A lot of the educational chat in recent weeks, in the media and in the staffroom, has been about a certain type of school disciplinary regime. The kind of regime where, if the allegations are to be believed, students are kept in line by a dehumanising set of procedures that would have looked extreme even back in the 1970s.

While I’m sure that most people who read about a school that purposefully humiliates pupils would be horrified, it does raise the perennial issue of how we should get the best from our students.

There is a continuum that has the military academy approach at one end and AS Neill’s Summerhill, "do what the hell you want" approach at the other. Kids are not all the same, and there is no one-size-fits-all method that’s going to suit everyone.

Proponents of the more disciplinarian methods will maintain that many students benefit from the firm hand and the iron rod (back when I was at school there were rumours that our head had an actual iron rod he would use on the worst kids...). 

On the flip-side are those who suggest children require something more flexible and collegiate to help them learn. Part of the problem is the students themselves rarely get to make that choice and once you’re in one system there’s not much wiggle room. If a student finds themselves in a school where the model of discipline doesn’t suit them, there are inevitably problems for all concerned.

A few weeks ago I spent the day in a school that seemed to have made the decision to move from one approach to another. This school had started the term with a new whole-school strategy that leaned decidedly towards the military end of the spectrum, and while it was by no means as extreme as some of the schools in stories that have been circulating recently, it clearly aimed to introduce a markedly stricter way of working. As an outsider, it was fascinating to witness the response of staff and students to this regime change.

The system carried the ethos of disruption-free learning. On the face of it, a good idea. But like the Brexit chaos the country remains mired in, it turns out that simple ideas can be quite tricky to execute.

The list of prohibited student behaviours was just as one might expect and included anything that might possibly detract from learning: talking, fiddling with anything not relevant to the work, fidgeting and so on were banned. The procedure for failing to adhere to the rules was simple too: two warnings followed by immediate removal from the lesson.

In theory this looked fine. The reality was somewhat more complex.

A few questions to the students showed that not all staff were equally committed to the new rules. What would be regarded as breaching the rules in one lesson would be ignored in another. There’s nothing new in this of course, and learning which teachers you can mess about with and which ones you can’t has always been part of surviving at secondary school. Students less attuned to recognising these often subtle social cues struggle to change their behaviour from one teacher to the next, and when the stakes for getting this wrong are higher, the problems for these students grow.

The other main issue is that for a significant minority of the class, the crackdown on what many would see as perfectly reasonable behaviour – talking, stretching, an idle moment spent staring out of the window – becomes not a spur to more diligent working, but a challenge.

Things in my first lesson started well, but it didn’t take long for the subversion to begin. For about a dozen students, the entire focus of the lesson soon became how to rub right up against the rules without quite crossing the line. A good example of this is the cough or sneeze, which the smart kids know is hard to punish. It wasn’t long before the room sounded like we were in the middle of the flu pandemic of 1918. There was humming and whistling, toilet requests aplenty, and a lot of stationery items being borrowed with unwarranted fanfare and enthusiasm. If these students had put as much effort into their work as they did into messing with the system, they’d all be heading for top grades. As it was, the atmosphere was tense and combative.

In contrast, in my next lesson the class had been given special dispensation to talk to each other in order to complete some group work. The difference could not have been starker. While not every conversation was about the work, for most of the lesson students were on-task and actively helping each other out. The atmosphere too was wholly different, with everyone relaxed and cheerful. There was no question which lesson had been more productive.

In the end it comes down to a simple precept: if we start with the belief that children will mess about and take advantage, then that’s how they’ll behave. If we treat children like humans, and assume the best, they’ll usually live up to these expectations.

The writer has recently taken up supply teaching after 20 years in a full-time teaching job