Tom Bennett on SEND, exclusions and why his behaviour model works

“The systems are now in place to create the best behaviour that [teachers have] ever had,” argues Tom Bennett, the “behaviour tsar” of the English education system for much of the past decade.

For Bennett, this moment has been a long time in the making. He spent eight years advising consecutive Conservative governments on behaviour, but various measures during that period did not suggest improvements in classrooms.

At the start of those eight years (in 2016), 75 per cent of all respondents reported that behaviour in their schools was “good” or “very good” in a National Foundation for Educational Research Teacher Omnibus survey, and there were fewer than 6,700 permanent exclusions and 340,000 suspensions. 

In May 2024, prior to Labour taking office in July, survey responses from the 2023-24 National Behaviour Survey revealed that 72 per cent of school leaders and just 46 per cent of teachers reported “good” or “very good” behaviour the week prior. There were 10,885 permanent exclusions and 954,952 suspensions recorded in English schools that year.

Faced with data like this and political pressure from many to change the approach on behaviour, the rumours were that Labour was going to try something - and someone - different when Bennett’s contract ended in March 2025. Labour confirmed that funding beyond this point would be subject to its Spending Review.

However, after two months of deliberation, then education secretary Bridget Phillipson instead opted for continuation of the existing policy direction, and eventually to let Bennett finish the job he started: he was appointed alongside Jayne Lowe as a national ambassador overseeing the merged attendance and behaviour hubs programme.

“We know what works,” Phillipson said when the appointments were announced, and “we’re investing in proven expertise so that schools facing the biggest challenges can get the support they need.”

So 12 months on, does Bennett believe that this iteration of his philosophy is having an impact?

The birth of a tsar

To understand the current iteration of Bennett’s behaviour approach adopted by this government, you have to understand its origins: Bennett has been clear and unchanging on his philosophy on behaviour since he first started working as an adviser with the Department for Education.

Politically speaking, it was Michael Gove who first took to Bennett’s approach, labelling him the “behaviour guru” in 2013 and saying he was a fan of his “provocative work”.

But it was Nicky Morgan who first gave him a government role, selecting Bennett to lead a group “aimed at creating recommendations” for the way teachers are trained to manage behaviour.

The media labelled him the behaviour tsar, and the name has stuck - though Bennett himself was less keen on the phrase. Bennett stresses that he is an “independent behaviour adviser” for the government.

Prior to and following his appointment, Bennett repeatedly articulated his philosophy on behaviour management, both in columns for Tes and more broadly.

Pupils need to be taught to behave

The foundation of his approach is that pupils need to be taught to behave well, and the best way to achieve that is through rules and routines that are implemented consistently and supported by senior management, and that those routines and rules flex only in the most necessary of cases.

“Inclusivity is not a model whereby we have one group of children who need to be included, and everybody else has to bend to accommodate those needs,” he explains.

He’s been a constant critic of more relational behaviour approaches, such as restorative practice, which he described earlier this year as “one of the worst system-level strategies you can imagine”.

And he explains that while ideas about giving children more freedom are understandable, they don’t survive the reality of the classroom.

“[People] love the idea of their children being allowed to do what they want to do, but they often lack the imagination to understand what impact that has on other people, and to understand the impact that other people could have on them, and to understand that when you exist in a society, it’s not just individuals that have needs; groups have needs too,” he argues.

There is no ‘one-size-fits-all solution’

Across his time advising government, he has been a staunch defender of his stance and of schools who share it.

In 2015, he labelled educators who believe in noisier classrooms “rocking with spontaneity” for learning as “absurdists” and remarked that “for every outlier who enjoys spending time in a centrifuge, there are 29 kids who can’t concentrate”.

Two years later, he wrote that any mention of the much-discussed zero-tolerance advocating Michaela Community School, led by the often-labelled “strictest headmistress” in Britain, caused some people to have “aneurysms” and when the school listed a vacancy for a school detention director, Bennett accused critics of “pearl-clutching”.

And when Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy came under scrutiny following parental complaints around its behaviour policy, Bennett wrote a blog post defending the school, saying it was a victim of “perpetual mugging from people who campaign against any form of school discipline, rules, consequence or boundaries”.

He added that the official report into the disciplinary processes at the school was “staggeringly weak, biased, and relies on a methodology that would shame a fortune-teller”.

But he has also acknowledged frequently that schools’ needs vary enormously depending on their context and there is no “one-size-fits-all solution”.

Exclusions are ‘necessary part of education’

Where he has perhaps been most vocal is on exclusions, consistently maintaining that they are a “necessary part of the education system”.

He has said that schools that decide not to exclude pupils create circumstances where they are required even more, as “misbehaviour backs up the pipe and remodels the social norms of the school in the direction of incivility and belligerence”.

He first put all these ideas into policy in 2017 in the first major publication of his advisory role: to lead an independent review on behaviour in schools and strategies to support effective cultures. 

Challenges he identified as impeding better behaviour included schools lacking a clear vision of behaviour, poor communication of the vision to pupils and staff, insufficient management skills in classrooms, staff over-burdened by workload, and either poorly calibrated or low expectations. 

His recommendations included funding internal inclusion units to provide early intervention in schools with high levels of challenging behaviour, more guidance for schools in supporting the most challenging pupils, and for heads to demonstrate an appreciation of behavioural cultural levers in the certification process.

Impact of Behaviour Hubs programme

Bennett was then afforded the chance to put his approach to behaviour, and those recommendations, into action when he was appointed to lead a £10million “pioneering scheme” to tackle bad behaviour in more than 500 schools in 2019 - what later became the Behaviour Hubs programme.

The programme, which saw high-performing schools and trusts working with schools facing challenges with behaviour, was disbanded in 2025 under the Labour government, months after the findings of an interim evaluation were published. 

The findings of the interim evaluation were mixed, with staff reporting improved cultures of behaviour, notably in schools with higher deprivation, but pupil-reported behaviour did not improve overall. 

The final evaluation, however, was more positive, finding the programme “largely achieved its objectives” in driving nationwide improvement in behaviour management and “strong evidence” of better pupil behaviour.

Other data at the time cast doubt on how much had changed for the better, though.

Between 2015-16 and 2023-24, permanent exclusions increased by 63 per cent and suspensions were up by 181 per cent. 

Moreover, Browne Jacobson’s 2025 School Leaders Survey found that 45 per cent of school leaders reported an increase in suspensions and exclusions during the previous 12 months, against only 22 per cent noting a decrease.

Some 79 per cent of respondents said behaviour had deteriorated since the Covid-19 pandemic, with a third reporting it was “significantly worse” and just 4 per cent indicating it had improved.

Was Bennett disappointed about these measures of progress during that eight-year period?

“I think we should always be careful of looking at raw data and try to be much more mindful to understand what’s going on underneath it and what the data actually represents,” he replies.

He says it was “obvious” during his time working in challenging classrooms that schools were being discouraged from using “any forms of suspensions or exclusions” by Ofsted and other bodies “on the grounds that they were intrinsically a bad thing”. 

“The problem is that, historically, what this led to was far more chaotic classrooms because children weren’t being suspended or excluded when perhaps they should have been,” he added.

Revised behaviour guidance

Bennett says that one thing he has tried to help leaders understand for years is that sometimes exclusions and suspensions “are absolutely the right thing to do, and not to do them would be the wrong thing to do”.

“When it’s necessary, it’s not an evil,” he argues.

He says he hopes his work with the DfE and revised behaviour guidance has allowed for schools to be more confident in their response to behaviour.

He also pointed out that while the use of measures like suspensions and exclusions has increased, “they’ve gone up from very very low levels to slightly more low levels, and when numbers are already very very low, any variation looks like a large increase”.

But has he departed at all from the formula of the previous eight years with the new programme under Labour?

He says the programme has retained a lot of content from previous incarnations, explaining that this was the “right thing to do”, not only because they “got a lot right” previously, but because “we have a fairly strong professional instinct as to what tends to work in schools”. 

The political backdrop of this version of the hubs is, though, very different to that under the Conservatives. The predominant theme of Labour’s education narrative has been to tackle the attendance crisis through emphasis on “belonging” alongside a significant push towards inclusion in mainstream schools.

Bennett says his model of behaviour management fits with that policy direction.

Universal behaviour policies

“When you look at some of the schools with the clearest behaviour policies, and with the highest expectations, you often find, like Michaela, that they routinely get graded as ‘outstanding’ in old money, in terms of how well they provide for children with special educational needs and disabilities,” he says.

“Why? Because overwhelmingly, what everybody needs, particularly children with SEND, is the calm, safe, dignified environment with accommodations made.”

He emphasises, though, that behaviour policies should not begin with the accommodations, making the analogy that roads begin with speed limits and road signs, but that they can be broken by emergency vehicles.

“You begin with the universal offer of what we are all expected to do, and what many people need to realise is that when you create an environment like that, it’s massively inclusive, particularly for someone with SEND,” he argues.

He goes as far as to suggest SEND becomes “less of an issue” if you get the basic principles of the universal offer right, because those pupils are in an “environment that is less chaotic”.

SEND criticism

The programme has been criticised, however, for not including special schools who may bring the expertise to ensure both the universal offer and accommodations are as inclusive as possible.

Bennett says that including special schools would “definitely” be an aim for phase two of the project, but adds that no decisions have been taken by ministers on this front. 

“The aspiration is absolutely to get them involved,” he reiterates. “The understanding…[was] to begin the programme in a way that helped us to understand if the programme was working, and then to work in the much more specialist and intensive environments of special schools, which themselves can often be quite boutique, and specialist environments are often quite different from one another.”

So is the new programme working so far?

“I think it’s a tremendous success, but then, of course, I’m bound to say that,” he answers.

He explains this opinion is based on the enthusiasm of schools taking part, day-to-day feedback indicating the open days and online CPD to be useful and “particularly meaningful”.

Asked about the methods used to evaluate the success, he replies that regular feedback is received after “every event” with attendees, including open days and face-to-face functions.

He’s positive, too, that the “success” will continue and that teachers will have the behaviour in their classrooms they have long wanted and that they deserve.

Bennett ‘relishes’ being public face of behaviour policy

But what of his critics, who claim that his approach will not deliver the outcomes he desires?

Bennett concedes that being the focus of a particular ideological approach has meant hostility to a level where he has “blocked so many people for being horrible” on social media.

However, he fundamentally believes that his approach is the right one.

“Many people who comment on behaviour in schools have very rarely worked in challenging school environments and have very little understanding of what it takes to actually run a group of people safely, and in order to make sure that they flourish, and not just keep them safe, but to help them learn,” he says.

And while he will take measures to ensure “a duty of self-care” if people cross the line criticising him, none of it has put him off being the public face of behaviour policy in England.

Quite the contrary, he says: “It makes me relish it all the more.”