A lot is written and said about behaviour. For good reason. The recent survey and analysis by TeacherTapp for the BBC highlighted how important it is to get right – with way too many teachers reporting significant challenges and bad experiences.

As well as classroom behaviour, the @TeacherTapp data for @bbc also revealed:

1 in 5 teachers had experienced verbal abuse from parents.
1 in 5 teachers had experienced abuse online (emails etc) from parents.https://t.co/SXK1jqObz9

— Gráinne Hallahan (@heymrshallahan) March 29, 2024

My perspective on this is informed by time (decades) in the classroom where I was generally successful but had a lot to learn. It’s also informed by the process of coaching others. This video, for example , contains a lot of the advice I would give to teachers during training – it’s aimed at supporting a regular teacher who might not yet have all the tools needed:

My perspective is also informed by having the experience of trying to get on top of behaviour at a leadership level in my last school – and not succeeding. It’s not a stretch to say that failing to get on top of leading behaviour is the underlying reason why it was my last school! I tried incredibly hard; the circumstances would have challenged anyone and we were succeeding in numerous areas – but, still, it wasn’t enough. So, that’s my starting point on this: I don’t come to it projecting authority based on my great deeds; I come to it rather battered and humbled by the experience of failing. Now enough time has passed so that no students from my time are still there – and it’s essentially a different place, with many great people working there – I feel I can discuss some of the issues again.

As ever, success vs failure is obviously too stark. It’s not binary. Despite everything, I think, after a turbulent period in the school’s life, we did make a big difference and improved behaviour and learning in multiple ways. Here are some of things that worked:

• Empowering teachers with a systematic consequences system with centralised detentions; lesson disruption radically decreased. Multiple teachers reported that they could now really teach because there was a clearly understood consequences system they could use. The much-needed on-call system generally worked well. Day to day, lessons were calm and learning-focused most of the time.
• Introducing automatic sanctions for uniform and lateness to lessons after breaks and lesson transitions – these things had a dramatic impact, all but eliminating the issues for most students. One indicator: a teacher reported that the corridors outside his class had gone dark during lessons for the first time in years – because the light sensors didn’t pick up student movements. Previously there was a sense of constant traffic during lessons, along the corridors. Uniform became a non-issue; we had spares at the student reception and students could borrow shoes and ties if needed (monitored for persistence etc).

But still, things were tough and at times it could feel edgy. No school should ever feel edgy. Some of the issues included:

The pinball kids: A term I coined for those students – a small but significant handful – who simply did not have the tools to self-regulate so they hit the sanctions boundaries all day long. We searched hard for solutions but it was a relentless challenge. We either didn’t have the level of resources needed or we needed to reconfigure our resource deployment in a very fundamental way.

Breaks and lunchtime. There were days when we felt our supervision ratios were not sufficient; there was overcrowding, surges of movement that felt stressful. I don’t think I was demanding enough or strategic enough about planning fail-safe supervision as a total priority. We tried to have lunch in one sitting so that lessons were always free from outside distraction – but this was a mistake.

Corridors: Again there were horrible bottlenecks; too many stairwells where congestion was bad and some student behaviours were really hard to tackle – eg the boysy physicality of 10-20 large teenagers hugging in their normal meet and greet style could seem intimidating to others. Nobody liked lesson transitions. They were pretty horrible.

Toilets; We made a mess of introducing gender neutral toilets. The toilets weren’t designed for it and students weren’t ready for it and our supervision capacity didn’t match the need – another bad mistake. Our eagerness to be inclusive in one respect clouded our judgement about basic supervision and added a safeguarding risk. Big error.

Serious incidents and exclusions: The frequency of serious incidents was really high compared to most schools and was very stressful – a function of the challenges faced in the community. We had to deal with the aftermath of deaths in the community from gang-related knife crime, replica fire arms incidents, drug gangs, prostitution gangs – and numerous one-off incidents of violent assault outside school and occasionally in school. Some teachers were injured trying to intervene; we had to call the police to restrain parents seeking to enter the corridors .. our door security was excellent thankfully. All of this led to numerous permanent exclusions – only one of which was ever challenged by governors or the local authority. If anything I wish I had permanently excluded more students sooner but the system doesn’t let that happen. I was fully involved in the school network and placement panel and worked extensively with all the stakeholders; I was not ever seeking to dump students onto others or into oblivion. But still, I think we held on to many many students that, in truth, caused more damage to others’ learning and sense of wellbeing than is justifiable. The cost was too high.

The internal exclusion room and behaviour support unit: Designed with the best intentions, these facilities were not staffed adequately with people who could provide both the educational input the students needed and maintain the behaviour standards needed with such complex students. The scale of demand day to day was too big for it to be therapeutic or to provide a coherent curriculum. The staff worked so hard – I have nothing but total respect for them – but even when we used senior leaders most of the time, essentially I think we asked too much of everyone to thrive – students and staff. We had some successes and most days things were fine – but it only takes a few days when it all goes wrong to leave their mark.

So, I could go on. Of course as the leader I carried the can for things not working and so, of course, I have spent years reflecting on what I could have done differently. Partly, I think I was trying to do too many other things at the same time as sort behaviour – curriculum, teaching and learning, finance and redundancies, HR crises of one kind or another. Although it occupied a lot of my time, it was still only one of many priorities. It should just have been a total focus. I was good at designing systems that made sense on paper but not good enough about seeing them through month to month, term to term, building the level of capacity needed amongst the staff who did all the frontline work.

It didn’t help that I was too open with people when we were not ready to share: I made two catastrophic mistakes – one in being interviewed for TES and another in a public forum about tackling knife crime – which led to an avalanche of unhelpful local media and parental interest. This began to influence my decision-making; I was caught between the two poles of a dilemma all the time; should we tighten things up or should we relax them? I felt like I was constantly second guessing myself. I even asked Ofsted – do you think our system is too strict or not strict enough? It’s not for us to say… blah blah…

However I think I failed personally mainly in one very important respect; I didn’t invest enough of myself in building the rapport with students needed so that they could accept the systems we were introducing. Whilst I think teachers should be able to rely on a system in a fairly neutral manner without putting undue pressure on their personal relationship-building capacity, for leaders I think this is different. Leaders need to model hands-on engagement, showing how to blend systematic consistent responses and relationship-building. In my last job, for at least 10% of students – maybe 20% or more, who knows – I was a kind of bogeyman figure; a person to resent and push against; to challenge. I didn’t know how to connect to some of our most hardened students and this was a problem. To use Zaretta Hammond’s phrase, too many of our students were not ‘ready for rigour’. For them, I was pushing them into behaviour routines without first building enough understanding and respect. Of course, with most students this worked fine – but it only takes a minority to pull things down.

For sure – without any doubt at all – I now feel I didn’t yet have the skills or personality for being the figurehead in that particular job given the needs of so many students, even if I might have thrived in a hundred others. I used to visit other Heads – Jamie Brownhill at Central Foundation for Boys; Vic Goddard at Passmores. These people have magnetic charisma and a capacity to relate to their students that is utterly inspiring. My wife is the same in her job in as Deputy in an inner city comprehensive. The way they command total respect whilst enforcing and modelling high expectations is quite something to witness. I wanted to be more like them – but you can only be yourself. And for too many students in that job, I failed to connect with them. It was and is painful to admit but I knew it all along.

So here it is.. perhaps the crux of this post and the reason for writing it: When I hear of schools where they have succeeded in establishing high standards of behaviour such that students and teachers feel happy, secure and ready to thrive and relationships can flourish, I just want to applaud them. It doesn’t matter to me how they’ve achieved it. Why should it? They did whatever was needed and pulled it off. Hats off! I’m in awe. I’m grateful. And so should we all be. Almost nothing makes me more angry than seeing people critiquing a school from the sidelines, making judgements from on high about one approach or another that they happen to find too strict or perceive to be too rigid. (‘Strict’ schools I’ve visited have always felt incredibly joyful purposeful places.) Maybe, just maybe, the people running that school know what is needed and have gone to the lengths needed to make things work. It doesn’t matter if other schools do it differently – good for them too. People characterising schools as oppressive, making analogies to prisons and factories etc – are just ignorant of the realities of what it takes, deluded into thinking they are liberators of some kind when actually they are part of the problem, making it harder for others to establish the behaviour norms that allow schools to function.

And for sure, when you find a school in an area where the community challenges are high, where there is excellent behaviour – you will find teachers and leaders fostering those all-important relationships and running clear and consistent consequences systems, where everyone knows and understands that a permanent exclusion is a possibility in the end. They work on educating students to understand the cultural norms that constitute excellent behaviour; they teach students to behave very explicitly; they model it day in day out – and it works. Now, in my roving consultant mode, I see this time and time again. As an outside at-distance observer of a school you are simply not in a position to judge – so you shouldn’t. It makes my blood boil when people do. The arrogance of it. The damage it does. It’s enraging.

My final thing to say here is about Tom Bennett. In my view, if you demonise the ‘Tom Bennett approach’ as being draconian or rigid or no-excuses or all about silent corridors or liberal exclusions, it means you simply don’t know what the approach is. You’re wrong. You’ve been duped by snipers and their soundbites. I’ve had the privilege of attending a couple of Tom’s training days and visited schools he has supported and I can tell you this: I wish I’d had him come to visit me in my previous job. I learned so much. It makes total sense. It’s built on an understanding of the subtle balance of systems and culture – boundaries, routines, norms, choices and consequences; the need to build capacity in the staff body and the overall spirit of human interactivity that promotes love, respect, warmth and kindness. Every time I see someone slag him off on twitter I think – well, he’d have been a hell of a lot more use to me in my old job than you would so why not keep quiet eh?!

As for the issue of behaviour hubs and their efficacy – well, that’s an ongoing matter of evaluation. How do any hubs work in general? We have hubs for research schools, teaching schools, maths, music…. you name it. Does the model of school-led system improvement work? For sure it’s no quick fix and no panacea. Behaviour comes down to leadership and if the hubs that Tom has helped set up are reaching enough leaders and giving them ideas and tools to implement great behaviour systems with the necessary supporting cultures, then they will be making a difference. Time will tell. Even then they won’t reach every school that needs support. TB is not responsible for the whole nation’s behaviour. Nobody is more keen to see the hubs work than TB. He needs maximum support. Let’s cheer him on. And if you’re accusing him of doing it for the money .. well this is where I lose it; that ultra-cynical argument deserves nothing but contempt.

Meanwhile, I’d say to anyone, just don’t ever get in the way of schools and school leaders trying to do the very hardest work there is – not unless you feel you personally could step up to do it better. I know I couldn’t because I tried. How about you?