How do you feel about detentions? Do you hand them out freely? Or do you do everything in your power to address poor behaviour in other ways, so you never have to resort to the dreaded D-word?

Your answer to this question will likely depend on how behaviour is led at your school. If staff know there is a centralised system of detentions that does not involve each individual giving up their own free time to run them, they are more likely to use them.

As such, this is one of hundreds of decisions every day that teachers make that are directly influenced by the person leading behaviour. Leading behaviour, therefore, is a rather important job.

Behaviour underpins the success of the whole school. Without excellent systems to ensure impeccable behaviour, none of the vital work on teaching and learning will have the desired effect and, as a school’s behaviour lead, you are responsible not only for putting those systems in place, but making sure that they are being implemented consistently.

It’s no surprise, then, that stepping up to lead on behaviour can be daunting. It’s an area of constant challenge and complexity. So, how do you get it right for your school?

Put policy first

If you are new to leading on behaviour, the first place to look is the school’s existing behaviour policy. Ask yourself: does the policy deliver a clear and simple vision? Too often, behaviour policies are confusing to follow, full of codes and processes. Instead, the policy should lay out explicitly what your standards are, as well as making any red lines clear.

Your policy should set out a vision for school leaders to have excellent expectations of students, while also giving them the support they need to dictate what is and is not acceptable behaviour in your setting.

Make systems clear and simple

The behaviour policy should be underpinned by clear and simple systems that empower your staff to manage behaviour with minimal workload. Many excellent software packages are available, so find one that works for your school and use it to create your own systems.

Recording poor behaviour should be quick and easy. If it becomes an onerous task for busy staff, then standards will slip. Aim for it to take as few clicks of the mouse as possible - any more than three clicks is too many.

Workload is also an important consideration when it comes to sanctions. It is vital that teachers are not the ones being penalised for students’ misbehaviour, so centralised detentions are a must. It cannot be the case that, when sanctioning behaviour, staff have to choose between being able to leave on time to collect their own child from school or spending an extra hour supervising someone else’s child.

Set a behaviour curriculum

To achieve excellent standards of behaviour, you must also have excellent support systems in place for students who find these standards challenging. Too often, standards are set with no real understanding of what students must know in order to meet them. And lots of students find standards difficult to meet because no one has ever taught them what good behaviour looks like. For this reason, you need a behaviour curriculum running alongside your academic curriculum. Ask yourself the following questions:

• When students join our school, how, when, where and what do we explicitly teach them about what “good behaviour” looks like in the classroom and during social time?
• How do we build on this throughout a student’s time at our school?
• How does this need change and develop as students progress through their education?
• Which strategies do we teach explicitly and regularly to ensure that all students have a clear understanding of what our standards look like?

If your only answer to this is telling students that they must “behave”, significant numbers of students will struggle. Just as knowledge must regularly be revisited in the classroom, so too should students’ understanding of good behaviour be reinforced regularly.

Define routines

As a school, you will have countless routines: for entering and leaving the school building, entering and leaving lessons, moving between lessons, buying your lunch in the canteen, and so on. Each one of these routines must have clearly defined behaviours and the leadership team needs to set the expectations here.

Spend some time working on defining each of these routines. How do you want students to enter assemblies? You need to set your expectations out in black and white and then work with middle leaders to enforce those expectations. Decide when and how you are going to teach this behaviour, model it, challenge it and praise it.

Ensure that the behaviour you set out is both achievable and simple to sanction. There must also be capacity to sustain the behaviour in the long term - over a full school year, at least. There is nothing more damaging to whole-school behaviour than setting standards you cannot enforce; it makes a mockery of everything else and will inevitably lead to further issues for your staff.

Support colleagues

With that in mind, ensure that every member of staff is fully supported when they are applying your behavioural systems. Without this support, nothing will work. A child’s poor behaviour must never be attributed to the failures of a member of staff. The minute you do this, staff will not use your system, which puts learning at stake. Teachers must be publicly supported by school leaders in front of students and parents.

This is often the most difficult part of leading on behaviour, so you must have the right people dealing with it - leaders who are unafraid to have difficult conversations and to back your staff. No leader should ever undermine a teacher’s authority by removing a sanction following kickback from the student or parents. Equally, leaders must never judge staff for using the systems that have been put in place to help them.

Too often, if a member of staff is relying regularly on behavioural systems, it is viewed negatively. But any judgement you place on staff using the system should be positive; those staff are doing what you’ve asked them to do. Instead, it might be better for you to focus your attention on those members of staff who do not use the systems at all, as that’s often where the bigger problems lie.

Amy Forrester is an English teacher and director of pastoral care (key stage 4) at Cockermouth School in Cumbria

This article originally appeared in the 23 October 2020 issue