You are not getting worse at behaviour management. There may be something happening in your classrooms that makes it seem like you are losing your behaviour edge, but actually, something else is at play: we are reaching our critical mass of disruption.

Critical mass of disruption is where the number of persistently and severely disruptive students in a classroom overwhelms a teacher’s ability to maintain a positive learning environment. On an individual level, in a particular setting, we each have a pretty stable number of disruptive students we can deal with.

Trainee teachers, early career teachers and less experienced teachers will often struggle with behaviour management. They have a low critical mass of disruptive students.

Is behaviour getting worse in schools?

Disruptive students not only directly disrupt lessons, but they also cause others to misbehave in a chain reaction of poor behaviour. If you can’t stay on top of their behaviour, your lesson has the potential to descend into chaos.

Like most experienced teachers, over time, I have developed a suite of different strategies to build relationships with students and handle disruptive behaviours. My critical mass increased over time. So, after 15 years of teaching, I can now say that behaviour isn’t an issue in the vast majority of my lessons because I am able to prevent it from becoming one. The exception is when my critical mass is exceeded.

This year, I have found it more difficult as two of my classes hit my critical mass of disruption. True to form, when all the disruptive students were present, I have to say my lessons “required improvement”. When just one was away, it felt completely different.

Behaviour management

Speaking to colleagues, some have a critical mass more than my own, some less. But the endpoint is the same: go past your critical mass and your confidence dips, your lessons falter and you begin to experience burnout.

There have always been those in the teaching profession declaring that “behaviour is getting worse”. I’m not one who subscribes to this view, but that said, the pupil referral unit down the road has a waiting list of more than a hundred. So, even if moving these children to a more suitable setting was the answer, it may not be possible.

The senior leadership team keeps telling us that increasing numbers of more disruptive students is a trend in all schools, which is set to continue. This leaves us in a very difficult situation as critical mass is being reached in more and more classrooms. This in turn leads to less wiggle room to use intelligent, flexible timetabling that separates disruptive students and supports less experienced staff.

CPD for managing behaviour

The answer may come through more CPD to improve our ability to play Whac-A-Mole and teach at the same time. It will help up to a point but there is a limit, we will all plateau.

A school’s culture will certainly impact student, and staff, behaviour and may even increase individuals’ critical mass by one or two.

But parental engagement has to be part of the solution. The large majority of disruptive students have ineffective support structures at home. Unfortunately, changing the behaviour of ineffective parents, where it is even possible, is usually a slow process.

Parents and schools

We pick up what we can, and a growing number of schools even dedicate curriculum time to teach students how to behave. However, without a properly funded social care service, this is a plaster on a gaping wound.

I do not envy senior leaders. It is their responsibility to chart a course through these choppy waters, and with this particular problem, there seems to be no land in sight.

If this problem sounds familiar in your school then my advice from the front line is to make behaviour priority number one, two and three. Everything else should become secondary, as everything is helped by a calmer, well-managed classroom.

If we are to weather this storm, reduce pressures on teachers increasing their energy and capacity to teach at their critical mass.

Peter Caspall is a teacher in a secondary school in England

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