For much of the past year and a half, many of us have been yearning for the same thing: a return to normal. Unfortunately, in education, there may be no way back to “normal” as we remember it. The effects of the pandemic have crept into every aspect of society.

Take child poverty, which has been increasing since 2010. According to a 2020 review of the impact of Covid-19 on socioeconomic and health inequalities in England, conducted by Michael Marmot and colleagues, the pandemic has exacerbated this trend.

We know that poverty can affect children’s outcomes. As shown by a 2013 report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, economic deprivation affects academic outcomes in early childhood; through later childhood and into adolescence, it also affects social and behavioural outcomes, with a knock-on effect for academic outcomes.

Of course, while children who experience poverty are more likely to face difficulties at school, it is certainly not inevitable. Schools can help pupils to overcome the challenges of poverty by creating communities where every child feels they belong and can learn.

Doing this isn’t always easy when you are faced with children who display challenging behaviour. We might feel the need to punish or exclude, assuming this will help them learn how to behave more appropriately. But evidence suggests otherwise.

Behaviour management: Punishments vs rewards

In a fascinating 2016 experiment conducted by Stefano Palminteri and fellow researchers at University College London, volunteers aged 12-17 and 18-32 completed tasks in which they had to choose between abstract symbols. Each symbol was consistently associated with a fixed chance of a reward (a point and a smiley face); a punishment (losing a point, and an unhappy face); or no outcome. As the trial progressed, participants learned which symbols were likely to lead to each outcome and adjusted their choices accordingly.

The results showed that adolescents and adults were equally good at learning to choose symbols associated with reward, but that adolescents were less good at avoiding symbols associated with punishment.

The researchers concluded that the adults engaged in more sophisticated forms of decision making, including possible “counterfactual hypotheses” (that which might happen or could possibly happen). In other words, the adolescents learned more from the rewards than the punishments. The punishments did still have an effect on the adolescents - but just not on their learning.

This is something we need to remember as we return to classrooms this term. While rewards can be powerful learning tools, sanctions may have no impact on teaching students to behave more appropriately; this is true even if we have always relied heavily on sanctions in the past.

Nothing will ever be as it was. Rather than wishing for a return to normal this term, we should now be thinking hard about lessons learned and lessons to be learned - and using the research to help.

Megan Dixon is director of research at Holy Catholic Family Multi Academy Trust. She would like to thank Jean Gross for her input

This article originally appeared in the 3 September 2021 issue under the headline “Reward and punishment: not as simple as you think”