Leading Better Behaviour

A Guide for School Leaders

Author, Jarlath O′Brien

• Publisher: Corwin UK
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526489210, 9781526489227
• eBook ISBN: 9781529721751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

How can an informed, evidence-based whole school approach to behaviour benefit you, your colleagues and your students?

In this companion to Better Behaviour, Jarlath O'Brien combines insights from his own experience of improving behaviour in schools, research and policy in a practical guide to support current and aspiring school leaders.

Through discussing the everyday issues that come with leading on behaviour, and casting a critical eye over sanctions, rewards and exclusions, this book encourages you to develop an approach that is firmly rooted in the values of your school, supports staff and will help navigate the challenges that can arise.

1 Values and Culture

When children become a liability for their school’s performance education has come to an end.

Professor Gert Biesta (n.d.)

The Headlines

• There is an established culture in your school. If the culture is not of your deliberate making then it will have crept into the vacuum you’ve left and grown unchecked all by itself.
• An agreed set of values that permeate throughout the school is one of the foundations of good behaviour as these values influence and inform your policies and your decision-making.
• A school vision will lead naturally from a strong set of shared values and will communicate your collective ambition for your children. It will be a tangible thing to visitors to your school, evident in every aspect of school life.
• This vision and these values are susceptible to professional pressures on school leaders such as those that arise from inspection, external exam results and government floor targets. A collective strength and commitment to standing by your values can help leadership teams from compromising their values when faced with difficult decisions and situations. Being open about what those pressures are, discussing them honestly with each other and with governors or the leaders of a multi-academy trust can protect against succumbing to the pressure.
• A positive behaviour culture amongst the staff is sustained by ensuring negativity is systematically and routinely challenged, and that colleagues receive the support they need to deal with the potential sources of the negativity.
• Deciding on what kind of school you want to be can help when trying to translate a school’s vision and values into a behaviour policy. Completing the following sentence openers can be useful:
  • We are a school for …
  • We are a school where …
  • We are a school with …
  • We are a school that …

Professor Gert Biesta’s superb paper ‘Why “what works” still won’t work: From evidence-based education to value-based education’ (2010) should be mandatory reading for all school leaders. In it, Biesta persuasively highlights the deficits in knowledge,¹ effectiveness² and application³ that exist as limitations in an evidence-informed or evidence-based approach to decision-making in educational leadership. Do not make the mistake of interpreting this as a view that evidence is unimportant – he doesn’t say that – rather it should be used as a helpful reminder of what can be omitted or lost when we fail to take into account the role evidence should play in our decision-making.

Biesta summarises this neatly by contending that, ‘If evidence were the only base for educational practice, educational practice would be entirely without direction’. And that ‘Questions about “what works” – that is questions about the effectiveness of educational actions – are always secondary to questions of purpose’ (Biesta, 2010: 500).

It is a call to ensure that an examination of how school leaders use the significant power available to them and their school’s values is given sufficient weight when they formulate policy and make decisions that affect the hundreds of children and adults in their care.

Nowhere is this more important than in the leadership of behaviour.

Why?

There is an ever-present risk of school leaders making up policy on the matter of behaviour in isolation or as they go along, or by simply lifting an idea from another school because, from a distance, it seemed to work for them or has superficial appeal. I’ve done this myself on more than one occasion. The regularly reported immediate increase in stringency of uniform standards when a new Headteacher takes on a school which had previously poor standards of behaviour suggests itself as one such example.

The behaviour of children, and school leaders’ responses to it, are two of the most emotive and controversial topics in the teaching profession. Listen in on any staffroom conversation or social media bunfight and you won’t have to wait too long for it to surface. The acceleration in emotion that these topics can bring about can make cool, measured discussion and decision-making difficult. I’ve been in precisely this position numerous times, both as a teacher exasperated with my own inadequacy or with what I perceived as poor support from my leaders, and as a Headteacher when I knew colleagues felt exactly the same way about me. As a school leader it provoked an overpowering urge to do something, anything right that second to help my colleagues and to show them that I was a tough, uncompromising Headteacher who wouldn’t take any messing from the children. Of course, what I was really doing was suppressing my own insecurity and hiding the fact that I didn’t really know what to do. It was inaction masquerading as action, procrastination dressed up as decisiveness.

This urgency, and its accompanying stress response, can cause leaders to make those knee-jerk decisions to satisfy demands that can come in the form of:

‘Everyone says you’ve got to do something about Luke Hadley/Year 8/break times/haircuts/phones!’ [Delete or amend as appropriate.]

Colleagues look to us as leaders for solutions and we are keen, sometimes desperate, to provide them with those solutions without delay. However, decisions made in the heat of the moment whilst coping with the glare of expectant onlookers are more likely to be taken in order to meet the immediate needs of the decision maker rather than the needs of the children and adults involved. It is one thing to know this. It is quite another to hold your nerve and tell everyone that the road ahead may feel long and bumpy, that there are things we can do straight away to help, but that lasting improvement will take time in the way that losing weight takes time. The worst part of this inevitably temporary respite is that the problem remains essentially unsolved and must be confronted sooner or later, perhaps once it has deteriorated.

Improving behaviour is neither swift nor simple and we know this for sure because we would have cracked it by now if it was. Without a reasoned and careful consideration of the values – the principles that should guide and influence the behaviour of the adults – that are important to a school community, and the culture that the community wants to foster, leaders run the risk of developing policies seeking to improve behaviour that are desiccated, transactional documents that do not coexist well with the other policies and practices that all schools have. What’s worse is that they then fail to reflect what happens out there in the real world of the classrooms, corridors and playgrounds where teachers will fill in the gaps for themselves.

One such example of a practice entirely at odds with a school’s stated values sticks in the memory from my first day as a Headteacher. I was in my office well before school started when a colleague came in and handed me a sheet of A4 paper, saying, ‘This is the rota for Year 10 to clean the staffroom’.

Without a moment’s hesitation I responded with, ‘If the staffroom is dirty, we’ll clean it or it will stay dirty. I’m not having children cleaning up after adults’.

I regret the way that I made that decision. I should have thanked the member of staff, explained to her what my thoughts were and then explained to the whole staff team why this was incompatible with what we were trying to do as a school and that the practice had now ceased. The swiftness with which I did it stemmed from the glaring dissonance between that particular practice and the school’s stated values. We quite clearly gave no regard to the dignity of the children by doing this, and I could find no justification to rob them of some of their learning time so that the staffroom could be clean.

That example and a host of others led me to take a good look at our values as an organisation and how, or if, they manifested themselves in the day-to-day life of the school. If they didn’t, and I worry that schools’ values sometimes get decided in a senior leadership team (SLT) or staff meeting but only exist in a pristine display in the entrance hall, then we needed to make some changes to ensure that they did.

Reflection Points

• Can you think of a time or times when you have felt under pressure to solve a behaviour issue quickly?
• What was it about the situation(s) the made you feel pressurised?
• How did you cope with the pressure and expectation?
• What did you say to the people around you?
• How did the situation turn out?
• Were the solution and the actions you took consistent with your values?
• What would you have done differently?

When children leave our school they should be …

For most of my teaching life I thought that the idea of a school vision was an empty gesture. I listened with some interest when the subject was brought up on leadership courses such as the National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH), but I’d seen enough inane management speak in my time and thought that much of what I saw was more of the same. (‘An outstanding school where outstanding teaching leads to outstanding learning’ remains my all-time favourite.)

I changed my mind on that, as with many other things, when I became a Headteacher, but this time quite by accident. One of the things that I did manage to get right when I first took up the post was to talk to all the staff and governors and as many of the parents as I could about their hopes for the children of the school. I, of course, asked the same of all the students too. I framed all of the discussions around the question:

What should our children be able to do when they leave here?

I decided on this approach as I wanted to force us to think of the end point (as far as our involvement was largely concerned). That is what I understood a vision to be – an almost literal look forward to the hopes and aspirations of the future.

The results were illuminating. The parents’ responses centred around enabling their children to live and work independently; the students’ answers were remarkably similar to each other’s – they wanted school to equip them with the skills and knowledge to realise their ambitions of getting a job, a flat, a car, a boyfriend or girlfriend and to earn their own money. Not too much to ask, you might think, but the life outcomes for people with learning difficulties in the UK at the present time are all gut-wrenchingly poor (O’Brien, 2016) so this should give a very sharp focus to anyone working in schools with children with special educational needs.

I dreaded trying to assimilate all of this information into something coherent, yet it quickly became apparent that some key characteristic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Values and Culture
• 2 Policy
• 3 Staff Confidence and Self-efficacy
• 4 Supporting Our Colleagues
• 5 How Good Is Behaviour in this School?
• 6 Behaviour Reports and Plans
• 7 Recognition, Not Rewards
• 8 Sanctions
• 9 Bullying
• 10 Support Staff
• 11 Special Educational Needs and Disabilities
• 12 Exclusion
• 13 Governance
• Afterword
• References
• Index