Since the end of the Covid pandemic and the return of children to schools, there has been a national deterioration in the behaviour of students. Independent quantitative evidence abounds and my own qualitative experience has seen the behaviour curve shift to the more extreme, from the minimal background disruption in class through disengagement to truancy, a lack of respect for peers, teachers, rules, property, and even an outright anger at education in general. Not only has this led to a disruption in the quality of education for all students, irrespective of their behaviour but it has added to the already immense workload of teachers and support staff, and pushed existing behaviour management systems to breaking point and beyond.
This article will not deal with the why of this situation, for there is already a body of research, investigation, and conjecture into the nature and cause of the change. Rather, its aim is to explore the nature of student behaviour in general, and the role that schools should play if the output of their operation is to be a stream of citizens capable of forming, maintaining, and driving forwards a tolerant, compassionate, creative, and well-behaved society.
Starting with that most basic of questions: what is the purpose of a school? Most will say education, but education of what? Is it merely the academic, the subject, the transference of knowledge and skills in particular domains legislated by curricula and government? Is it something more, the development of the raw young person into a socialised adult capable of acceptable insertion and operation within a society? What about the development of critical, confident and engaged citizens able to play an active part within the political personality of their state?
Libertarians argue that schools should limit themselves to the academic, with parents required to be the active agent in societal and cultural development, to prevent the state from brainwashing the individual. Communitarians offer a contrasting viewpoint: that active engagement in a society is achieved only by the independent education of an individual in the processes and skill sets required of a citizen: a relationship of citizen and state rather than parent and child. Indeed, many disagreements and conflicts within education arise from the friction inherent in these counterpoints. Does a parent decide what and how a child should learn or is that the responsibility of the society in which that child will grow into an adult participant? Which one is “brainwashing” and which one is “education”?
This in itself raises wider considerations about the nature of ownership of a child. Is a child “owned” by its parents and they have the “right” to pass on their cultural genetics in parallel with their biological: a transmission of their intellectual traits into the next generation of adults? Does a society “own” a child as a future member of its specific aggregation and therefore have the “right” to prepare the young person for their future role and its definition of what that role might be? What about failure in application of such “rights”: where parents don’t bother, society is absent, or the exact opposite occurs: coercion, control and dictat? What of the rights and responsibilities of the child as it moves along that journey? When does it have the right and the ability to take on those responsibilities for itself?
I became a teacher to share the beauty of my subject with students, to offer an adventure through the various topics with the aim being to instil in them the concept that mathematics is the language of the universe. I want them to understand that, far from multiplication tables and long division, it can be used to describe the objective world and, in doing so, provides access to a huge skillset of representation, manipulation, and problem-solving: skills that are transferable across other subjects and throughout life in general.
What I didn’t become a teacher for is to force students to experience my subject; to act as a prison guard in a coercive environment; to function as a warehouse operative, keeping children occupied so their parents can go out to work. Politically, socially, and culturally, it can be argued that this is entirely the purpose of our industrial education system: securing the availability of the current generation for labour and obeisance whilst preparing the next generation; indeed, I have made those arguments in other articles, but this is not the purpose of this instance. It is to consider the nature of behaviour and its management in schools.
As a teacher, I expect students to enter my classroom “ready to learn”: that is to be able to understand and follow instruction, to put in required effort, and not to disrupt or distract others. Of course I recognise such is a perfect situation: the very nature of industrial education, of compressing large quantities of children into small spaces and trying to focus them on a specific task for which they do not recognise the reward ensures an optimum outcome will be far from perfection.
Each child is an individual: they have different moods, different life situations and experiences, different wants and desires, different influences, different concepts of what makes them happy, different abilities across the widest of spectrums, from subject knowledge, academic skill set, to mindset and focus. Add to this their plastic brains, raging hormones, and fermenting personalities and one must raise the question: are the teenage years the best time to be providing exposure to substantial academic load? Yet another area for future debate.
The fact is that every school day, this is the situation in classrooms across the planet: overstuffed chambers trapping an incoherent chaos of light where a coherent stream is required for optimum efficiency; a cacophony of audio discordance where a smooth and melodious performance is required. That learning occurs at all is testament to the skill of professionals, both teachers and learning support staff, who operatie within a complex and draining environment of hyperstimulation and explains the exhaustion and burnout of staff endemic to the education sector.
Teachers accept that part of the job is managing behaviour for learning within acceptable parameters. The normal distribution of heterogeneous elements mentioned above ensures that active strategies will always be required and can often be tied into the implementations of formative assessment: the movement around the class, the questioning of individual students, the constant monitoring of sound and motion to measure focus and encourage engagement.
Success is the spontaneous ignition of that active focus and engagement, which will lead to learning either directly or in the future, based upon the nature of the presentation and the subject. Not all, if indeed any learning can be encapsulated in tickbox objective sets for a single period of exposure: another bane of the industrial education system. What is considered success is that exposure, that engagement, that consideration of new knowledge and practice of new skill as steps on the road to exposure, assimilation, and accommodation.
For an individual student to be successful, those opportunities and processes for learning require a carefully prepared and operated pair of macro and micro environments that combine both an established culture of expectations and the dynamic operation of an effective teaching and learning cycle. These are brought together in the relationships constructed by the teacher and other learning staff., with each class having a unique feel and flavour based upon the heterogeneous personalities involved, a pattern knitted together from the unique individual relationships between staff and student.
These individual relationships form the cornerstone of any successful class and of any successful learning experience. It is the deep understanding of the personalities and drives, of the fears and the dreams of each student that moulds those educational journeys: relationships that can take months if not years to develop and which constantly evolve as the child grows into an adult.
Any impediment to this process, at both individual level and upwards, through group, class, cohort, year group, and school body will result in sub-optimal performance for all involved, generating dissonance and friction for both student and educator. An obvious impediment is class size and teacher to student ratio: it stands to reason that if the elemental entity of learning in the relationship between a single teacher and a single student, then increasing the number of those relationships not only creates a vertical load on the teacher (the number of relationships requiring active management) but also a horizontal load (the interference, friction, and dissonance generated by the student to student relationships now offering competition, distraction, and disruption to the coherence of the learning environment).
Increased teacher student ratios and class sizes have always been an obvious drag on learning outcomes. As with any activity, education is ultimately an economic activity and thus a political choice: spend more money to employ more learning staff and provide more resources in terms of preparation and debrief time, more class rooms, more tools and devices to empower the presentation and experience of that learning … or don’t.
Too often now, to the point of habituation and thus expectation, these political choices have impinged negatively on teaching staff, leading to the current situation typical of many public services: that of employees giving their own time and resources for free in order to manage the excessive workload and underinvestment that results from those political choices.
Unwilling to deal with the already well known and described causes of sub-optimal execution, politicians deflect responsibility and resort to the blame game, offering ill-fitting at best and poisonous at worst structural and management reorganisations completely disconnected from the educational environment. Better to be seen to be doing something and blame others for its failure than to address the actual issues and hold those responsible to account: the political system, the politicians, and ultimately the voters who believed their promises and elected them to office in the first place.
That is not to say that education, like any system, should not be evolving within an actively critical performance assessment. However, one only has to spend minimal time in a classroom or school to understand that reflection, critique, and action are not just core skills taught to students on a daily basis but permeate every operation of the teaching staff providing that learning experience. Indeed, if there is any drag on this process, it comes from a lack of time made available to reflect, discuss, research, plan, experiment and enact that process. Again, coming full circle back to political choice and its impact upon workload.
The current societal state post covid has combined with the already deepening crisis in the education system caused by political choice, and thus ultimately voter responsibility, to see the teacher student ratio go through the roof. Excessive workload, lack of structural support, and poor pay have created a negative gradient of experienced staff leaving the profession against new staff joining. Rooms are stuffed, supply is creaking, specialisms are unavailable, classes are collapsed: the failures are condensed into a daily decline that deteriorates all those relationships discussed above, adding structural load to behaviour mechanisms and emotional load to teachers who then become ill or quit: a vicious feedback cycle that few administrators or politicians seem willing to recognise or are able to address.
It is the behavioural load that I wish to address more deeply, and in particular its perversion of the noble concept of inclusive teaching. This is not a new strategy but rather an acceleration of the contamination of the philosophy brought about by the political refusal to accept responsibility for education in general and the current crisis in particular.
Inclusive teaching concerns itself with providing a safe, open, and non-judgemental learning environment in which all is welcome: child and opinion. Its purpose is to expose all students to a totality of experience and opportunity, providing them with the tools to engage with reality and come to their own conclusions through a combination of confident personality and rigorous critique.
For some time however, and increasingly as the education crisis deepens, the concept of inclusion has been rebranded by administrators and politicians to mean included within a classroom at any cost. This has led to a transference of responsibility for individual behaviour from politicians, administrators, parents, and students down to the teacher, a course of action sending those teachers through iceberg laden waters with treacherous intent and predictable results. Indeed, the opposite is required, a re-directing of responsibility for behaviour upwards to the students, the parents, the politicians and the voters.
If we go back to the idea of a class as a group of students ready to learn and a teacher able to provide an environment for that learning, then we recognise the importance of the individual relationships as crucial to the successful operation of the class. This is not just the responsibility of the teacher but of every student within that class, and sitting behind them, their parents. Again, that word responsibility appears, a golden thread that should glow throughout the banners of education but which now lies tarnished, corrupted, and broken.
A teacher is responsible for the learning of a class over the long term. Students have a responsibility to be ready to learn as part of a contract for being members of that class. As discussed above, within normal parameters, behaviour management will be required to fine tune the running of the class. What is not acceptable is the placing of a student within the class who is not ready to learn within those normal parameters, a situation now becoming all too common as administrators fail in their own responsibilities to students, parents, and to their staff.
A student not ready to learn is a hand grenade waiting to go off, a piece of ordnance that needs defusing at best and reconstructing at worst. Both require effort, resources, and embedded strategies within a school as an execution of its corporate responsibility to all of its stakeholders: the student, the parents, the teacher, other students, and other teachers. Classrooms are not dumping grounds for students not ready to learn; they are not warehouses where students can be parked so that some notion of service provision can be tick-boxed. Such policies are short-sighted, counter-productive, disruptive, and ultimately fail to process the responsibility of providing an inclusive education.
A student not ready to learn can turn an existing class into a toxic experience of low level disruption, argument, and behaviour challenge that poisons the culture of that class. A teacher of thirty students (if only) during a sixty minute lesson provides a notional two minutes per child. A student not ready to learn will take up far more time than their notional allocation and in poisoning the culture of learning will reduce the effectiveness of the remaining minutes for all other students. Additionally, their attitude and challenge will seep into the learning mindsets of the other students, both in the short term, and in the long term, across periods and lessons. The temporary removal of such students to another class may provide repair and rebuild to the affected class but simply transfers the issue to another class. Such levels of behaviour, such states of not being ready to learn, are not within normal parameters and require a different approach. This is not a failure of the teacher, the class, or the student, but a failure of administrator, strategy, and leadership for all stakeholders: students don’t learn; parents don’t see their children educated, and teaching staff suffer excessive emotional loading.
Inclusive provision is about welcoming all students into a school and providing an education for all of those students. However, what it further recognises is that all students are unique, with very different strengths and weaknesses, needs, wants, and desires, and positions on their learning journeys. The majority of students are or can easily be transformed into individuals ready to learn within a large classroom environment. However, there are those for whom that is not true: students who require smaller class sizes, one on one learning, and different behaviour management solutions. A one strategy fits all policy that refuses to accept this reality fails everyone, not just those affected by the collateral damage of placing such a student in the wrong learning environment but in habituating a longer term failure within that individual student themselves.
From an educational viewpoint, there are no “bad” students, just students in “bad” fits, by which I mean a learning environment that is not optimised, within normal parameters, for their personalities and skill sets. Many students today present with varying levels of ability in focus, drive, literacy, numeracy, observation, engagement, maturity, socialisation, emotional management and many other areas that are pivotal to a successful education journey. Placing them in a learning environment contrary to this learning state is a recipe for friction and failure. An inclusive school needs to recognise this truth and provide alternate provision, alternate curriculum, and alternate metric systems: in short, it needs to be satisfying every one of its students rather than a group of external inspectors.
Further it requires brave choices. The executive function needs to accept that education of a child is an honourable and broad responsibility that steps beyond mere grades and formal qualification certificates. To insist a student is ready to learn sits upon a large number of assumed skills, most of which are not academic but personal, social, and emotional. How much curriculum time is given over to the dynamics of mood management, stress strategies, reflection and self-assessment, goal setting and engagement, measurement, and adjustment, the social skills of presentation, argument, listening, considering, and working together towards shared goals? Many students not ready to learn are deficient in one or more of the above skills and to assume or insist otherwise and inject them into mainstream provision is a failure of education at its most basic level.
Yes there is an economic cost to alternate provision but that is the responsibility of the executive function of a corpus, as part of its universal responsibility: to ensure that every element of its operation is able to work at an optimum level. It is why the executive roles are paid the big bucks, not because it is easy but because it is difficult. It is the responsibility of any executive function to ensure that its corpus operates at an optimum level, and that does not mean transferring responsibility to lower levels and then wrapping behaviourist performance management frameworks around that abrogation, for in the end all that happens is the corpus becomes sick and dies. In the education sector, this can be seen as the deterioration of schools where excessive teacher workload leads to a recruitment, progression, and retention crisis.
Responsibility and behaviour are two sides of the same coin, whether a student’s behaviour in class and corridor, a teacher’s behaviour in preparing and maintaining an excellent learning environment, or an administrator’s behaviour in protecting students and staff from inclement economic and political climates. Individual responsibility is processed from personal accountability fed by observation, experience, and understanding of consequence and the current crisis in student behaviour has deep roots in a failure to teach this trio: responsibility, accountability, and consequence. Indeed, this learning package can be considered far more critical to a child’s future successes than any academic education for life, and an individual’s journey through it, is built upon a trinity contract of self, society, and surroundings.
Responsibility for poor behaviour is developed by an understanding and experience of the consequences of that poor behaviour. This isn’t a mere application of the carrot and the stick but a far deeper process, of the development of empathy, of critique, of both emotional intelligence and personal, social, and environmental capital. A student needs to understand why they are behaving in such a way, what its consequences are in the short, medium, and long term for that trinity of self, society (meaning any size of social entity), and surroundings, and how they should make use of that knowledge to inform their individual choices.
Too many students are escaping the consequences of their actions, particularly in the valuable learning space of immediacy. This can be down to economic restrictions – not enough staff, resources, or spaces – but it can also be down to a deeper cultural failure: the fear of a school to accept that behaviour and attitude underpins learning and not the opposite, and to deal with it as a core responsibility irrespective of its potential effects upon the ephemeral and selfish metrics of external results and performance tables: such things will take care of themselves when a cohort of students is ready to learn.
Bringing this article full circle, back to the idea of responsibility for education of children as the future citizens of tomorrow. It is an equal responsibility of all stakeholders: society, parents, and children. An inclusive school should take all students and offer suitable provision for all types of learners. However, it is equally the responsibility of parents to ensure that their children are socialised to the level where they are able to learn, and that they take responsibility for any lacking.
A school is not a prison nor is it a warehouse for those unable or unwilling to learn and parents must play a supportive part, particularly when it comes to consequence. If a student is unwilling to learn, then it is part of parental responsibility to deal with that omission, and that includes the child being at home, the parent being pulled from work, and the three stakeholders (school, parent, child) working together to a successful outcome. This could be education at home but equally a situation where the parent or a family member comes into school to support their child and the teaching staff, a personal investment in the educational process. Yes it would require investment, resources, cooperation from employers and even supportive legislation but if all are to stand by their professed insistence upon education, then they have to provide concrete support and bear the cost.
It is often the case that there is a disconnect between parent and school, particularly in the presentation of the child: their behaviour in school being very different from their behaviour at home. Equally the disconnect of the parent and the school (and the value of education in general) can be a negative factor on the engagement of the child, leading to a devaluing of education and learning that may linger far past the walls of a classroom and into their adult life.
The trinity of school, parent, and student should be the cornerstone of any educational process and once a year parents evenings coupled with a few metric heavy reports and messages about missed homeworks and detentions is simply not fit for purpose. Far more investment needs to be made by schools in the personal and pastoral support and provision, allowing for the development of more confident, more critical, more capable students who will become more engaged citizens and parents better able to support their own children in their educational adventures.
Conventional wisdom for performance improvement is based upon assuming a student can learn so investment is in more time to learn, more interventions, more resources, more strategies and techniques for exam success, more homework but with little success. This is because the assumption on which it is based is weak at best and false at worst. Most students are not ready to learn and pretending they are for five years of secondary education whilst mangling them in an industrial education process with a distant goal of a grade that means nothing to them is tantamount to pedagogical abuse. The transfer of investment from assumed learning to required learning skills, on the other hand, would improve the capability when exposed to learning, with success breeding confidence which breeds engagement which breeds behaviour.
Any successful execution of education must come as a dynamic partnership between all the stakeholders, with responsibility, accountability, and consequence being equal if not dominant learning outcomes of any provision. If not, then the current education crisis will worsen and the trinity of self, society, and surroundings will be the worst for it, in the short, medium, and long term.
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