Imagine you could cut your timetable by one and a half hours each day, or extend your school holidays by 45 days a year. It would be pretty incredible, right? Yet that is the amount of lesson time reportedly wasted due to misbehaviour, with evidence showing that seven minutes out of every half hour in the classroom are lost to disruption.

The finding has prompted the Department for Education to launch a “crackdown on bad behaviour”, with a new package of support for the schools that are most affected. According to the DfE, this will include assistance from attendance and behaviour hubs to identify areas of concern and to establish new processes to deal with poor conduct, as well as greater access to online resources and training webinars.

While a spokesperson for the DfE did not specify the exact practices that will be encouraged, they emphasised that the aim is to “have a strong focus on belonging”. “[It is] clear that a safe, supportive, inclusive school culture is critical,” they told Tes.

Exactly how this will play out in classrooms remains to be seen; more detail on the government’s plans is expected in the forthcoming schools White Paper.

Yet addressing behaviour has been a priority for successive governments. The Conservatives previously invested £10 million in their own behaviour hubs, which were then disbanded under Labour in March 2025.

A final evaluation of the programme, published last week, found “strong evidence” that it led to improvements in pupil behaviour, although the authors note that while “in some instances, these improvements could be directly attributed to the programme itself… additional causal factors also played a substantial role”.

Are those “causal factors” the reason why schools have not come closer to eradicating disruptive behaviour already? And if so, are there approaches that could help to get those seven “lost” minutes closer to zero?

Is behaviour in schools getting worse?

Let’s first look more closely at the government’s data on behaviour. The numbers come from the National Behaviour Survey, which asked pupils, teachers and leaders to complete detailed questionnaires about the school environment. In June 2022 teachers estimated that, on average, 6.3 minutes out of every half an hour had been “lost due to misbehaviour”, with similar figures across primary and secondary education. By March of 2023 this figure had risen to 6.5 minutes, increasing to 7 minutes in May of the same year.

With just three data points, it is difficult to say with certainty that student conduct is worsening over time, but the fact that there is a problem seems undeniable. Within the same survey, 22 per cent of pupils said they had been a victim of bullying within the past 12 months, while 73 per cent of teachers and leaders reported that misbehaviour had damaged their health and wellbeing over the past week. Of these, around one in 10 reported that it had affected them “to a great extent”.

Bad behaviour is also driving the teacher retention crisis. According to a study from the think tank Policy Exchange, roughly two-thirds of teachers have considered leaving the profession due to poor behaviour. “One of the key factors for keeping teachers in the profession is having good quality student-teacher relationships,” says Laura Oxley, a research fellow at the University of York.

Whether or not behaviour is getting worse, there is no doubt that determining how to establish order and discourage wrongdoing remains a pressing issue for schools. But what is it that drives poor behaviour in the first place?

Pupils’ home circumstances and past experiences undoubtedly play a role, as does school context. The evaluation of the behaviour hubs scheme found that schools “experiencing external challenges led to relatively poor results in behaviour improvement, and none of the most significantly improved schools encountered substantial external challenges”. High deprivation, low parental support and high numbers of children with special educational needs and disabilities are named among these challenges.

On top of this, factors related to children’s and young people’s developing brains also need to be considered.

Adolescents, for example, may be hard-wired to test boundaries. Their brains are still developing their capacity for self-control, while the reward centres are hyperactive - both of which can contribute to impulsive decision-making that the student may later regret.

Teenagers also face challenges in navigating new social roles and determining what is age-appropriate behaviour. Keep in mind that all of this is happening alongside growing awareness of - and increased sensitivity to - broader societal issues, such as racism, that may result in frustration and anger.

Children in primary schools must face their own internal conflicts. During middle childhood - which spans from age 6 to 12 - the young brain is still learning to process emotions independently, without the constant guidance of a caregiver.

These children must also navigate increasingly complex social relationships, which can be accompanied by emerging feelings of self-consciousness and doubt. It’s a steep learning curve that can sometimes feel overwhelming. The resulting period of mood swings and misbehaviour that is sometimes called “wobbly tooth puberty” will present difficulties for parents and teachers.

Given these challenges, it would be absurd to assume that we can eliminate all disciplinary issues; the question is how to manage the problems so they do not escalate.

Different ways to manage behaviour

Within the education sector, there are various schools of thought about which approaches to behaviour management work best, with some pushing for “zero tolerance” of undesirable behaviour, while others advocate for more relational approaches.

Evidence-based guidance from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) makes six recommendations, including understanding students’ individual contexts and taking a consistent and coherent approach at a whole-school level.

But what do the latest findings in behavioural psychology and child development tell us about the best approach?

A key area to consider is the use of sanctions. According to Oxley, there is scant evidence that the most common punishments, such as detentions, suspensions and exclusions, work in the way they are intended.

The recent Behaviour in Schools Study reviewed the evidence behind disciplinary measures ranging from verbal reprimands to isolation and suspension. “We found a recurring pattern in the evidence of disciplinary strategies associated with poor mental wellbeing and behaviour in pupils,” the authors concluded last year, though they emphasised that the research so far was of generally low quality, and called for more rigorous assessments.

‘It can create this toxic relationship where the student assumes they are going to be treated badly by the teachers’

Placing students in “isolation rooms” after disruptive behaviour may be equally problematic, with one recent study focusing on Year 7 and Year 10 students in Greater Manchester finding that one in 12 pupils were placed in isolation at least once a week. The researchers also found that in these schools, pupils with SEND, those eligible for free school meals, and those from minority ethnic groups were considerably more likely to receive these punishments than their peers.

Such punishments may be especially counter-productive if the student feels that they’ve been treated unfairly, suggests Lewis Doyle, a lecturer in social psychology at the University of Surrey. “It can create this toxic relationship where [the student] assumes they are going to be treated badly by the teachers, and so they disengage with their schoolwork and actually do behave badly,” he says.

Oxley agrees. “Children sometimes get stuck in this cycle, where they behave in a certain way that they shouldn’t, and the school keeps responding with the same response,” she says.

However, from a school’s perspective, “it’s important to note that sanctions and consequences are not just about the individual who breaks the rules [but] are also about protecting the rest of the school community from having to live with the impact of one individual’s behaviour”, says Thomas Fisher, principal of Ernulf Academy, part of Astrea Academy Trust.

“An environment in which there are scant consequences for broken rules and poor behaviour is neither safe nor conducive to learning,” he adds. “Where this happens, authority doesn’t just disappear - it shifts from responsible adults to the children, and more often than not to the children whose behaviour can be most difficult for others and who are unlikely to be taking responsible decisions that benefit the collective. This is clearly not acceptable - it’s the children who are most vulnerable or who want to work hard who suffer the most.”

Oxley admits that it would be naive to ask schools to avoid all punishment. Exclusion may be inevitable if a student is putting others in danger, for instance. “In the system that we’re in, with the constraints that we have, it sometimes needs to happen,” she says, “because you need to balance the needs of the other students and the staff with the needs of that individual.”

Three alternatives to sanctions

In general, however, research suggests that sanctions should be applied with caution - a realisation that has led to the development of three main alternatives for handling bad behaviour, each of which proposes ways to enhance trust and respect in the school culture.

The first is restorative practice, which is focused on building and maintaining relationships while repairing any harm that has been done by the undesired behaviour. This may include conferences between all individuals concerned, and it is thought to encourage the development of children’s and adolescents’ emotional intelligence.

The second is the Positive Behavioural Interventions and Supports framework, which encourages students and teachers to agree on a system to deal with behavioural violations, and its efforts may be guided by an educational psychologist. One of its underlying principles is to offer increasingly targeted support to the students who need it most, and to remain focused on positive changes that can improve the school environment, rather than focusing solely on the infractions.

The third is the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions programme, which also tries to look at the context of what we might call “challenging behaviour”. According to this line of thinking, the “bad” conduct is thought to arise when the demands of the environment exceed a child’s capacity to respond adaptively. School staff and parents are expected to think about the triggers that might have led to the issue, and to help the student to develop the cognitive skills that would be necessary to act more appropriately.

In a recent paper, Oxley and her co-author George Holden reviewed evidence showing that all three approaches can bring some improvements to student behaviour.

Many schools are already working along these lines. After all, these suggestions broadly overlap with the EEF’s recommendations, which highlight the need for targeted support, a focus on relationships and better understanding of individual context, among other things.

However, whether these approaches are being formally and thoroughly embedded across the whole school is a different matter. As Oxley points out, this can come at a considerable cost: “One of the main challenges is the time commitment that is needed initially…It is asking a lot more of teachers, who have already got huge workloads.”

That’s why Oxley is currently working with teachers to establish the kind of additional support that will be necessary to make these programmes more viable.

Psychological interventions

In the meantime, we might find inspiration from some psychological interventions that have been proven to kickstart a cultural change.

Consider a series of recent studies that attempted to establish a more “empathic mindset” in teachers, first established by a team of US scientists in the 2010s. In the original study, Jason Okonofua at Brown University in Rhode Island and colleagues asked 31 middle-school maths teachers to complete two online training modules, lasting 45 minutes and 25 minutes each, that emphasised the importance of empathy in teacher-student interactions.

This included a reminder of the biological and social challenges that adolescents may be facing, the stress that can arise from unfair treatment, and a discussion of research showing the benefits that come when a student feels “heard, valued and respected”. They also read case studies of student experiences and were asked to write about the ways they might implement what they had learned. Across the next academic year, the suspension rate for the participating schools halved from 9.6 per cent to 4.8 per cent. Such results may seem like a fluke, but Okanofua saw the same effects in a larger study across 20 middle schools in 17 cities.

As enticing as these results are, we cannot assume that this psychological intervention could travel across the Atlantic, given the obvious cultural differences between the UK and the US. This thought led Doyle to establish his own trial in two secondary schools in the South East of England. At each school, maths teachers were allocated at random to take the empathic mindset modules or to continue as normal. The intervention reduced the total number of school suspensions among the students who were taught by those teachers by 58 per cent.

We cannot fully rule out the possibility that the teachers themselves were acting a bit more leniently, but the students’ behaviour seemed to change across the board. Students not only showed greater discipline in their maths lessons but also in all their other classes, taught by teachers who had not been part of the intervention.

“These students were in Years 7 to 9,” says Doyle. “They have maths classes for about three hours a week, meaning there are many other lessons in which they could be acting out. So I feel quite confident in the results.”

Besides examining the students’ behavioural records, Doyle and his colleagues also measured psychological constructs such as sense of belonging, which was measured by asking students to rate statements such as “I feel like a real part of this school”. This measurement tends to decline as children progress through their education, but the drop-off was far slower for the students who were being taught by the maths teachers in the intervention. That’s significant since previous research has shown that belonging is a key predictor of conduct.

Punishment is unlikely to be the solution

Doyle, who trained as a teacher before turning to psychological research, emphasises that most teachers will already be showing empathy to their students. “We’re just bringing that side to the forefront of their minds,” he says. “It’s a reminder just to slow down and show the student that I am interested in and care about their side of the story.”

There may be many other ways of appealing to students’ better instincts. Kevin Binning, at the University of Pittsburgh’s Diversity and Equity Lab, has investigated the benefits of “self-affirmation”, for instance: middle-school students were asked to write a series of around 10 essays on the values that are most important to them, between 6th and 8th grade (equivalent to Years 7 to 9 in England). The aim was to build their “self-integrity” - the sense of being a good and well-rounded individual, which, the researchers hoped, would be reflected in their behaviour.

It worked exactly as planned, with cumulative benefits for each essay that the student wrote. By the 8th grade, the students who had taken part in the intervention were nearly 70 per cent less likely to be punished - from “office referrals” to suspensions - than those in a control group.

Like with the empathic mindset training, this intervention’s success may have come from enhanced relationships between staff and students, Binning argues. “If you put yourselves in the shoes of the student, it is the classroom teacher asking you about your values,” he says. “They are asking what matters to you, and that then seems to boost trust in the school… It helps you to engage and feel like you’re more part of the community.”

None of these practices can be considered a panacea, especially given what we know about young people’s developing brains - and there may still be times when schools feel they need to rely on sanctions.

“There is nothing controversial about saying that children test boundaries, but it is our job as adults to hold firm on those boundaries,” says Astrea Academy Trust’s Fisher. “Children do this to discover the limits of acceptable behaviour, and so if we don’t hold the line then we make it difficult for them to learn how to behave and become good members of society.”

But what the research does suggest is that overreliance on punitive measures is unlikely to be the solution to the ongoing challenge of managing student behaviour.

“What schools want is for children to behave in a positive way and to be compliant with the school rules, so they can have a peaceful and productive learning environment,” says Oxley. “And fairly often, punishment is not actually achieving that for the children who are in contact with the school disciplinary system.”

Many alternative approaches, where they are being used, have not yet been trialled in a robust, policy-backed way across the sector as a whole.

Will we soon see that change?”

David Robson is the author of The Laws of Connection: 13 social strategies that will transform your life

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