School behaviour policies have little impact on teacher stress levels, research suggests.
An FFT Education Datalab survey shows that one of the two biggest factors causing teacher stress is whether or not there is a supportive school leadership team that offers teachers the chance to participate in decision-making.
The second factor is whether teachers have a reasonable “work/admin load”, which the researchers defined not in terms of total hours worked but rather the extent to which staff are asked to complete tasks unrelated to improving children’s education.
But there is “no clear relationship” between having a “helpful” behaviour policy and levels of teacher stress, the survey of 300 teachers across seven volunteer schools found.
Previously Ofsted has reported class disruption as being a contributor to teacher stress and this year’s government Schools White Paper highlighted the role that effective behaviour management plays in the delivery of high-quality teaching.
A 2018 paper from the think tank Policy Exchange found that “teachers find dealing with low-level disruption and disorder time-consuming and exhausting. Teachers find being prevented from teaching to be a frustrating experience.”
For these reasons, the Policy Exchange report added, “low-level disruption is having an impact on teacher retention”.
Behaviour ‘is a factor in teacher retention’
Amy Forrester, director of behaviour at Cockermouth School, in Cumbria, and a Tes columnist, said she found the latest research “quite surprising”.
“Many teachers leaving the profession comment that behaviour is a factor in their decision to leave,” she said.
Where behaviour is poor, she added, “there cannot be a supportive leadership because a core role of school leaders is to create environments where teachers can teach”.
Behavioural policies vary between schools, with some approaches advocating ”productive and supportive” discipline while others are closer to zero tolerance.
Ms Forrester said school leaders needed to ensure that behaviour policies involved as little workload as possible for teachers, “otherwise this leads to staff not using the policy consistently and that, in turn, leads to a decline in behaviour”.
The FFT research, which is also involved the Teacher Development Trust, is part of a long-term FFT project on teachers’ mental health and wellbeing supported by the Nuffield Foundation.
