Education Exposed: Leading a school in a time of uncertainty

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For a teacher, behaviour management is never ‘sorted’, it is something that can work a dream one minute and fall apart the next. Irrefutably, behaviour has a huge impact on both T&L as neither can blossom if behaviour is poor. This is something all practitioners can relate to, but what can we all do to make behaviour more stable, because it shouldn’t be a rollercoaster? I believe consistency in our classroom routines is the key to success and the challenge is to maintain it, lesson in lesson out, week in week out, term in term out. After all, it is all too easy for inconsistency to creep in across lessons, departments and year groups and this is why students will learn to behave differently and ultimately manipulate the systems. A school can ill afford to have teachers who are inconsistent in their classroom approaches. The importance of recognising that all students deserve clear boundaries and high expectations of their conduct, for both their moral and academic welfare, cannot be understated. The programme is aimed at those teaching 3- to 8-year-olds, so doesn’t necessarily tell us about how best to deal with low-level disruption in older children. As much as assemblies are about conveying messages to the children, they are also an opportunity to remind and retrain staff. Every single time you have a public forum is an opportunity to train children and staff in what your culture is all about. The school needs to take responsibility, first and foremost, for laying out the parameters and behavioural expectations the school community are working towards,” he says. The effect on learning is well-documented. In 2014, Ofsted found that 20 per cent of teachers identified low-level disruption in every lesson, accounting for up to an hour a day of lost learning time. This translates to 38 days of education a year, and 266 days over a child’s primary education - which is around one academic year.

It is hard, he admits, to always maintain your momentum with these routines, though - especially during certain points of the year. He’s noticed that mid-November, the end of January and the end of June are common times where behaviour wanes.With any training it is important to consider the starting point of any given colleague, to carefully consider their needs and the context within which they are operating. Behaviour management ideas

However we seek to strip it, Heads are more accountable than ever yet face extenuating external factors that are actually beyond their control and sphere of influence. Bennett T (2017) Creating a Culture: How school leaders can optimise behaviour. London: Department for Education. This would develop from our existing cultural capital talks, where senior leaders choose a current affairs theme from the news for wider discussion with pupils. What this looks like will depend on how many pupils we can have in school at once,” Sam continued. Case studies He isn’t the only one to recognise how serious the problem is. In It grinds you down, a report published in 2018, the think tank Policy Exchange called for low-level disruption to be taken more seriously by the government.A study published in 2018 by developmental psychologist Dr Suzanne Cogswell paints a similar picture - not just for teachers, but for other members of staff, too. One teaching assistant Cogswell spoke to described low-level disruption as being constantly “tiring and draining”, while a teacher commenting on behaviour she faced said: “It was horrendous, it almost broke me.”

Why should a teacher be forced to reinvent the wheel by themselves? Every school should have a clear behaviour policy” You have to have sky-high expectations about your routines that apply to all your classes,” he says. “If you start to dampen them for different groups of pupils, you’re actually lowering the bar of expectation.” Another commented: “It affects the whole class, because if you’ve got a question that you want to ask the teacher, and the teacher’s attention is being taken by someone who’s being disruptive, then nobody can really learn from that.” Behaviourshould not be left to chance. We should not allow staffroom conversations about behaviourto be dominated by the member of staff who throws ‘they behave for me’ as the bomb that crushes the spirt of others struggling with a particular group. Our Training Programme finds the right teachers for your school. Includes expert support for trainees and their mentors.Sallie Stanton, Director of Education at Bedford Free School, for example, explained that “it is difficult planning for breadth and enrichment when we can’t be sure what pupils will be able to do come September.”