system which was not underpinned by the threat of exclusions. “There are other schools in equally tough circumstances who don’t exclude and who get good outcomes,” they said. “There has to be a way of having high outcomes without excluding children.”

A third teacher whom Tes spoke to at a different Outwood school on Teesside had a different view, and strongly supported its behaviour approach.

“They brought their discipline in, which sounded quite harsh, and, yes, there was quite a bit of shouting at students, but at the students who were disturbing the lessons for the vast majority of the students who did actually want to learn,” they said.

“There was a high presence from them. They did walk round, they did look at the ‘consequences board’, as they were called it, and did pull out children and shout at them in the corridors. But it worked.

Outwood ‘reacting to bad publicity’

“We’ve got very disadvantaged students, and a lot of discipline systems make allowances… but fundamentally when students leave school, life doesn’t make allowances.”

However, the teacher said that behaviour had worsened following the recent changes. “The staff are getting a little bit tired and fed up because we’re having challenging behaviour that for three, four years we haven’t actually seen, because Outwood are now trying to modify their policies because of all the bad publicity”.

They said that pupils had picked up on Ofsted’s scrutiny of exclusions, and had told teachers: “You’re not allowed to exclude us as much any more, we’re just going to do what we want”.

The teacher went on: “Ultimately, that black and white line at the end makes a massive difference, and now they think we’re trying to make it a bit greyer and making it harder to exclude.

“The students know that and they’re playing on it, and you can feel the ethos in the school changing.”

A spokesperson for Outwood Grange Academies Trust said: “As an ever-maturing and learning organisation, we review our behaviour policy annually; not because we are under media pressure to do so, but because it is the right thing to do. 

“To suggest that we have changed our behaviour system in the wake of negative media coverage is simply untrue.”

The spokesperson said the current version of its behaviour policy was introduced a year ago and “has had the desired effect in supporting students to make better behaviour choices”.  

“However, when a student does not make good choices, there remains the route for staff to issue a behaviour sanction. 

“We are shocked and surprised that the Tes is attempting to criticise or shame us in our desire to reduce behaviours in schools that lead to exclusions, which is something that the media have previously criticised us for.”

The spokesperson added that Ofsted this year praised the trust’s new behaviour policy because it “provides pupils with more opportunities to make appropriate choices to regulate their behaviour before they reach internal isolation in the consequences room or a fixed-term exclusion”.