In any school, there will be students who seem immune to the persuasive power of the behaviour policy. They are the ones who test your every boundary, emotionally and mentally.

When I took the post of head of Year 11 at an all-girls comprehensive a few years ago, I knew I needed to find a solution to this problem. Despite their upcoming exams, a small number of students were creating a storm of defiance, disruption and broken relationships between the adults and young people.

Fortunately, I had a team of form tutors who were dedicated to supporting and educating every student, whatever challenges they presented. And because I was studying for a master’s in transformational leadership in education, I had the opportunity to trial less orthodox methods of tackling the issue.

So, we got to work. Many ideas were bounced around. A senior leadership form group, a head of year form group, reduced timetables - all were discussed. However, we felt that all these options would only build resentment between teachers and students, as well as creating more work for staff.

Thankfully, after much discussion and research, we eventually came to the “solution-focused approach”. I immediately had that butterfly excitement feeling in my stomach - this was what I had been looking for.

It’s probably best described as an attitude rather than a checklist. As the teacher, instead of concentrating on a list of “problems” that you try to interrogate, you focus on what the student does well and how that can be the focus going forwards. The young person leads the conversation - they are the expert in their own life - and they come to the solution with your guidance rather than being told what to do next.

There is no set way of undertaking a solution-focused approach and it has been implemented through whole-school strategies, group sessions and individual meetings (Department for Education and Skills, 2013).

I discovered that the approach had already been used in schools around the world. For example, Kerstin Måhlberg and Maud Sjöblom (2005) introduced it to their special school in Stockholm, Sweden. Through this, they gained insight into why certain behaviours were happening, helped young people to remove barriers to learning and improved communication with both parents and students.

I headed to a senior leadership meeting with my proposal and was pleased when it was accepted and we were given the green light to be trained in the approach.

The training introduced the technique to all heads of year and provided tips on how to use it with students. We were given headings to frame conversations:

• Problem-free talk.
• Preferred future/best hopes.
• Exceptions.
• Success history/successful past.
• Locating resources/building on strengths.
• View of self/other people’s perceptions.
• “What else?” questions.
• Scaling questions.

In practice, this meant having conversations prompted by questions such as:

• “What do you like doing in your free time?”
• “What is it about you that makes you good at X ?”
• “What do you think your friend/family would say are your strengths?”
• “How will you know that it’s been useful coming here today?” (This is normally the point at which the student will choose to explain a problem they might be facing. It is important to realise that this does not have to be school focused.)
• “What smallest change would be a sign of you moving ahead?”
• “On a scale of one to 10, with one representing no confidence at all that you can reach your goal and 10 meaning that you’re confident you will get there, where would you say you are now?”
• “You say you are at Y. What is stopping things from getting worse?”
• “How will your friends/family know that things have improved?”

We role played and explored the approach between us, and the majority of the heads of year responded positively. They commented that they could see how the approach could turn around the negative attitudes of students towards school and how it could provide the opportunity to develop the teacher-student relationship further. However, there were concerns over how this would work alongside the new behaviour policy at the school, which followed a strict format.

Although I would have loved to change the behaviour system there and then, we opted to try this approach alongside the one that was already in place.

After discussions with my senior leadership line manager, I decided to focus on our most at-risk students; by this, I mean the students who would otherwise be likely to be removed from school before study leave time began.

I approached the students by asking them to come for a catch-up and made it clear that they were not in trouble - this encouraged them to attend. Our training made it clear that if the students did not turn up, we were not to take this personally, and should instead rearrange another catch-up for another time. It is important for students to want to come to the initial meeting.

The students were not told anything in advance regarding the process of the meeting or the approach. I arranged to meet with them in my office and I set up the room so that there would be no desk between us, as this would have only encouraged hierarchy and formality.

I also chose not to set time limits for the meetings because each conversation could take a different path, depending on the changes the student wanted to make. Time was also required to develop questions that would delve deeper into each student’s point of view.

I planned to use the approach with six students at first and I kept to the structure of the training with all of them. We worked through the questions and let the time run for as long as was needed. We avoided problems and focused on positive characteristics and routes forward. Working in this way was liberating but also challenging. I had underestimated the difficulty of not filling the gaps; it’s natural, as an educator, to want to make students feel comfortable. However, in this approach you must allow awkward silences as they encourage the student to take control of the conversation, and prevent the teacher from directing the answers.

The views of other professionals within the school were also challenging. There are still many teachers who are traditional in their views of discipline, believing that punishments should be tough and that they should be used to deter the student from repeating their behaviour and to set an example to other young people.

The solution-focused approach does the opposite and does not always provide an immediate improvement, which some teachers find difficult. Boundaries and behaviour policies have their place. But it is a continuing challenge to get reluctant teachers to see that, on many occasions, students lack self-esteem and confidence to improve their behaviour, because they are so often tarred with the same brush throughout their educational life.

The approach does work, though. While using as a head of year over three years, I noticed an improvement in participating students’ self-confidence in their abilities and the strengths of their characteristics. One student I worked with started to use her strength of articulation (often seen as her being argumentative and manipulative) in her drama performances outside school and in her essay writing within subjects such as English and history.

The responses from the students were overwhelmingly positive, too. My relationships with them improved, and many told me that they felt valued and empowered, with the strongest response coming from a student who felt that someone believed they could change for the better.

Despite the success we had, I can’t say that this will work for all students in every situation; there are some reasons for behaviour that we cannot change as educators in a school. However, I do believe that using this method to try to prevent the exclusion of students is a positive and compassionate way forward. Maybe it could even be trialled as a reintegration method following an exclusion.

After an exclusion has taken place, looking at the solution rather than the problem encourages discussions about the student’s strengths, building connections with educators and providing a platform for the parents/guardians to be involved in a meaningful conversation focused on finding a positive way forward.

Annie-Jane Finch-Johnson is now a teacher of physical education in Lima, Peru

This article originally appeared in the 22 November 2019 issue under the headline “Target solutions instead of taking aim at problems to boost behaviour”