Challenging Behaviour in Schools

Teacher support, practical techniques and policy development

Peter Gray,Andy Miller,Jim Noakes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136146923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Difficult pupil behaviour can reflect and exacerbate stresses within a school, increasing the potential for conflicts among teachers, parents and support staff. The need to acknowledge and overcome this in practice is fully recognised and is a central challenge addressed by this book.
Challenging Behaviour in Schools describes effective practical approaches that have been developed by schools and support services. It contains chapters on behaviour support in mainstream primary and secondary schools, the organisation of support services and also looks at the ways parents and schools can work together. Other chapters outline whole school approaches to building better behaviour, as well as specific techniques.
Challenging Behaviour in Schools will be of direct, practical value to all teachers, senior staff, special needs coordinators and governors in schools, educational psychologists, support teachers and all those involved in policy and planning.

Chapter 1

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Challenging behaviour in schools: an introduction

Peter Gray, Andy Miller and Jim Noakes

 

 

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Ask any teacher what makes their job so difficult and they will point to the problems presented by pupils with challenging behaviour. They will of course also identify other causes, such as increasing curriculum demands, expectations from parents and increasing pupil-teacher ratios. However, challenging behaviour has a particular salience. Why?

By contrast to other problems faced by teachers in schools, challenging behaviour tends to be perceived as a direct and personal threat to the teacher's authority. And the greater the sense of threat, the more likely it is for a number of things to happen. First, it becomes more difficult for teachers (without support) to maintain a dispassionate perspective. Second, teachers can become defensive of their own position and develop negative attitudes towards the pupil, parents or others (including outside agencies). Finally, attitudes can become more hardened, with a loss of flexibility or willingness on the part of teachers to consider alternative approaches (on the basis that flexibility might imply a weakening of their own position or an admission of fault).

All of these emotions are natural enough and arise from the fact that teaching is an intensely human profession. These kinds of emotions have always been there, as long as challenging behaviour has existed. We sometimes tend to hold a romantic view of a ‘golden age’ in education when such problems did not exist and teachers were able to respond, without distraction, to pupils' enthusiastic search for knowledge. This view is not supported by history. The Hadow Report (Board of Education 1927), for example, was, like Elton (DES 1989), initiated as a response to rising concerns about declining standards of behaviour in schools. Humphries (1981), in his oral history of education in the 1920s and 1930s, also provides evidence of incidents comparable to if not worse than some of the more extreme difficulties that teachers currently experience.

Yet, there is no denying the level of current concern among teachers and schools about challenging behaviour. This is evidenced by the rising numbers of exclusions from schools reported nationally. While these may result in part from increases in the level and intensity of difficult behaviour presented in some schools, arising from changes in social conditions, other factors are also relevant.

First, teachers' traditional professional autonomy has been challenged by the developing climate of educational consumerism. Government and media coverage of the teachers' industrial action in the early 1980s has also contributed to an erosion of teachers' public credibility. The political thrust of the National Curriculum has been to give further credence to the view that teachers cannot be trusted to teach effectively unless methods and content are centrally prescribed. In this context, challenging behaviour poses an additional threat to teachers' professional self-confidence and morale.

There has also been a shift in public attitude during the last two decades, away from a therapeutic and tolerant approach to difficult pupil behaviour towards a more retributive and punitive stance. The public outrage that followed the murder of Jamie Bulger, for example, revealed a reluctance among many to accept the legal status quo on the age of criminal responsibility. There is a current tendency to see even young children as ‘witting offenders’ rather than vulnerable individuals in need of planned and caring support.

Teachers' professional responsibility is educational not penal in character. However, as members of the public at large, teachers are not immune to influence from a predominantly punitive climate and negative beliefs can emerge when they feel most under threat and least able to achieve a professional resolution to the problem.

Another factor that makes challenging behaviour particularly difficult at the present time is the danger of teachers and schools becoming more and more isolated professionally. This leads to a potential lack of awareness of the broader picture. What happens to excluded pupils when they leave and who cares? How far are needs actually met in off-site or specialist provision? Local Education Authorities have traditionally held the responsibility for ensuring a corporate view (through policy, planning of provision and specification of professional development opportunities). However, these are very much under threat from new legislation. Schools have been actively encouraged by government to compete and the notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools has extended to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ teachers through the development of appraisal and the threat of performance-related pay. This encourages an individualistic as opposed to a mutually supportive culture.

In this context, teachers and schools are bound to be more defensive in the face of challenging behaviour, with schools feeling under pressure to reject difficult pupils in order to improve their competitive image and teachers seeing less value in achieving success with such pupils, as this has relatively low ‘market-value’.

Finally, the flexibility that teachers have always needed in order to improvise and develop ways of meeting individual pupil need has been reduced by the narrower view of education imposed by the National Curriculum. While this may have broadened the range of subjects offered formally (e.g. primary school science and technology), it has diminished the importance of personal and social education. It has also reduced the flexibility in organisation of the school day, which has helped many schools lower the incidence of behaviour difficulties overall.

Teachers and schools now face potentially more difficult problems in a context which is less supportive than in the past. The need therefore for effective support both from within schools and from outside agencies is greater than ever. However, the task of providing support is beset by the same contextual factors that teachers and schools themselves are facing. Support services find it equally difficult to focus their attention on the most troublesome youngsters when they are under pressure to secure their own professional survival (services which are complex in client orientation and potentially challenging to schools are not easily marketable). In this context, a major emphasis within both schools and support services on professional and ethical values is called for to ensure that good practice can occur.

Teachers and schools need a number of things: opportunities to develop skills where appropriate, without having existing skills devalued (and morale further diminished!); opportunities for reassurance that, despite possible slow and painful progress, they are doing the best they can and that, at least professionally, their efforts with difficult pupils are valued; opportunities to have their beliefs challenged where appropriate, together with support and guidance to assist them in making a professional response.

The chapters in this book offer a number of strategies and ways of thinking to help schools and support staff in this process. Several were first presented as sessions at a series of conferences organised by the editors over the last few years, under the general heading ‘New Directions in Behaviour Support Work’, which have been attended by delegates from both mainstream schools and support services.

A major emphasis within the book (and within the conferences that have led up to it) has been the need to assert a professional response in this area of educational support, rather than letting market forces operate for children and young people whose behaviour may be provocative but whose needs for high-quality planned intervention are as great as many others with more ‘acceptable’ special educational needs. Support in this area is more prone to both professional and personal tensions, and the direct needs of the ‘customer’ (teacher/school/parent/LEA) and the individual needs of the ‘client’ (pupil) may sometimes start from opposite extremes. The aim of this book is to consider ways in which both pupil and teacher achievements in the resolution of challenging behaviour can be encouraged, supported and valued.

REFERENCES

Board of Education (1927) The Education of the Adolescent. Report of the Consultative Committee (The Hadow Report). London: Board of Education.

Department of Education and Science (1989) Behaviour in Schools (The Elton Report). London: HMSO.

Humphries, S. (1981) Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939. Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter 2

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Supporting effective responses to challenging behaviour: from theory to practice

David Lane

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NOTHING WORKS!

There have been increasing demands in recent years for special provision for children and adolescents who present behaviour difficulties in school or in the community. The impact on the public of the visual images of young children defying the authority of the police, racing cars, killing the innocent, has been dramatic. There is an increasing sense of outrage at the thought that there is nothing that anyone can do. In part the outrage is directed at those in the caring professions who seem to refuse to do anything.

This sense of hopelessness in the face of the onslaught on the public conscience is aggravated by the competing concerns that appear when stories surface of the outrages perpetrated on some young vulnerable people in care. Scandals give way to concern, and then a new story of a child's defiance of accepted conventions washes over the concern and converts it back to outrage. Many people have been left confused, seeking answers to a situation they simply cannot understand. In that set of circumstances, someone is sought to blame, and solutions, the more instant the better, are demanded and funded.

Yet this situation is not new. Each generation expresses shock at the unreasonable ‘immorality’ of the young. Since the 1950s, new schemes to work with difficult children have emerged. The 1970s in particular saw a dramatic increase in the number of services for ‘disruptive pupils’. (ILEA 1978; HMI 1978). Gillham (1981) has argued that there ‘was a point in the early seventies when it seemed as if many secondary schools in the major urban areas were heading for breakdown’. Current concerns about exclusions from school and the evidence that disruptivebehaviour is a major reason given for exclusions reflect very closely the issues raised during the 1970s (ACE 1992; NUT 1992)

Various theoretical perspectives have been brought to bear on the problem, and not inconsiderable levels of funding have been devoted to politically popular projects. Yet in many ways, the sense of hopelessness felt by the public was shared by the professionals. The optimism of the 1950s and 1960s that psychology had the answers began to wilt under the impact of an increasing number of studies which seemed to indicate that children improved or did not, and that the psychological interventions to which they were exposed had very little influence on the outcome. The idea that nothing works became the theme of a number of key literature reviews during the 1970s and 1980s (McGuire and Priestley 1992).

The public and professionals it seemed, shared the view that we had no answers.

SOME THINGS DO WORK, SOMETIMES!

There was, however, something missing from the literature reviews, something that is always missing. This was the work of those practitioners, striving to provide high-quality services, who were not writing papers for scientific journals but who were concentrating on the needs of the client groups. Their ideas were not unknown and were being shared as a number of groups began to emerge to help practitioners to look at each other's work and learn from that experience. Groups such as the Association for Behavioural Approaches with Children grew up to meet that need, faded and then died. The Islington Seminar series from the mid-1970s brought many hundreds of practitioners together and encouraged networking activities (eventually transmuting into the Professional Development Foundation) to spread good practice. The Behaviour Support Conference, as an informal grouping of practitioners working in similar fields, enabled many ideas to emerge and helped people to question their own practice. Little of this work ever found its way into print and, therefore, into the literature reviews. Some of this practitioner-based work has, of course, always found its way into the literature (Lane and Miller 1992; Miller and Lane 1993), but the trend towards publications which recognise this experience is reflected in this current volume.

It was possible that something might work. Certainly, reviewers in the UK began to see evidence of effective programmes (Topping 1983) and a revision of the earlier ‘nothing works’ philosophy emerged. Partly this was in response to new, more hopeful studies, and partly it was from a re-evaluation of the earlier work. There was, it was argued, too crude a grouping of the research in earlier ‘meta-analytic’ studies. Buried within the general negative findings were examples of projects that did have an impact. With careful selection of client, problem and technique, it now seemed possible to be a little more optimistic (Callias 1992).

Some things did work, sometimes. Not by throwing money at the problem, not by massively increasing on...