When I became headteacher of Parklands Primary School, in Leeds, in September 2014, it was a very different school. It was rated inadequate by the local authority and there had been 150 internal exclusions that year. I’ll never forget that on one of my first visits, there were 10 to 15 children playing tag on the school roof.
And yet, there was a very strict regime of discipline in place; the school had both an exclusion room and a padded cell.
The system clearly wasn’t working: I knew, from the very first day, that something needed to change. It was my first headship, and I was under no illusions about how challenging it would be. I had experience of working in tough schools before, as a class teacher, as a key stage lead and as a deputy head.
In all of those roles, I enacted change through love. It wasn’t about going around the school and saying “love you” to everybody, but about building a community of love and respect slowly but surely; encouraging children to listen to each other, and their teachers, and ensuring they took responsibility for their actions. That’s what I wanted to introduce at Parklands.
It could have gone pear-shaped, but I was determined.
I knew the school needed to become a calmer place, and so, within the first term, I banned shouting. No adult or pupil was allowed to shout at school.
Behaviour: why ban shouting in school?
With some children, shouting can become like a game of tennis. You shout at them, they shout back, and it continues to go and back forth and gets louder and louder. The student gets frustrated, the teacher gets stressed and anxious: no one gets anywhere.
Stopping shouting was a big learning curve for everyone. No teacher goes into the classroom wanting to shout, but it’s completely normal to get frustrated when children aren’t behaving the way you want them to. In the first two terms, I spent most of my time walking around the school, modelling this behaviour to both staff and students. If I heard any shouting, I’d go into the classroom and ask what was going on, and stress the importance of being calm and in control.
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In order to be able to maintain the no shouting rule, we created a new behaviour system, with both staff and students. The strict regime went out of the window, as did the exclusion room and padded cell. Together, the teachers came up with the process for how misbehaviour would be dealt with, and it was then passed on to the student council to add their thoughts.
We operate a bit like a football game: on an orange and red card system. Teachers agreed what sort of behaviour would result in an orange card: low-level disruption, shouting out in class, talking over others, being rude to the teacher are all examples. When a student is given an orange card, they move to sit somewhere else in the class.
If the behaviour continues, they are given a red card, and have to move to the class next door. If it still continues, the SLT are called and we remove the child and take them to our office. Once they’ve calmed down, we have a discussion about what went wrong and why, and when they are ready to return to the classroom, they do so. Parents are always told what’s happened and, if necessary, they are asked to come into school for a meeting with the SLT.
All actions have consequences, some of which need to be tougher than others. At our school, it was the student-led school council who decided what those sanctions should be. It may be that a pupil has to miss playtime to do work in a classroom - practising their maths through Times Tables Rock Stars or their spellings through Education Shed.
The system didn’t take long to bed in, and I believe that’s because we stopped the shouting, started listening and actively included student voices in the behaviour system. For the first time, our children felt listened to.
When Ofsted came in 2017, it described our behaviour as “outstanding”.
Keeping control
I can’t, hand on my heart, say that I’ve never shouted at school since. In nine years, I’ve probably shouted four times. A couple of times have been when bullying has taken place: when one child is making another one utterly miserable, they need to know that the behaviour is completely unacceptable, and that it’s extremely upsetting.
On another occasion, I had spent hours putting up a new display, and then a child had destroyed it later that day. I did shout - it was frustrating and the behaviour was completely unnecessary. But I spoke to the child again the next day, I apologised, took them to see the display and the damage they’d done, and, together, we repaired it.
If shouting is completely unavoidable - and sometimes it is - how you follow up afterwards is really important. And actually, it’s this which has a real, lasting impact on pupils. If shouting happens every single day, children get used to it. It loses all impact. If you put a cap on shouting, when you do shout, they know it’s really, really serious.
Most of the time, however, you don’t need to shout. And often, shouting makes the situation worse. Sometimes, as adults, we have to change our own behaviour, and recognise when it’s detrimental to student progress and behaviour.
When adults are in control, they don’t shout. Many of our children experience the opposite at home. We never want to remind them of that in school.
An absence of shouting means that every new child who walks through the doors knows that things are different here.
Chris Dyson is headteacher at Parklands Primary School in Leeds. His new book, Parklands: a school built on love, is out now
