Arrive early at school on a dark morning and you can walk along silent, empty corridors; the only sounds are the hum of electric lights and your own footsteps. At that time and place, silence is dull and taken for granted. Five hours later, in the midst of a busy day, obtaining silence now seems as likely as bottling that early dawn.

“When I ask trainee teachers what three things they want, silence is literally always number one,” Sue Cowley, teacher trainer and author of Getting the Buggers to Behave, says. “They want children to be able to be able to listen silently - that is always the goal, but it is not easy to get.”

While imposing silence in order to get pupils to listen, focus and learn might seem an uphill task, there are times when silence does permeate through the noise and hubbub of school life. As well as quiet to enable learning, there are other valued silences: Remembrance Day; the anticipation as a school play or concert begins - and that moment as the last note fades before the applause; quiet areas in the playground; in prayer rooms or in meditation practice.

And if none of that works, you can always lock yourself in the loo.

While teachers crave silence, the recent debate about the use of “silent corridors” has shown that imposing it can change something about the quality of being quiet. Instead of silence being a state that helps to elevate thinking and mood, it is now in danger of being seen as oppressive.

So what type of silence do we want?

“If you consider silence as the absence of noise, there is no such thing,” says Helen Lees, independent researcher and author of Silence in Schools. “Essentially, there is always some noise.

“In my book, I was looking for a concept of a positive experience that you can call silence. That is what I call ‘strong silence’ because it brings forth benefits, because - and this is the key thing - it relies on consent.

“If there’s no consent then I call it ‘weak silence’, because it cannot bring forth benefits. But weak silence is also called by other names: oppression, denial, silencing.”

Teaching, by its nature, does require some silence to be imposed. But children know this. Even young children will know that they need to fall quiet in order to hear a story. The trick is persuading them all to be quiet, all at the same time, even when they may not be in the mood.

Cowley suggests starting by spelling out a fundamental rule - that there is only one voice speaking at a time. And one thing is really crucial, she says: “Children should be silent for each other. That’s more important, in some ways, than being silent for you, the teacher. Because it is creating a sense of respect for people’s ideas and input. There is nothing worse than a teacher who demands silence for themselves but does not insist students are silent for other people.”

Of course, silence is not necessary for the entire duration of a lesson; it depends on the task. “When you need silence, you need it - and that’s absolute,” Cowley says. “But when you don’t need it, then why are you asking for it?”

Serious side effects

For most schools, silence in class is about not chatting and getting on with the work. But for some, there are more serious issues. In 2011, the World Health Organisation estimated that at least 1 million years of healthy life were lost every year in Western Europe due to traffic-related noise.

Noise can affect health not only through direct injury - for example, by causing hearing loss or tinnitus - but also through a higher risk of heart disease or disturbed sleep that can impact on children’s ability to learn.

A study in Munich, Germany, found that when an airport was relocated, children living near to the old site experienced improvements in their memory and reading comprehension. In the two years after the new airport opened, children living nearby, newly exposed to the noise, suffered deficits in memory and reading comprehension tasks.

Because of the dangers of excessive noise, there are building regulations in the UK to protect workers. These cover not just the noise of air and road traffic but even pleasant sounds such as music. And in schools, they allow more noise in a corridor than a classroom. It is ironic, then, that it is corridors where the debate over silence has really kicked off.

“I was quite perplexed by this silent corridor idea,” Jeremy Swinson, an independent educational psychologist, says. “I have worked with a number of challenging schools in Liverpool and Manchester and I do think that peaceful corridors lead to peaceful lessons. But I don’t really see the need for total silence.

“The problem I see with having a silent corridor is that people are going to break [the rule], then you get into a negative cycle of detentions for a minor bit of behaviour. Detention, in my view, should be reserved for kids who don’t work. If they don’t complete the work set in class, they are held back and have a detention in which to complete it.”

But those headteachers who have brought in silent corridors say that, far from wanting to alienate children, the intention is to be inclusive, especially for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). For example, children who use hearing aids find it easier to hear with less background noise. And some autistic children can find disorderly spaces difficult to deal with.

This is one of reasons why headteacher Val Masson introduced silent corridors at Hornchurch High School (formerly the Albany School) in Essex. “Silent corridors came about because some of our younger children, with anxiety problems or autism, were complaining that they were feeling the corridors were too noisy - not unruly, just too busy,” Masson says. At Hornchurch, the students are allowed to speak to each other at break time and lunch, meaning that there are five three-minute periods a day when they are walking to lessons in silence.

A middle way

While the feedback from pupils with SEND has been positive, Masson stresses that the initiative was not only about this but also about introducing a broader social norm.

“I have a bit of an issue with the imbalance in the school,” she says. “Sporty, upper-school boys having a laugh, japing around in the corridors, means any younger children are pushed to the side.

“By saying to those advantaged students that they must not fill that space, that they must leave space for others, then that gives more space to more children who are not able to fight for it. We are not ‘doing this for autistic children’; we are doing it to make sure the most advantaged students are mindful of others.”

As well as creating more equality in the corridors, Masson says, the policy is also geared towards students arriving at lessons feeling calm and ready to learn.

But not everyone sees it that way: “Pupils are forced into total silence as school becomes one of the first in UK to ban talking between classes,” was how the Daily Mail described the initiative. Heart FM’s website reported that: “The secondary school’s bizarre methods have been introduced to tackle behaviour issues but the strict regime has been slammed by critics.”

Masson says: “If I’d said ‘quiet corridors’, we would not have drawn any negative attention. But my point is that we don’t want to use the word ‘quiet’ because it is not clear enough.”

Lees stresses the importance of making an active decision. “You cannot get the benefits of silence, unless you have chosen it,” she says. “It’s about inviting a presence into the environment. It’s very precious. It calms things down. It enables people to listen to each other better. It allows learning to happen. And the research backs that up.”

She adds that her research shows that learning about silence in RE, or even as part of mindfulness in PSHE, is not the same as living it. “Curricular content is not the same as having something interwoven into the school day that changes the nature of that experience,” Lees says.

“And it has to be regular. One thing about silence in schools that really seems to matter is that it is not an ad hoc ‘trip up silence lane’; it’s much more of a commitment. Then it really delivers. Everyone I spoke to using it on a regular basis [indicated] that there was some sort of addictive feature to it, in a positive way.”

Bubble of safety

Swinson has seen the power of having quiet places in schools where pupils can go during break. “One secondary school I worked with had integrated special needs children with mainstream children,” he says. “They had made sure that there was a lunchtime area where SEND kids could go and feel safe, if they wanted to. Not all children liked the hurly-burly of lunchtime.

“It was totally voluntary, but what was amazing was the way it raised the status of the special needs children. If you were mates with [them], you could spend lunchtime in this nice, warm classroom where it was not totally quiet, but there was a reading area, or you could do homework.”

Often we don’t like silence - we stuff our senses in order to avoid it. The travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor even described his initial experience of the deep silence of a monastery as a type of pain. “I had asked for quiet and solitude and peace, and here I was; all I had to do now was to write,” he says in his memoir A Time to Keep Silence. “But an hour passed, and nothing happened. It began to rain over the woods outside and a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke.”

However, Fermor eventually found that silence had a healing power, as his impression of a monastery changed from “an enormous tomb, a necropolis” to a place of “absolute and god-like freedom … the reverse of a tomb, a silent university, a country house, a castle hanging in mid-air beyond the reach of ordinary troubles and vexations”.

That is what silence can do. Silence can be both mundane and mysterious. It can be thoughtless or kind. It is what we choose it to be. That is a powerful lesson.

This article originally appeared in the 8 February 2019 issue under the headline “It’s oh so quiet … but should it be?”