Naomi Fisher has a problem with zero-tolerance behaviour policies.
As a clinical psychologist, she’s seeing more young people than ever referred for therapy, citing anxiety as the reason they don’t want to attend school.
And yet, when she digs a little deeper, the anxiety, she says, is often an “entirely logical response” to a punitive behaviour system.
“When a child is going to school with a zero-tolerance behaviour strategy and gets into trouble for minute things, like tapping their pen on the desk, it’s natural to feel shame and anxiety,” she says.
Zero-tolerance policies - which don’t discriminate between low-level and more serious behaviour issues - have gained traction in England in the last decade. But Fisher thinks the side effects have been overlooked.
“An intervention is measured only on its own terms - does a particular intervention improve test results, for example, or does a behaviour policy reduce talking in class - but no one asks about the other, unwanted, effects,” she says.
“I see children who are stressed out by the behaviour policy, who have meltdowns after school, or who wake at night worrying. Those effects aren’t included in the evaluation of a policy.”
Fisher isn’t the first to raise concerns. In 2021, mental health charity YoungMinds wrote a letter to the behaviour team in the Department for Education because they were “concerned that the current focus on punitive ‘zero-tolerance’ approaches to behaviour and discipline will have a harmful impact on the mental health of children and young people”.
Others are also worried. Dr Elizabeth Nassem is a lecturer in special educational needs, disabilities and mental health at Leeds Trinity University, where she conducts research on bullying in schools. As part of her work, she’s interviewed young people who attend schools with zero-tolerance behaviour approaches.
“I am concerned about the mental health of these children: a lot of the time, children don’t have a sense of control or agency. They don’t feel listened to, they feel like they can’t challenge things, and they become really withdrawn,” she says.
But is there evidence to suggest that the concerns of Fisher and others are warranted?
Zero-tolerance behaviour policies ‘not reality’
Tom Bennett is the government’s lead behaviour adviser and he says that of all the schools he’s visited in the UK (over 600), none have been fully zero tolerance - highlighting the fact that the very concept of zero tolerance is tricky to define.
“The phrase itself is PR, not reality. There are no schools that are truly zero tolerance, because all of them, even the most strict, have exceptions to every rule, or make reasonable accommodations, for example, for children with SEND,” he says.
“However, a note of caution: perhaps there are some aspects of student behaviour that we should not accept or excuse, whatever the reason. How much sexual abuse should we tolerate? Or knife attacks? It may be that there are indeed some categories that zero tolerance applies to.”
But if no schools are really doing zero tolerance, why are so many people concerned about the effects on children’s mental health?
As it turns out, there’s not much research to go on here. In a report published in 2019, the Education Endowment Foundation found very few robust studies have assessed the impact of zero-tolerance policies on pupil outcomes, and no high-quality studies have been completed in English schools.
Internationally, the picture is similar. When Professor Kathryn Riley was asked to lead on research commissioned by UCL Institute for Education for the NEU teaching union, she was shocked by how little research there was.
“As a researcher, sometimes you research things and you discover things you don’t necessarily agree with. But I was genuinely puzzled by the lack of evidence,” she says.
A lack of evidence about these policies overall, coupled with the lack of clear definitions, makes it hard to establish if there might be a direct connection between zero tolerance and mental health.
However, what we do have evidence about is the number of exclusions happening in schools - and the impact those exclusions can have on wellbeing.
In their letter, YoungMinds drew a link between exclusions and the rise of zero tolerance, claiming that “simultaneous with this renewed emphasis on behaviour, the consequences of perceived poor or challenging behaviour have become more pronounced”.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that we don’t have clear data to support this anecdotal link.
Data from the DfE shows that there were 3,928 permanent exclusions in the 2020-21 academic year, down from 5,057 in 2019-20.
But suspensions - previously known as fixed-term exclusions (FTEs) - were up: there were 352,454 in the 2020-21 academic year, compared with 310,733 in 2019-20.
The most common reason for permanent exclusion was persistent disruptive behaviour, recorded 1,500 times (against 39 per cent of permanent exclusions). The same reason was the most common for suspensions, recorded 148,400 times (against 42 per cent of suspensions).
When releasing the data, the DfE stressed that these numbers should be taken with caution, due to the impact of the pandemic throughout the academic year 2020-21. This makes it difficult to get a truly accurate picture; while official numbers are down, we don’t know how many pupils may now be self-excluding, for example. Persistent absences are up, and the reasons for that aren’t clear.
That said, when it comes to exclusions, we can say with more certainty that there’s a link to poor mental health.
In February of 2022, Professor Tamsin Ford spoke to Tes about her research in this area, which found that being excluded predicted having a mental health condition three years down the line - even when you take out those who initially had a mental health condition.
She also highlighted another study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), which tracked 14,000 children born in the early 1990s, and found exclusion is linked to deteriorating mental health.
There’s also evidence that certain groups of students are more likely to be excluded.
Research published in the US by The Vera Institute of Justice in 2016, finds “there is abundant evidence zero-tolerance policies disproportionately affect youth of colour”. The researchers cite data to show that in the US, at a national level, black and Latino students and students with SEND are suspended and expelled at much higher rates than their peers.
These trends are echoed in the UK. In 2014, researchers from the University of Oxford, Steve Strand and John Fletcher, analysed data on exclusions for a cohort of 500,000 students throughout their secondary education.
They found “the numbers of permanent exclusions relative to the number of FTEs for Bangladeshi, Caribbean and other black children are based on large numbers and are markedly higher than those for white British students”.
On exclusions, Bennett’s stance is clear: “Exclusions are only done when necessary, but when necessary, they must be done.”
He highlights that the current rate of exclusions in England is actually at a twelve-year low.
“Students are overwhelmingly excluded for attacks, persistently disruptive behaviour, violence, drug use, etc. Not to exclude for these types of behaviours leads to chaotic, violent classrooms and schools where students are exposed to the very worst of human behaviour. Not to exclude for these behaviours leads to safeguarding nightmares,” he says.
It’s irresponsible, he continues, to only consider the mental health of the excluded students, when there are so many others who need and deserve a safe environment in which to flourish.
“There is no evidence that ethnicity is a significant factor in mental health issues associated with exclusion; all we can say is that all children deserve to be free from harm and abuse,” he adds.
Yet Jarlath O’Brien, a local authority adviser and behaviour expert, says that, in his experience, zero-tolerance behaviour policies can have a negative effect on all students in a school, and not just those who are excluded.
“In these regimes, children hyper-police their behaviour, because it becomes very easy to get in trouble for things that aren’t problematic in the rest of society. One that springs to mind is not maintaining eye contact with a teacher as a proxy for not paying attention,” he says. “Well, that’s contested at best. Getting in trouble for not doing that, which in any other walk of life, would seem to be eminently reasonable. That’s problematic for me.”
Ultimately, though, we can’t say definitively that zero-tolerance behaviour policies are having a negative impact on children’s mental health.
While research suggests that exclusions have a detrimental effect, official exclusion rates are down, and we’re currently missing the robust evidence needed to link zero tolerance to exclusions anyway.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be worried about children’s mental health. But if we are looking for a culprit, we may have to look beyond zero tolerance for now, at least until more conclusive evidence emerges.
