“I can’t judge behaviour in your school to be good if your staff don’t think it is.”
This comment, from the lead inspector during my first inspection as a headteacher, came to mind as I was reading a piece of data analysis about how we always think crime is rising, even when it isn’t. (I didn’t agree with the rationale of the lead inspector at the time, by the way, and I still don’t.)
It got me wondering if we as a profession think about behaviour in our schools in the same way society does about crime. Do we agree that behaviour overall is better than it used to be? If not, why not? I find it difficult to believe that behaviour has simply continued to deteriorate over time for decades.
The piece asserts that we’re not very good at judging things that we cannot directly observe. We’ve served our apprenticeship of observation, as Dan Lortie calls it, by having been to school as children but that, and our experience as teachers, is a tiny part of the overall picture.
We will all have opinions about what it was like for us as children, what it was like when we started teaching and what it is like now; this is unobjective and prone to the fallibility of memory.
More on behaviour:
The piece also finds that we’re more positive about our local area. I suspect this is not true of teachers. Our conversations on social media, and regular surveys - such as the very informative Big Question Survey from NASUWT, which provides a wider sample of views from the profession about behaviour - are important, but again do not provide us with the objectivity we need to form a view over time across the piece.
The data suggests that Britain has lost faith in the ability of the police to solve crime. The parallel here is if colleagues at the chalkface lose confidence in school leaders to tackle behaviour.
NASUWT’s latest survey reports that only 28 per cent of respondents feel their school’s behaviour policy is effective and fit for purpose, and that 43 per cent are made to feel they are to blame for poor pupil behaviour.
Behaviour: finding an informed position
The main issue we face in taking an informed position on whether behaviour is improving or declining is that we lack objective measures at depth and over time.
Data on suspensions over time is helpful, but the vast majority of behaviour issues are dealt with in schools without resorting to suspension and used far less often in primary schools, so that data set only shines some light on the serious end of the behaviour spectrum for older children.
At that serious end, we still do not have mandatory recording, reporting and publication of data on the use of restrictive practices. The recently reported cases of abuse at a London special school highlight the urgent need for this.
At the less serious end, we know nothing about the national use of isolation (I’ve written before about my own minor research into isolation use at a trust’s secondary schools, with some alarming findings) or the oxymoron that is internal exclusion.
I think these measures should also come under a mandatory duty of recording, reporting and publishing, especially as they do not have the same 45-day annual limit that suspension does. Further information could be gleaned from in-year fair access panels where so-called managed moves are agreed.
The benefit of longitudinal studies
The best information I’ve ever seen on behaviour over time is contained in Strand and Fletcher’s 2014 longitudinal study on the use of suspension in English secondary schools. This study tracked an entire year group over five years, a data set of over 570,000 children.
The longitudinal nature of the study provides fascinating detail that the Department for Education’s available data sets do not. For example, they found that 16.3 per cent of the cohort experienced at least one suspension during their time in secondary school. This is one in six of all children - a stunningly high number.
In order to better assess whether behaviour is actually declining (and for whom), we need similar longitudinal studies that cover the entirety of both primary and secondary education and cover a greater depth of behaviour indicators including those mentioned above.
Who knows? It might actually be improving.
Jarlath O’Brien is the author of Better Behaviour - A Guide for Teachers and Leading Better Behaviour - A Guide for School Leaders
