When Bill Rogers was 15 years old, he ran away from school. And he never went back. It was the teachers’ approach to discipline that caused the problem. And after a career as one of the world’s leading behaviour management gurus, he fears that teachers are still not getting it as right as they should be.

Of course, back when Rogers was at school, behaviour management was very different from how it is today. He recalls teachers who subjected him to humiliating punishments such as being caned in front of the class or being made to stand in the corner wearing a dunce’s cap.

“When I became a teacher, one of the things that stayed in my memory was teachers who were mean-spirited, petty, unjust,” he explains. “I said to myself: ‘I don’t want to be that kind of teacher.’ It was certainly a memory that shaped the way that I saw kids and the way that I saw any concept of discipline.”

After his “escape” from school in the UK, Rogers’ family moved to Australia. He became a teacher after being conscripted into the Australian army during the Vietnam War (during which time he went on trial for conscientious objection). He then worked as a parish minister for seven years. He honed his behaviour management craft working in challenging schools in deprived areas of Melbourne, while also researching conflict in the classroom for his master’s in education.

He was subsequently asked to work with the Victorian state government to implement better whole-school behaviour policies, before striking out on his own to advise teachers directly. He now lectures at universities around the world and has published a number of popular books, including Classroom Behaviour: a practical guide to effective teaching behaviour management and colleague support, now in its fourth edition.

Rogers believes teachers are now much better at handling behaviour than they once were. “I think, by and large, we are getting behaviour right these days. Schools are much happier and safer places now,” he says.

But while teachers might be better at behaviour than they used to be, there is still a need to improve further. One of the reasons why teachers still need support from people like him, Rogers suggests, is that a gap exists between what trainee teachers learn about behaviour management at university and the realities of the classroom.

“Sometimes university lecturers may forget what it’s really like in a very challenging school to help a really restless class to settle down,” he says.

Schools need to get much better at mentoring and colleague support, he says, helping the new teacher to develop practical strategies that will allow them to lead a class effectively, even in the heat of the moment when they are tired and frustrated and students are not behaving as they should be.

He is also critical of those who believe behaviour management is not part of the job - that children should simply behave and teachers be able to teach without a student playing up. That’s unrealistic, he says.

“If you put 25 children in a fairly small room, where the furniture is not always the best, they’re asked to engage in activities they didn’t choose, to sit with people they didn’t necessarily choose to be with and to be in a place that they’re required to be in by law every day of their school life...that’s quite demanding,” Rogers says.

Rights and responsibilities

And, he adds, when we then take these factors and combine them with others - testing regimes, special educational needs, the potential disaffection of some students about formal education, the pressures of being a teenager - and we throw all of this into the mix in one place where there might be hundreds or even thousands of pupils, all with different personalities, we shouldn’t be surprised when that causes problems.

“I mean, why wouldn’t there be issues to do with behaviour?” Rogers says.

Rather than resenting behaviour issues or expecting them not to exist, Roger argues that we instead need a constant drive to manage those issues better. His methods, for which he has gained a devoted global following, are based around the fundamental rights and responsibilities set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Encouraging teachers to behave like drill sergeants is the last thing he would suggest. Rogers instead advises teachers to speak to students about their behaviour and to make them accountable for their actions, but always with a view to repair, rebuild and make reparations.

“A lot of people still tend to think of discipline as something you do to control other people. Or punish other people. And most teachers realise now that when we discipline or when we exercise our behaviour leadership, we’re trying to help the student to be aware of and take ownership of their behaviour, which is not easy for human beings to do,” Rogers says.

A student should always be given the right of reply, he adds, and sanctions should always serve a purpose rather than being for show.

“We don’t simply use detention, for example, as an empty punishment,” he explains.

“We use detention to detain the child and, during that detaining time, work with him to sort through the issues of concern.”

There are plenty who might see this as taking a soft approach to discipline. However, Rogers would say that those people are misunderstanding the point of sanctions in schools, which should always be to rebuild rather than to punish. Indeed, if we really do want to get behaviour management right, he believes, we need to finally get away from an obsession with “punishment”.

“I was really annoyed several years ago when one of the education ministers here, whose name I won’t mention, was on a late-night news programme and said: ‘The punishment should fit the crime.’ And I thought, what a lousy metaphor for a school.

“We do call kids to account, but we’re not running a prison, so it’s absurd to talk about crime and punishment in that context. That’s not what it’s about.”

Helen Amass is deputy features editor for Tes and a former teacher. She tweets @Helen_Amass