Behaviour Problems in Schools

An Evaluation of Support Centres

Peter Mortimore, Jean Davies, Andreas Varlaam, Anne West

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138493261
• eBook ISBN: 9781351028523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Published in 1983. One response to the recent concern about pupil discipline in schools has been the creation of support centres: off-site special units to which disruptive pupils are sent for varying periods of time for education and supervision. The Inner London Education Authority had a substantial network of such centres. Yet the concept of these units has aroused some criticism: they have been labelled as 'sin-bins' and as dumping grounds for adolescents.

This book is based on major research conducted by the ILEA over a number of years and provides the only substantial evaluation of support centres. Data are presented on pupil characteristics and attainment, on how the centres operate and on the views of the staff in centres and in referring schools.

It concludes with an evaluation of support centres, highlighting a range of innovative approaches to the management of disruptive behaviour. The authors warn of the dangers of developing a separate system for disruptive pupils, but conclude that some form of alternative provision is needed for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 1

DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOUR IN SCHOOLS

What is disruptive behaviour? How is it identified and measured? How widespread is such behaviour at present? Have standards of behaviour fallen or risen over the last few years? What factors are associated with disruptive behaviour? How is it dealt with?

These and other similar questions are often asked by parents, anxious to choose a school in which their child will make progress and be happy; teachers, who may feel that they are having to cope with particularly difficult pupils; administrators and inspectors, who have to provide help and support for both pupils and teachers; and many others, interested in developments in our schools. Unfortunately, although the questions are simple, the answers are not. In this chapter we present our attempts to provide satisfactory answers and, where we are unable to do so, to explain the nature of the difficulties.

What constitutes disruptive behaviour?

Some definitions of what is disruptive focus on the behaviour whilst others focus on the child. For example, in a DES study disruptive behaviour is defined as that which ‘interferes with the learning and opportunities of other pupils and imposes undue stress on teachers’. In contrast, Parry (1976) defines a disruptive child as one ‘who knowingly or unknowingly effectively and frequently disrupts his own education and the education of others’.

We favour the first approach and have chosen to define disruptive behaviour as any act which interferes with the learning, development or happiness of a pupil or his or her peers, or with the teacher’s attempts to foster those processes or feelings. We prefer this approach as, unlike the one that focuses on the pupil, it does not appear to make the pupil solely responsible for the disruptive behaviour. It allows for the fact that misbehaviour is, to a greater or lesser extent, context-bound. By this we mean that a pupil’s behaviour within a classroom may be influenced by his or her peers as well as by the actions of the teacher. It is unfair, therefore, to judge the behaviour of a pupil without taking into account the context in which that behaviour takes place. Any observer who has seen a pupil change from a classroom fiend in one lesson, determined to irritate the teacher at all costs, to a compliant student in another lesson, will recognise this.

Of course, we would not wish to deny that some pupils are more likely than others to misbehave in any given situation. Quite obviously some pupils deliberately misbehave in a fashion designed to disrupt their own, or their companions’ learning and their teachers’ teaching. Again, other children - fortunately only a few - suffer from serious psychiatric disturbance, organic disorders, or have developmental difficulties which cause them to behave in a quite bizarre manner.(1) However, what we would like to stress by adopting a definition which focuses on the behaviour rather than the child is that many types of misbehaviour fall well within the bounds of normal behaviour. Calling out continuously, not having the correct equipment, shouting insults, acting aggressively towards other pupils, even fighting in class, are actions which can be very irritating for those pupils who are trying to concentrate on work and for teachers anxious to get on with the lesson, but they are not, by any means, an indication that the child is ‘by nature’ disruptive or that he or she necessarily suffers from any identifiable personality or psychiatric disorder.

How is disruptive behaviour identified and measured?

It is obvious that there can be no simple formulae or procedures for identifying and measuring disruptive behaviour. Clearly some acts of misbehaviour are trivial and form part of the general school experience of most pupils. Others, however, are serious and may disrupt classroom life. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to distinguish between the two kinds of behaviour. Thus, even an act as trivial as not having a pen or pencil, or the right equipment for a particular activity, may represent a calculated act of defiance on the part of a pupil and have an effect on both teacher and class far exceeding the overt seriousness of the act. Furthermore, the perceived strength of the misbehaviour may stem not from any particular act, but rather from the accumulation of many relatively trivial incidents which may result in a ‘flashpoint’ reaction from an exasperated teacher.

In school, disruptive behaviour is generally identified in a non-quantitative manner by teachers and its measurement is thus random and subject to bias. This is illustrated by Wigley (1980) who in the course of an in-service training course asked teachers to identify pupil misbehaviour and keep a record of its frequency. She found that in several cases the offending behaviour actually occurred less often than the teacher had supposed. Furthermore this was sometimes no more frequent with the target pupil than with other pupils in the class who were perceived by the teachers as being quite well-behaved.

Researchers have made a number of attempts to quantify behaviour by means of rating scales. These scales have been extensively used in various surveys and are also used to screen large groups, in order to identify any pupils who need special help. However, such scales are seldom used routinely by teachers, although they could be, since they are easily available. They usually consist of checklists of misbehaviours which teachers rate as being the frequent or infrequent actions of a particular pupil.

Perhaps the most commonly used of these scales is the Rutter ‘B’ scale developed by Michael Rutter (1970). The scale consists of 26 statements about a pupil (for example, ‘Is often disobedient’ or ‘Often tells lies’). The teacher has to indicate whether the statement applies, applies somewhat, or does not apply to the child in question. The scale has been used by Rutter and colleagues in their study of ten year olds living on the Isle of Wight and in an Inner London Borough (1975).

Another frequently used behaviour scale is the Bristol Social Adjustment Guide. A series of statements about children’s behaviour are presented to the assessor who then underlines those statements most applicable to the child being assessed.

A rather different type of behaviour scale has been developed by colleagues in the Research and Statistics Branch of the ILEA. This scale allows teachers to make positive as well as negative ratings on a number of different dimensions of adjustment to school, such as learning skills and learning problems, self-confidence and anxiety, and co-operative or aggressive behaviour (Kysel and Varlaam, 1983).

Behaviour scales can be useful, but they have two major disadvantages. First, like the child-focused definitions we discussed earlier, they treat misbehaviour as if it were the sole responsibility of the pupil. Thus, they can be (potentially) useful in identifying children who are prone to misbehaviour, children who misbehave regularly (and children who have some personality disorder), but they are rather unreliable and poor instruments for identifying and measuring the extent and nature of disruptive behaviour within a school or classroom. Second, behaviour scales on individual pupils can take no account of the relationship between pupil and teacher. Such scales are completed about pupils by teachers, never the reverse! A teacher who has difficulty in keeping control of a class is obviously more likely to identify misbehaviour than is a colleague with better classroom management skills. Thus, although useful for some purposes, behaviour scales are not very suitable instruments for the sensitive identification of misbehaviour.

Observation by school inspectors or trained researchers using specially designed schedules presents a more useful technique. It is, however, an expensive tool and tends to be used sparingly. The amount of time given to classroom observation by RMI in their study of secondary schools was very limited. Similarly, in research studies of primary schools (Galton et al., 1980) and secondary schools (Rutter et al., 1979) the amount of time used for observation for any one class was limited.

Have standards of behaviour changed over the past decades and how widespread is disruptive behaviour today?

Despite the coverage given to the topic of disruptive behaviour by the popular press, the evidence on whether standards of behaviour in schools have changed is both limited and unreliable. This is partly because, as already noted, the identification and measurement of misbehaviour is not easy, and partly because a disruptive incident in 1960 may not have the same potential for disruption in 1983. Some may argue that this is, itself, proof that standards have deteriorated, but this may not be necessarily true. Certainly schools have changed, just as life in general has changed. Society is less conformist, better informed and, in many instances, more affluent than it was in 1960. However, the unemployment figures over the past decade indicate that, for some, the affluence of the 1960s has not lasted and, for many younger people, it has hardly been experienced.

Changes in the attitudes of pupils, their parents and in society in general, are likely to affect views on how pupils should behave in schools. Twenty years ago, in most schools, pupils would stand up when an adult entered a classroom and they would punctuate the answer to every question with ‘Miss’ or ‘Sir’. Today many pupils do neither. This is not due to any lack of respect for their teachers but rather because schools have become less formal and this change has affected adults’ attitudes as much as those of pupils. Many visitors to schools would prefer to see pupils absorbed in a task rather than being distracted by having to give formal greetings to every visitor, and many teachers would find the constant interjection of ‘Miss’ or ‘Sir’ an irritating distraction from the work in hand.

This change in the style of schools makes the question of whether there has been a decline in the standards of pupil behaviour very difficult to answer. That pupil behaviour has worsened - and that it is likely to deteriorate further - is part of educational folk-wisdom. Some writers, such as Jones-Davies (1976), not only maintain ‘that a significant deterioration in the behaviour of children in secondary school appears to be beyond dispute’ but talk of ‘the significant acceleration in the incidence of disruptive behaviour and the increasing inability of some schools to manage such problems’. Not enough reliable statistical evidence exists, however, to support this view. This is partly because many headteachers and teachers, not wishing to appear incompetent, are reluctant to admit that they have behaviour problems in their schools. One result of this reticence is that surveys aimed at gathering such information frequently suffer such a low response rate that their findings are of little more than anecdotal value. For example, a survey carried out by Lowenstein (1972) produced a response rate of only 18 per cent from secondary teachers - and only 5 per cent from teachers.

A much higher response rate has been achieved in the various stages of the longitudinal National Child Development Study (NCDS) carried out by the National Children’s Bureau (NCB). This research has charted the development of all children born during one week in March 1958. The children have been studied at birth, 7, 11 and 16 years. At the age of 7 teachers assessed the children using the Bristol Social Adjustment Guide (BSAG). The results showed that teachers considered 22 per cent of the children to be ‘unsettled’ and 14 per cent of them to be ‘maladjusted’. In the 16-year old follow up, the Rutter ‘B’ scale was used in preference to the BSAG. In presenting the findings on the 16-year olds Fogelman (1976) reports that statements like ‘open disobedience’ referred to some 18 per cent of pupils and ‘irritable’ to 20 per cent of pupils. However, since different means of assessment were used on the two occasions the results are not strictly comparable.

When Rutter et al. (1970) investigated the incidence of educational and psychiatric disorders among 10-year olds on the Isle of Wight and in an Inner London Borough, they found that both sorts of problems were twice as common in the inner city area as on the Isle of Wight. These data were collected in the 1960s and there is no comparable recent study alongside which to set them.

Surveys carried out by the DES have produced estimates of the number of disruptive incidents occurring in a school, but, as no previous surveys using the same definitions of disruption have been carried out, it was not possible for the DES to ascertain whether there had been an increase in the number of incidents in recent years. Whilst several surveys have confirmed an increase in general teenage misbehaviour in America, various research studies have failed to produce similar evidence in England and Rutter (1979), after an extensive review of the literature on adolescence, concluded that: ‘It is clear that the general pattern of adolescent development and disorder has not altered to any substantial extent in recent years’.

It is possible, however, to present some evidence on the current prevalence of disruptive behaviour in schools, although this, too, has to be treated with caution. The HMI Inspectorate survey of a 10 per cent sample of secondary schools found that ‘most teachers and pupils alike work hard and have some solid achievement to show’ (DES, 1979). RMI Eric Bolton, commenting on the Inspectorate’s sub-sample of 18 schools in catchment areas with major social and economic difficulties, argues that ‘it is clear from the evidence that the vast majority of schools are orderly places and that most pupils are as well-behaved as they ever were. It would be quite wrong to depict schools as blackboard jungles where teachers are facing violent, rebellious, sullen adolescents in an uneasy and unproductive confrontation. It cannot be claimed that the generality of secondary schools are experiencing major conflict between teachers and taught. Even in schools which are likely to face greater difficulties than most, there is little to support the idea of a major breakdown in order and discipline’ (Bolton, 1981).

Factors associated with disruptive behaviour

Whilst it is not possible to claim that factors in a pupil’s family or school environment directly cause misbehaviour, there are certain aspects of family and school experience which are clearly associated with disturbed or disturbing behaviour in school.

Parental Influence Part of the context of pupils’ school behaviour must be the home background of the pupil and the attitudes of parents to their children’s behaviour. There is considerable evidence to suggest that early childhood experiences affect children’s subsequent development, although unhappy experiences are no longer considered to be irreversibly damaging (Clarke & Clarke, 1974). There seems little doubt that ‘parents help shape the child’s behaviour by means of their selective encouragement and discouragement of particular behaviours, by their discipline and by the amount of freedom which they allow’ (Rutter, 1975). Inconsistent discipline - punishing a behaviour one day whilst overlooking the same behaviour the next day, or one parent being lax and the other being harsh - seems to have a negative effect.

The timing and quality of parents’ responses also help shape good or bad behaviour. Much misbehaviour is attention-seeking and if that is the only way in which a child can gain adult attention he or she is likely to persist in the undesirable behaviour. Rutter claims that, quite early on, the parents of troubled children ‘begin to differ from other parents in being less good at recognising when and how to intervene, in giving less encouragement and praise for good behaviour, in responding erratically and inconsistently to bad behaviour and in giving a lot of attention (both positive and negative) when the child is misbehaving’ (1975). It is, however, not hard to understand the ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ approach when a frequently naughty child is being good. Parents may well have more pressing matters to occupy them than that of praising good behaviour, however desirable and ultimately beneficial it may be.

In their comparative study of the Isle of Wight and an Inner London Borough, Rutter and colleagues found that parents in the inner city suffered from more social disadvantages; worse housing conditions; more family discord; more mental disorder and more criminality. Their children were twice as likely to have emotional, behavioural and reading problems as their counterparts on the Isle of Wight. About 1 in 7 ten-year olds in their sample were not living with their natural parents and ‘a broken home’ was associated with delinquency and child psychiatric disorder. Claims that children living in one-parent families are more likely to be disturbed and disturbing have, however, to be treated with caution since family disruption is frequently associated with longer-term social and economic adversity. Evidence from the NCD Study (Davie et al., 1972) and from our own work in the ILEA has shown that children from single-parent homes are no different from those from two-parent families once allowance has been made for economic factors. Associations similar to those found by Rutter, between home and other background variables, and behaviour and reading attainment were also reported in the ILEA Literacy Survey (Varlaam, 1974).

Finally, the Report of the Committee on Child Health Services (the Court Committee, 1976) concluded that ‘there is now extensive evidence that an adverse family and social environment can retard physical, emotional and intellectual growth… and adversely affect educational achievement and personal behaviour.’

However, despite such evidence, from these and other similar surveys, it is difficult to find evidence to relate directly, specific classroom incidents to situations external to the school. Research has little to offer on this topic. Quite properly, pupils’ individual home lives are seen as distinct from school activity. Unless the pupils link the two aspects of their life, no-one is able to piece the two together though teachers and researchers (as we have shown above) frequently invoke explanations of home or neighbourhood difficulties in seeking the cause of school behaviour problems.

Taking part in classroom activities is likely to be difficult for pupils whose home life is in any way unsettled. If, for instance, parents are experiencing great stress, perhaps as a result of unemployment, poverty or poor housing, this may have severe consequences for the behaviour of their children in school. Low income may mean that parents have to spend more time ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Disruptive Behaviour in Schools
• 2 What are Support Centres?
• 3 Aims and Methods of the Research
• 4 Pupils in Centres
• 5 Staffing at Centres
• 6 How Centres Work
• 7 Schools’ Perceptions of Centres
• 8 Evaluation
• Bibliography
• Index