There is no doubt (from my experience as a teacher and as a local authority School Improvement Advisor) that where behaviour is poor in schools you either need:
a) Very strong teachers- who have excellent subject knowledge, understand how children learn their subject, understand the skills needed (not just subject but literacy and numeracy) and how to teach them effectively, can engage children in lessons, understand behaviours and have the skills to manage behaviours with subtlety and build strong, positive, effective relationships, and can keep up to date with planning, assessment and marking- in relation to all students in a class.
It's no wonder most teachers are not these teachers.
Or you need
b) Clear, effective discipline systems that allow classroom behaviour to be managed effectively using these systems. The issues here are manyfold. The systems have to be used consistently by all staff to work. If only weaker staff use them, children do not respect the. However, very effective teachers don't need them and manage classrooms in very subtle ways. They find the systems cumbersome and irritating. The staff who need to use them can often use them very harshly and children resent that and see it as unfair. Consistency of use is vital but it involves really extensive training of all staff and all students if the system is going to actually work. In my experience they rarely work effectively- they end up as a half-in/half-out system that is actually very inefficient- staffing has to be put in place to support the system every lesson ie to collect the children who will not co-operate or to support the staff who over-rely on it. The analysis of it is key- and it always shows staff who completely over-use it and put children out if lessons every lesson because they are either new teachers and have not developed effective skills yet or ate poor teachers, set in their ways who can't manage teaching, learning or build effective relationships. Schools rarely have the capacity to address the personal issues with these staff and coach them to improve.
Currently, I am seeing behaviour at its lowest point in the 21 years I have worked in schools. I much prefer the option of excellent teachers who have great all-round skills- they are worth their weight in gold to a school. They get the best results for children and teach interesting lessons in well-ordered, low-fuss classrooms where expectations are clear and respect levels are high between them and children. Their reputations are widespread across a school and reach beyond their classroom. However, even some of these staff are fed up and finding , particularly teenagers, very challenging.
I don't believe the answers are things like:
More classroom support assistants/teaching assistants
Smaller classes
Rigorous systems like the one in the article
Excluding students
I'm not sure what the answers are fully but they include:
More rigorous, entirely school-based, teacher training run by the best schools from a range of socio-economic catchments that set themselves the highest standards in their practice. Universities are not the best places to teach someone to be a teacher. Initial Teacher Training should weed out poor teachers- currently it dies everything to pass every participant however weak they are.
A whole new curriculum for all age-groups of children- the current one is the most unfit for purpose we have had in the last 50 years. It's appalling- particularly in secondary schools. Michael Gove should be held to account for the damage he did in implementing the curriculum change he put in place.
Better parenting. Poor parenting is a really significant issue in the behaviour of children. I have NEVER seen really poorly behaved children who do not have very poorly behaved parents. The standards, values, expectations and manners are set at home and schools face the problems of those. Every child can make a mistake, have a bad patch because of worries, or have an undiagnosed need that affects their behaviour - but ingrained awful behaviour making repeated awful choices comes from what happens at home. We are seeing fast-increasing numbers of children who are growing up with incompetent parents who don't understand/care about what the role of a parent is or how their own behaviours affect those of their children.
A wholescale look again at the systems that diagnose and support SEN.
The local authority I work for is a good one. The one next to us is turfing out children across our borders, into our schools at the rate of half a dozen + a week into secondary schools because of the numbers their schools are permanently excluding- officially or unofficially. Most do not settle and their parents move them back in a short space of time, or they simply do not attend, or when the parents discover their local authority has not actually permanently excluded their child and they have a right for their child to return to the school or to another school local to them, they take that option.
The whole system is a terrible mess. None of the systems that support mainstream schools are functioning with any capacity- children's social care, children's services, CAMHS, out of school provision, PRUs, special schools, ed psychs, SALTs, family support teams.
The burden falls on the schools with the poorest catchments where the biggest social problems exist. It's a vicious circle and has been exacerbated by increased poverty and all the issues that go with it.