Behaviour is high on the Department for Education’s list of priorities.
In the Schools White Paper, published this week, the DfE again committed to revising the Behaviour in Schools guidance and Suspension and Permanent Exclusion guidance.
The consultation on their proposed changes closes tomorrow, 31 March.
In the White Paper, the DfE also committed to the launch of a new national behaviour survey in order to “better understand” the thoughts and feelings of parents, pupils and teachers on behaviour and wellbeing.
But what does the research tell us about what works when it comes to a behaviour policy?
This week’s Tes Podagogy revisits an episode from 2017, when editor Jon Severs interviewed Professor Linda Graham, a leading researcher into behaviour in the classroom, and director of The Centre for Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology.
Graham has strong feelings about “no-excuses” behaviour policies, which may not tally with the approach some schools have adopted. She says that it’s problematic for schools in the UK to adopt zero-tolerance approaches, which were born in the US, because, culturally, the countries are very different.
“I don’t think people look at the DNA of a policy, where it’s come from and the different cultural context in which it was brought up,” she says. “There are certain ideas and philosophies that end up trickling through which are not consistent with your own culture.”
Graham is clear, though: managing behaviour is part of a teacher’s role, and children do need to be taught how to behave.
“Some children will need much more explicit guidance than others. The reality is that we have children entering school at a very young age, as 4-year-olds, and they’re not developmentally ready a lot of the time,” she says.
“There seems to be this expectation that they will come into school knowing what to do, that somehow once they’ve crossed that threshold, either they should know what to do or they should do what they’re told immediately. But that’s not realistic, because you’re dealing with 4-year-olds.”
Graham goes on to discuss students being “hard-baked” to be disruptive by ineffective school behaviour management policies, low-level disruptive behaviour and productive and supportive discipline.
