Memorandum submitted by Dominic Boddington,
Respect4us
SUMMARY
1. Developing positive behaviour in schools
is a complicated process requiring a focus on individual children
and their needs, great school leadership, and a motivated, committed
and highly skilled staff.
2. Punishment is ineffective in changing behaviour
and making schools more effective as institutions of learning.
3. Good relationships are the key to good discipline.
4. Political pressure to meet targets based
on academic performance makes the job of building inclusive schools
almost impossible.
ABOUT ME
5. I have been a teacher since 1975 in a
variety of schools and for the last two decades as a school leader
in a challenging school in Norwich. I was a teacher co-ordinator
of the Norwich Area Schools' Consortium action research project
on pupil disaffection which had published outcomes. http://www.uea.ac.uk/care/nasc/TTA_Final/NASCFINALREPORT_June02.pdf
6. I have recently left the public sector to
form a CIC working with secondary schools in Norwich to provide
alternative education for excluded pupils and those close to exclusion.
www.respect4us.co.uk
How to support and reinforce positive behaviour
in schools
7. Develop a collegiate approach.
8. Emphasise the crucial importance of relationships.
9. Throw out all the old clich
s and folklore about teaching. School cultures often
turn teachers into control freaks.
10. Shift the grip of the negative cynics
who have occupied the same seat in the staffroom for years—The
movement of teachers between schools should be routine as in many
other countries, a reminder that schools belong to children not
the people who work in them.
11. Always treat young people with respect.
12. Listen to young people.
13. Understand the young person's needs
and starting point.
14. Involve the young person in decision
making and allow them to take control of their learning.
15. Individualise and personalise learning
as much as possible.
16. Be non-judgemental in discussing behaviour.
17. Treat cultural differences including
class cultural differences with respect.
18. Model respect, politeness, tolerance
and patience at all times.
19. Always be positive—"catch
them being good", notice the good stuff.
20. Make sure young people know what their
strengths are, not always academic.
21. Praise, praise praise.
22. Help teachers to analyse their own emotions
in dealing with stressful situations. Social workers always get
debriefed and counselled—given opportunities to dump their
stuff—it's unheard of in teaching.
23. Be aware that there are no quick fixes.
Progress towards improved behaviour requires patient, consistent
practice.
24. Never give up. Make sure young people
understand you will never give up on them.
The nature and level of challenging behaviour
in schools, and the impact upon schools and staff
25. In the 35 years since I began teaching,
secondary schools have been transformed. They no longer use corporal
punishment nor is there the ethos of the military boot camp that
used to be commonplace. Teachers are far better trained, far more
accountable, far less likely to be alone in a classroom with children
and there are many more sources of support than there used to
be. The average lesson is far more imaginative and engaging and
the majority of children are making more progress with learning
than ever (all the data supports this).
26. Children have changed in that time. They
are mostly subject to the same media pressures and experiences
as adults and as a result mature earlier than they used to. Like
most adults when treated with disrespect they will respond in
kind. The unquestioning obedience of children to authority is
as rare as it has become in the adult world—yet some teachers
still behave as though nothing has changed since the time of Dickens.
Nonetheless, schools in general are happy places where children
are treated with respect.
27. Most comprehensive schools have some
pupils who find the school experience alien. From an early age
they struggle to make progress and fall behind their peers. They
learn patterns of avoidance and behaviours that enable them to
maintain their self-esteem, becoming rebels often admired and
aped by their peers. In some schools they will be very few; in
challenging schools serving areas of deprivation there will be
many more.
28. In a secondary school with good leadership,
and an energetic and committed staff, it is possible to break
these patterns but there are impediments that seem to get greater
year by year.
29. Curriculum—The introduction of
the National Curriculum from 1988 did great damage to the ability
of schools to provide a curriculum that met the needs of all pupils.
From 2000 it became possible to pick up again the threads of the
new curriculum that had been in development in the 1980s, in particular
the centrality of social and emotional aspects of learning. However,
this was only at KS4 and schools were and still are under immense
pressure to meet academic targets.
30. Poor teaching—there are still
some shockingly poor teachers in schools. There are teachers who
don't like children. There are teachers who only like teaching
children who have similar manners and social skills to them. There
are teachers with appalling communication skills. There are teachers
with only a couple of broken tools in their behaviour management
tool kit. Good teachers have an ability to form a relationship
with each child as a unique individual.
31. Schools—schools should be places
where the needs of all children can be met. Unfortunately this
has never been the case and all the trends of recent years—academies,
targets, league tables, competition, 5A*-C etc—are pressures
that drive schools away from being genuinely inclusive. There
are children who will not achieve academic success but are nonetheless
capable of making a massive contribution to their communities
and society. In the inclusive school their talents, skills and
achievements would have parity with academic achievement. Yet
at the moment schools where 71% of children achieve only non-academic
success are labelled as failing. There will inevitably be disaffection
and behaviour problems in schools until we recognise that education
is about more than examination passes, until we adopt a whole
child approach to learning, and we acknowledge the centrality
of relationships in pedagogy. Children know that the relationship
is all important—when we discuss options at KS4 they want
to know who the teacher is before deciding on the subject. We
tell them that this shouldn't matter to them but we are absolutely
wrong! The subject is far less important than the relationship.
Approaches taken by schools and local authorities
to address challenging behaviour, including fixed-term and permanent
exclusions
32. Working in challenging schools I have
seen it all! One becomes a little cynical when one sees the same
failed strategy being adopted for the third time in twenty years.
Exclusion rooms, inclusion rooms, isolation rooms, three strikes,
zero tolerance, detentions, Saturday detentions.
33. The main findings of the NASC (Norwich Area
Schools' Consortium) research project on rewards and sanctions*
were that rewards (including praise) were far more effective than
sanctions in shaping the desired culture systems. This had to
be followed and used by all staff or they broke down, consistency
was key.
*Shreeve, Ann and Boddington, Dominic (2002) Students'
perceptions of rewards and sanctions in Researching Disaffection
with Teachers edited by John Elliott and Barbara Zamorski special
issue of the journal Pedagogy, Culture and Society Vol 10, No
2 2002 pp 239-256
34. For the majority of young people disapproval
from a teacher who is respected is the only sanction necessary.
For serious incidents, restorative justice works. Generally, sanctions
further damage relationships and for the most damaged young people
school sanctions can never be anything but ridiculous and laughable.
35. Few schools exclude young people without
much soul searching. Those excluded are almost always the most
damaged children, for whom it is yet another rejection confirming
their own self-view of worthlessness. The reason given is always
for the greater good of the majority.
36. Respect4us exists to provide schools
with an alternative. We take young people who are in danger of
exclusion or who are simply not thriving. Relationships are central
to everything we do. We work on our young people's behaviour,
through listening and acknowledging the issues in their lives.
We work with them to help them identify their own needs, help
them select worthwhile projects that they want to do and we help
them to construct futures for themselves. We talk with our young
people about behaviours that we find unacceptable but they know
our support for them is unconditional—they will never be
chucked out, we will never give up on them. This work has to be
small scale and done by committed staff. The ethos is that of
the loving family. We build relationships and use restorative
practice. There are no sanctions. We involve and share our practice
with parents.
Ways of engaging parents and carers in managing
their children's challenging behaviour
37. By the time young people are in secondary
school and the school is ready to send them to Respect4us parents
are very often in despair—embarrassed, angry, and defensive.
We deal with behaviour issues ourselves and only when we think
it might have a positive impact on the young person do we refer
issues to the parent. Instead we tell them the good news. We report
on progress. We find the young person's strengths and qualities
and write about them—we tell the parents, we tell the school,
above all we tell the young person and then we tell them again.
We make our young people proud of what they achieve with us and
make them want to share it with their parents. Meetings with parents
are informal and as un-school-like as we can make them.
How special educational needs can best be recognised
in schools' policies on behaviour and discipline
38. Throughout my time in teaching there
has been a deep philosophical divide between those who believe
that once children have crossed the school threshold they should
all be treated in the same way and those who believe that allowance
has to be made for the differences in life experience, social
culture, learning ability and needs of children. This divide explains
the contradictions between policy and practice in many schools.
Like successful families schools need to be flexible institutions,
able to waive rules and bend structures to accommodate the child
who is different.
The efficacy of alternative provision for pupils
excluded from school because of their behaviour
39. Where this is of the boot camp style it has
little long term impact (there are plenty of examples). Provision
that sets out to engage, that deals with the whole child etc etc
can have an impact. Our belief in the latter led me and my colleagues
to leave the maintained sector and set up an independent alternative
provision. See www.respect4us.co.uk
Links between attendance and behaviour in schools
40. The causes of poor attendance are normally
the same as the causes of poor behaviour. Sometimes schools give
up chasing attendance because some teachers would rather not have
the child present. At Respect4us we don't give up. If the young
person is not present and there is no reason we go and get them
out of bed.
The Government's proposals regarding teachers'
powers to search pupils, removal of the requirement for written
notice of detentions outside school hours, and the extent of teachers'
disciplinary powers
41. This is all about giving teachers more weapons
when what they need are more tools. Introducing these will send
out a get-tough message that might be good politics but don't
expect them to make any difference. Have the highest prison rates
in Europe turned back the tide of crime in Britain?
September 2010
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