On the face of it, compliant seems a perfectly reasonable thing to ask school children to be.

If they don’t do as they are told, if our classrooms aren’t orderly places, not an awful lot of learning will go on... or not the sort of learning we are paid to ensure happens, anyway. If classrooms aren’t places where teachers are in control, all sorts of undesirable things can happen, from larking about, wasting everybody’s time, to bullying.

Children, in their nature, can very quickly move from silly to unsafe. Schools need them to behave in particular ways or they can’t function as learning communities.

Unfortunately, despite all of the above good reasons, compliance is one of those things in life that has a problematic undertone.

Managing behaviour

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have a daughter and I teach daughters, too. Watching them grow is a privilege and a delight. But, as a mother and a female teacher, I am aware of the world they are heading towards.

There are times when doing as you are told, no questions asked, really could put them in harm’s way, and I need to look for those moments when they are able to say that magic word “no”.

We want girls who, I hope, will make decisions for themselves, not just mindlessly accept those of others they believe have authority over them. A little bit of feistiness does them no harm at all - even if it makes my life more difficult.

Over-reliance? 

And then, of course, there is disability. Now one of the things that you learn when you work with disabled young people, and especially so if your own children are disabled, is just how dependent on others they are. Compliance, for them, can become a way of life, along with waiting and accepting help.

And, just as I think of the adult woman my daughter will one day be, I also think about the adult lives of my students, disabled or not.

Faced daily with the immediate and glorious challenges of working with young people, it’s easy to forget the world beyond the controlled environs of the school. But while we might be obliged by our contracts to teach a particular curriculum, what we teach and how we teach it reaches well beyond the school years and far beyond the school gates.

Being overly compliant can put people in danger. When you rely on other people for so much, then you need to know that it’s OK, and can sometimes be absolutely necessary, to kick off. That sometimes, kicking off can keep you safe from harm.

And, just as respect is something that is earned and authority is something that is given by young people to their teachers rather than something that is taken for granted by them, it is not compliance from our young people, that we must seek. It is, instead, their consent.

Nancy Gedge is Tes SEND columnist, coordinator of the Ormerod Resource Base at the Marlborough School, Woodstock, and author of Inclusion for Primary Teachers