It’s essential to pupils’ personal development, ability to learn and safety; it’s a key area of focus in Ofsted inspections; and if it isn’t up to scratch, it can decimate a school workforce. 

We’re talking, of course, about behaviour.

According to a 2019 survey by the NASUWT teaching union, poor pupil behaviour has driven more than half of teachers to quit the profession or seriously consider leaving it. Unsurprisingly, then, supporting teachers to better manage behaviour is at the top of the agenda for school leaders.

Yet many are unclear about the best way to go about it.

“If you’re a school leader at the moment, I wouldn’t blame you for being confused about what is an effective behaviour policy,” says Tom Campbell, chief executive of the E-ACT multi-academy trust.

Amid often conflicting views about how to approach behaviour, one important development in recent years has been the emergence of the Department for Education’s behaviour hubs programme, which pairs schools looking to improve behaviour with those modelling best practice.

The programme, billed as being grounded in evidence, is led by Tom Bennett, the DfE’s behaviour adviser. There is, as many will already know, a particular Bennett ethos of “very low tolerance for misbehaviour” that, in his words, involves sanctions alongside rewards.

However, other popular approaches to behaviour management, also billed as being rooted in evidence, put the emphasis on teachers building relationships with children and on helping children to self-regulate their emotions and responses. Such approaches tell teachers that sanctions may suppress behaviour but cannot help pupils to learn the right habits.

Behaviour hubs: the evidence

So, how do school leaders know which methods are the most effective?

In the DfE hubs programme, one fundamental principle is that behaviour is learned and can be taught through a “behaviour curriculum”, says Bennett. The hubs follow on from his 2017 review for the DfE, Creating a culture: how school leaders can optimise behaviour.

Given that not every child comes from a home where good behavioural habits are being fostered, Bennett says that what schools need to do - and what many already do - is to proactively teach children the behaviours they need to succeed: how to walk down the corridor between lessons, how to ask a question in class or how to behave on a school trip. The aim is to create a safe, dignified environment in schools, where children “know that they matter”.

Another aim is to remedy a situation whereby “we’re asking teachers and leaders to manage behaviour but giving them very little training to do so”, says Bennett, who also wrote a 2016 report for the DfE on developing behaviour management content for initial teacher training. 

What does the hubs programme advocate on the detail of behaviour management, such as on whether to use sanctions?

“I am quite unequivocal about this: schools have to have a sanctions process,” Bennett says. “Because without the use of sanctions, even the best-taught behaviours will be ignored by some students who just choose not to do it.

“We don’t advocate zero tolerance because that’s insane and we don’t advocate enormous penalties for small things,” he continues. But he does support “sweating the small stuff - which means you notice when things don’t happen; you notice when kids don’t have a pen or a tie or something like that”.

He sees sanctions as a “backstop”, not as “the heart of behavioural change”, adding: “Nobody was ever punished into being good.”

Is the approach being taken by the hubs based on evidence? 

As the founder of researchED, which aims to make teachers “research literate and pseudoscience proof”, it “really behoves me” to take that approach, says Bennett. With research on behaviour at school level underpowered, he argues that “we are increasingly turning to things like group psychology, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology as well as things like surveys and studies of school cultures to try to inform what we do with behaviour management”.

Among “a wide range of evidence-informed approaches” deployed in the hubs programme, Bennett highlights the work of Doug Lemov, who wrote Teach Like a Champion, and behaviour specialist and consultant Bill Rogers.

Further evidence comes from Bennett’s visits to about 700 schools looking at the work they do on behaviour. The schools that tend to be the most successful are the ones that have defined good behaviour, and “taught” the “processes” to staff, he says: “Here’s what punctuality means, here’s how we want you to talk to children, here’s how we want you to de-escalate conflict, here’s what the behaviour policy is, here’s what your part is in it.”

Also highlighted by Bennett is the Education Endowment Foundation’s 2019 guidance report Improving Behaviour in Schools. Recommendations from this report, based on a review of academic evidence, included the premise that “teaching learning behaviours will reduce the need to manage misbehaviour”. It also said that schools should “use targeted approaches to meet the needs of individuals” as “universal behaviour systems are unlikely to meet the needs of all your students”, and that “consistency and coherence at a whole-school level are paramount”.

‘Nobody was ever punished into being good’

When it comes to the evidence from psychology, though, some are concerned about the approach being taken by the hubs.

Naomi Fisher is an independent clinical psychologist with a practice in Hove, who works with children who are unhappy at school and not attending. She sees a major problem in definitions of behaviour management that determine “what works” on the basis of ensuring that young people don’t show disruptive behaviour in school, rather than seeing managing behaviour “as part of addressing young people’s wellbeing”.

Bennett’s approach, says Fisher, “is very much: put the right consequences in place, put the right systems in place and the young people will conform, will behave”. 

But “when I talk to parents…they tell me their children find those kinds of very punitive approaches extremely anxiety provoking”, she adds.

A relational approach

Others echo the point about the need to see behaviour in a wider context. Educational psychologists “would promote a relational approach” to behaviour management in schools, says Cath Lowther, general secretary of the Association of Educational Psychologists. That approach centres on staff “learning about that young person, learning what makes them tick” and “building a relationship with that young person”.

A core argument from educational psychology is that behaviour cannot be looked at in isolation. We are talking about “complex human beings in quite complex social systems” in schools, says Lowther. That means looking at children and young people’s relationships, including with staff, other pupils, parents or carers and siblings, she adds.

In terms of evidence to back that up, Lowther highlights academic research from areas including neuroscience, trauma and adverse childhood experience. She also points to the EEF guidance, the first recommendation of which includes the statements that “pupil behaviour has multiple influences”, that “understanding a pupil’s context will inform effective responses to misbehaviour” and that “every pupil should have a supportive relationship with a member of school staff”.

The EEF evidence review was carried out by University of Exeter researchers in education, child psychiatry and mental health. When the researchers analysed academic studies of whole-school approaches to behaviour management, they found that two different combinations of interventions appeared most likely to succeed.

First, “tailoring” interventions for individual children, with “a focus on improving relationships and over 20 hours of teacher training”. But then there was a second pathway, which “indicates that an alternative way of improving behaviour can be to focus on academic issues, teaching coping and resilience skills, but not to focus on improving relationships”.

In contrast to the relational approach, says Lowther, the “behavioural” approach involves “sticker charts, detentions, isolation booths, exclusions”. This fits “within a reward-punishment structure which is based on behavioural psychology originating in the 1930s”, stretching back to American psychologist BF Skinner, and experiments on rats and pigeons extrapolated to humans, she says.

There is “an effectiveness, in some ways” there, in that most children will comply, Lowther continues. But the difficulty comes with those “not able to follow the rules”, she adds, whether because of “neurodivergence, a mental health difficulty, adverse childhood experiences, disadvantage, disability, learning needs, literacy needs or language needs”. 

And with the number of pupils in mainstream schools falling within those categories on the rise - whether you attribute that to a lack of places in special schools, or to enhanced diagnosis of and sensitivity to autism or ADHD, for example - it’s no surprise that some schools are now turning to more relational approaches.

The rise of trauma-informed approaches

Therapeutic Thinking Ltd, formerly known as Steps, is a company that offers a “trauma-informed” approach - and the company’s system is the preferred one for 11 local authorities, including Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, plus two multi-academy trusts.

The aim is to train teachers to be “curious and empathetic”, to “try to refocus on the cause rather than react to the behaviour”, says Adam Hayes, co-founder of Therapeutic Thinking and a former senior inclusion lead for Hertfordshire County Council.

“Not all behaviour is choice…some behaviours come from SEND [special educational needs and disabilities], from feeling overwhelmed,” he explains. The Therapeutic Thinking approach, he continues, encourages teachers to ask: “If not all behaviour is choice and all behaviour is communication, what is it [children] are communicating in that moment?”

That doesn’t mean classrooms should be free from rules or accountability, he stresses. “We still need clear boundaries but in a graduated approach, so we don’t demonise behaviour. We want staff to recognise that children develop academically and emotionally at different rates,” Hayes says.

Rather than applying traditional sanctions, such as detentions, the Therapeutic Thinking approach relies on what Hayes calls “consequences” - which, he says, can be broken down into two categories. In the case of dangerous disruption, there would be a protective consequence to reduce the impact of the behaviour on other pupils (removing the instigators from the situation, for instance). The other type of consequence would be educational, based around teaching pupils how to get their behaviour right.

But do trauma-informed approaches work? The answer to that question depends on where you look. 

Hayes points to figures showing that, after training its first staff cohorts in Therapeutic Thinking, East Sussex County Council saw 69 per cent of its primary schools improve their persistent absence figures. 

Cambridgeshire County Council, meanwhile, introduced Therapeutic Thinking in 2017, and saw suspensions reduce from a total of 1,515 to 944 in 2021, according to the company.

‘Educational psychologists need to be much more involved in DfE policies’

Others, however, take a more critical view of trauma-informed approaches. Trauma should be taken seriously, says Bennett, but “if you’ve got a habit of being late to things, that’s a bad habit, not a trauma”. His argument is that the term “trauma” has become so widely used as to lose meaning.

“The trauma-informed whole-school approach is, in my opinion, an inappropriate way to deal with behaviour management,” he adds.

On the flip side, when we look at the effectiveness of something like sanctions, there is not a clear consensus there, either. The EEF evidence review highlights a dearth of research, stating that the studies of interventions it looked at “focused on largely positive responses to the challenge of misbehaviour…rather than a focus on punitive measures”. 

With the evidence seeming to support both relational and behavioural approaches to some degree, school leaders are being left to base the detail of their policies on personal preference, often guided by their beliefs about what the overarching aims of education should be. 

That, some argue, is not necessarily a bad thing.

E-ACT, a multi-academy trust of 28 schools from Greater Manchester to London, provides an interesting case study here. There are expectations around standards of behaviour across the trust, but each academy has its own behaviour policy.

Within the trust “there are leaders who buy into the Tom Bennett approach and there are leaders who buy into the Paul Dix approach,” says Campbell, E-ACT’s chief executive (Dix is another key relational influence on behaviour policies, whose book, When the Adults Change, Everything Changes, has been turned into training for teachers). “There are many leaders that sit somewhere in the middle.”

The trust leadership has been carrying out behaviour culture visits at each academy to see where they are drawing their behavioural concepts from.

It’s very early days, but “where academies have an understanding of their behaviour ethos informed by theory, and that is consistent with the values of the leaders within that academy, we’ve seen early evidence that’s better placed to then support and improve behaviour”, says John Spring, E-ACT’s safeguarding lead, who has led its behaviour culture visits.

But while theory is important, he adds, school leaders have to “spend time discussing: ‘is this what we want? Is this what our children need? Is this what this context would benefit from?’”

That sentiment is echoed by Jarlath O’Brien, a former headteacher and author of Better Behaviour: a guide for teachers and Leading Better Behaviour: a guide for school leaders.

When it comes to a school’s approach, the question of values “has to come before any discussion about efficacy or effectiveness”, he argues. For example, he points out that even if there was evidence showing that corporal punishment worked to improve behaviour, no school leader should be arguing for that, as it’s at odds with the values of today’s society.

O’Brien also stresses the need to understand a school’s intake; the approach will inevitably differ in an infant school and a secondary school, or in a special school compared with an academically selective school. He thinks that a “glaring absence” from the discussion of behaviour management is “the over-representation of children with SEND in behaviour statistics”.

“The question around the evidence base is heavily dependent on values, consensus and who it is that you are teaching,” he explains.

Educational psychologists ‘massively underused’

On that basis, reaching any kind of universal conclusion about what works is tricky. So, where does that leave the DfE’s behaviour hubs?

One of E-ACT’s schools has been involved in the hubs and it has been a “really useful, incredibly supportive” experience spotlighting the importance of theory and evidence, culture and leadership, says Spring. 

Yet he still believes it is worth looking “more widely at what other approaches and opportunities are out there”.

Campbell agrees, suggesting there is a “massively underused resource in the system” when it comes to support with behaviour - “the people that do the research and evaluate the theory: the educational psychologists”. 

Indeed, from Lowther’s point of view, “educational psychologists need to be much more involved in DfE policies around behaviour, around mental health, around education reform”.

For Bennett, meanwhile, the behaviour hubs programme is full steam ahead. The hubs have so far reached 700 schools and he’s keen to grow this number. 

“I’d like to see it more extensively rolled out,” says Bennett. “I think that every school that wants it should be able to join a hub and to share best practice in that way. In my mind, it’s part of the future of how we’re going to change school culture at a national level.”

As to whether “the evidence”, such as it is, backs the hubs programme, that may depend on how schools use, or are advised to use, it. If the hubs are a means to look at how other schools develop whole-school behaviour policy, strategy and culture, the consensus from leaders is that this is helpful.

But if the hubs become a means to present one approach to behaviour as the only acceptable option, regardless of a school’s social context or SEND intake and to the exclusion of all alternatives, that may be more of a cause for concern.