Earlier this summer the Department for Education published its National Behaviour Survey covering the academic year 2021-22.
There was a great deal of focus - and with good reason - on the concerning revelation that teachers felt that in every 30 minutes of lesson time more than six minutes were lost to poor behaviour. The impact of poor behaviour on teacher wellbeing was also a notable revelation.
Beyond that, though, the full report is 96 pages long and there are many useful insights that teachers and school leaders can take from data to help inform ongoing initiatives to tackle poor behaviour in their schools.
Behaviour in schools: what the research tells us
1. Avoid a leader-classroom disconnect
One main finding is that school leaders not “at the chalkface” have a considerably more positive view of behaviour in their schools than teaching staff or pupils.
For instance, while 90 per cent of school leaders said their school had been calm or orderly either “every day” or “most days” in the past week, only 64 per cent of teachers agreed, and only 47 per cent of pupils.
The most obvious explanation for this disparity is that very many school leaders are, understandably, somewhat detached from the everyday classroom experience and do not witness low-level misbehaviour that blights classrooms.
All of this makes it very important that school leaders and senior teams are working hard to stay connected with the daily life of the school, no matter how many meetings they have, and do everything they can to get a really accurate picture of what is happening across the site.
Teacher and pupil surveys, focus groups and making time to be around school during the day should all be in the thoughts of school leaders to ensure that they understand the true behaviour picture in classrooms.
2. Enforce behaviour policies fairly
Another notable issue that the report reveals is disparity in how teachers, leaders and pupils feel about the way rules are enforced.
Only 42 per cent of school leaders and 23 per cent of teachers said they thought rules were applied fairly “all of the time”, and just 19 per cent of pupils agreed.
Perhaps it is not surprising that young people have a feeling of injustice about the application of rules but the figures for teachers and senior leaders should be of note.
In particular, it underlines the importance of investing time and energy into making sure that teachers are properly trained and supported through the year to ensure that they use the school’s policy to enforce good behaviour as consistently as possible.
One very effective way of doing this is by giving staff (and pupils, too, ideally) a voice in what is in the behaviour policy - after all, it is the policy that they will be using and that should be their greatest help in keeping good behaviour.
Pupil voice is also something that school inspectors will be looking at closely in the coming year, so it is interesting that while 72 per cent of teachers said that pupil feedback was taken into account when reviewing their behaviour policy, only 24 per cent of pupils agreed that they were asked for feedback.
3. Bullying is still a problem - but there is cause for optimism
Some of the most negative responses to the survey revolved around the pupil experience, with only 41 per cent of pupils saying that they felt safe at school “every day” and 49 per cent saying they enjoyed coming into school “every day”.
Furthermore, 22 per cent of pupils said they had been bullied either in person or online in the past 12 months.
While this shows there is work to do on bullying and the wider school experience, it is a useful benchmark for schools and inspectors looking to see what a “typical” level of bullying is in a school.
Sometimes schools log bullying too thoroughly for fear that inspectors will criticise the amount of bullying being seen, but this figure should be a useful benchmark for schools when assessing their own data.
One positive element from the bullying figures is that schools do seem to be doing a good job of educating pupils about bullying in school. And perhaps the growing maturity of pupils as they go through school can be seen, with the report showing while that 30 per cent of Year 7 students said they had been bullied in the past year in school, this fell to 12 per cent among Year 13s.
4. Making use of data to inform behaviour plans
A very decent 83 per cent of school leaders said that they did use data to inform their approach to managing pupil behaviour. But this means that almost 20 per cent of the leaders asked did not have a data-informed behaviour policy.
The academic side of life in school is extremely data-focused and, given the amount of data that schools now collect on behaviour and pastoral concerns, there should be the same use of data in this area of school life.
A simple example would be that if the data shows that there is a particular area of school that sees lots of poor behaviour then staffing of school at break times should be changed to reflect that.
Or if there is a particular issue with, for instance, vaping, that school would look at its policies and use of personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) lessons and assembly times to ensure that this is an issue being appropriately dealt with and educated about.
5. The importance of parental engagement
Finally, 79 per cent of school leaders and 65 per cent of teachers agreed that parents were supportive of school behaviour rules.
While this is a good majority, it shows that too many are not on board - indeed, 11 per cent of parents said they were not supportive of their school’s behaviour rules.
This may be small figure overall but it underlines the importance of ensuring good and consistent communication with parents - not just when there is an issue but on a regular basis.
In the survey, 52 per cent of parents said school communicated with them only if there was an issue with behaviour and 18 per cent said that their school did not communicate with them about their child’s behaviour at all.
Clearly, then, many schools could benefit from more timely and ongoing communications with families.
Of course, there are some parents who seem allergic to opening emails from school but the more regularly they are informed of policies and procedures, the more chance of them being supportive of what a school is doing, even if their own child is in trouble.
Luke Ramsden is the deputy head of an independent senior school and chair of trustees at the Schools Consent Project
