This week my independent report into behaviour in schools is published. It’s called Creating a Culture: how school leaders can optimise behaviour and I hope people find it useful. I hope it acts as a catalyst for change; I hope people use it to drive their own improvements, and I hope it makes a difference to students. What a privilege it was to write it.
Schools matter; what we do in them matters, and how we behave in them matters most of all for every measure of success we can imagine. Last year I headed a working group for the Department for Education to consider ways we could improve teacher training in how to run classrooms so that pupils could enjoy a safe, supportive environment. It became obvious quickly that, while individual teachers could make a huge difference to their classrooms, there was an even bigger lever in schools that had a much bigger impact on outcomes: the school leadership. How a school was led and managed was crucial to the kind of learning culture it created for staff and students.
Every school has a different culture. How people understand “the way we do things around here” is crucial to how everyone behaves. Psychology teaches us that people are tremendously social beings - we take our behaviour cues from what we observe around us, to huge effect. School leaders have a big job, and one of the biggest parts of that is to help create a culture where students expect to do well, act kindly, work hard and flourish - and every staff member believes and lives this, too. We don’t need mindless uniformity - just sufficient consistency of behaviour where it matters. It’s important that we share a collective understanding of how we are going to work and interact in order for the school society to nurture the individual - and vice versa.
Getting good behaviour isn’t only about rules and consequences, although they provide a valuable skeleton for it. It also isn’t just about “not misbehaving”, although it’s that, too. It’s also about encouraging and supporting students to learn habits of mind and character that will help them become the best they can be, like how to speak to adults, plan an essay or work with people they don’t get on with. Just as self-regulation is a hugely important capacity to nurture in children, so too is confidence, tolerance and civility. Good schools aim for all these traits.
‘Together we can perform miracles’
I wanted to find out what great school systems did to create effective systems that maximised great behaviour to the mutual benefit of the whole community. So I went to them to find out. I went to primary schools and secondary schools, through-schools, alternative provision, and PRUs. I spoke to coastal schools, inner-city schools, rural and suburban. I spoke mostly to school leaders and the people they represented, but I spoke to academics, researchers, too. I was less interested in schools that enjoyed great behaviour because of privileged intake, and more interested in talking to schools that had turned around difficult situations, succeeded despite the odds, or managed to maintain success for years in challenging circumstances. Too often schools are applauded for results based on their intake. I wanted to learn what made a difference where it mattered most. So I asked them.
And I learned a great deal. Some of what I heard was repeated so often by so many that I concluded they were “good bets for most schools in most circumstances” - like having clear routines and high expectations. But rather than create a dogmatic checklist of must-dos, it became obvious to me that while there were strategies that had higher or lower probabilities of success for schools, how those strategies were executed often varied a great deal. No size, as they say, fits all. Some things seemed to work more often than others - like having a commitment to staff training in running a classroom - but context was very important, and the skill of the head is often to look at the range of strategies and consider what would work best, in what way, and for how long. This was the marriage of craft and collective, structured knowledge.
Where I could, I reported on common strategies that seemed to work frequently. I also commented on circumstances where more tailored work was needed, such as in SEN provision, and ways to improve inclusion that really meant inclusion. One thing that helped enormously was research we commissioned from an independent organisation to ask many of the questions I was asking, separate from my own investigation. Their findings provided useful examples of different ways that different school leaders carried out their strategies. It’s one thing to say a school should have “strong links with the community”, but what might that look like? Making grand aspirations concrete was crucial to the schools I talked to, so I made sure that findings were published simultaneously as a separate document for people to look at and use as a resource.
This report is a distillation of many voices from many contexts; it represents something often marginalised - the voice and expertise of those actually fighting the good fight. Above all I wanted to do justice to their wisdom, and represent it in a way that can make a difference. There is some extraordinary practice going on throughout England, and I know that if we can learn from one another we can perform miracles. There can be few things more important than the education of our children, as scholars and people. It is an article of faith for me that education can be a climbing frame and launch pad for every child, regardless of background.
Is there a problem with behaviour? In many ways there is, and we’re naive to ignore that. Not because many schools are falling apart but because many could improve their behaviour systems. Often official, external data about school behaviour appears rosier than how it actually feels at the chalkface. And there are big opportunities to improve how we offer training to school leaders who want to develop in this area. It’s hard to blame school leaders for feeling challenged by challenging circumstances when there is no formal requirement, entitlement or provision for professional behaviour development. But more importantly, the solutions also lie within our systems. This is an area we’ve overlooked for too long at a national level. But it’s nothing we can’t fix together.
Read Tom’s top 10 tips for behaviour management
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