Government Behaviour Hub pushing zero tolerance in schools

[Usedtodance]

I've just been reading how the Behaviour Hub set up by the government has been pushing this idea of very strict behaviour policies and zero tolerance in schools. The sort rolled out by many of the academy chains. Does anyone know what the evidence base is for this?

The policies in many of these schools are highly restrictive - short lunch breaks, limited access to toilet breaks, consequences for minor mistakes. Many adults would find it stressful to be in an environment like this. I wonder if anyone has looked at the cost of these measures to the children in terms of their mental health, fostering independence and social skills etc.

Any insight, thoughts or links to research on this would be great.

nobody who has witnessed "low level" disruption hampering every stage of a lesson is ever going to argue that "unstrict" is good.

A teacher can do nothing, individually, they only get to use the discipline policy of the school, and if that policy is right, then the teacher can tap straight into it, with minimal disruption to the lesson, and learning can proceed - which is in the interests of everyone, including the children who are behaving badly

I have seen it taken too far, I agree, it can end up being soul destroying, for staff and students if every little misdemeanor has to be picked up on, I have refused to give detentions for "not sitting up straight enough" for example.

But there is a happy balance, and that is very definitely on the strict side of the line

Hi OP

Schools don’t want to enforce these measures but we also don’t want children at risk of violence.

Since returning from lockdown violent behaviour has increase dramatically. Some of the behaviours we’ve seen in the past year are wildly dangerous. But these students also have a right to an education and a right to be in school.

How do you suggest we deal with the following issues:

Students using social media to arrange violent revenge attacks at break and lunch (we have had five incidents like this since Sept)

Students using the toilets to sell/ consume drugs and vapes.

Students sexually assaulting each other in toilets (we have a mix of gender neutral and sex segregated because of DEI policies)

Students defacing toilets with swear words and graphics pornography.

Students destroying school property (we have had to replace all the doors in the boys toilets three times this year because they’ve been ripped from their hinges).

Toilet breaks are also being used to send nudes/ inappropriate social media posts which then cause knock on behaviour incidents.

I forgot the drinking in the toilets. Bringing knives to school, using toilet breaks to interrupt lessons by constantly asking to go and then hanging around I their first twenty minutes with friends to get out of doing any work.

A clear policy is fair and gives consistency.

The other side of this shiny new fashionable coin being the major problem with the number of children with MH needs and with Autism who are out of school or school refusing because it is such a stressful and traumatising place to be with constant sensory overwhelm and inflexible demands. And that the govt also want to stop pouring money into meeting SEND needs, because its becoming a black hole - in part because mainstream schools with the high speed, pressured gallop primary education has become, is steadily less able to meet their needs without more staff and individual teaching, and without having to frequently pick up the pieces of meltdowns. Many of these are academically able children, the environment is just not accessible to them.

You can do this kind of thing with the kids that can, but the side effect is that other types of schools are then going to need to be built to provide for the increasing numbers of kids who can't, who need different approaches and environments to achieve to their full capacity. And staffed by people who know what they are doing and properly understand how to meet those needs, and do something very different for those kids as opposed to just provide the One Right Model in smaller groups. Or staff them with cheap NQTs who have no experience of SEND provision.

Bollocks - going to the toilet should not be an issue for any pupil.

Making every pupil suffer because of poor behaviour in other students does nothing more than breed resentment towards the school.

Manage the behaviour in those pupils rather than draconian measures like no toilet breaks fgs.

@Icedlatteplease I can't believe that you think it is ok to throw well behaved, keen to learn children under the bus 'whatever the detriment of the NT kids who will probably do sufficiently adequately regardless.' why should they be dragged down and create an ever increasing gap between state and private for the many children who can't afford to go private and will pay for it by not achieving the best they can at school which could then have lifelong consequences for them. Why should they have to opt for a lesser job/lesser pay/lesser lifestyle because of their school throwing their education under a bus as they 'will do adequately'.

I like a clear consistent behaviour policy. I struggle with zero tolerance for a few reasons

The penalties for things that are harmful are the same as the penalties for things like having the wrong shoes because you wore a hole in them that showed up last night and you had no money for the shops til pay day. You get sent to the internal exclusion room.

The impact on SEN. Obviously clear and consistent boundaries are needed by SEN pupils too but most schools use ehcps as a gateway for reasonable adjustments so you have children recieving detentions for having genuine issues.

I also think some children prefer the environment in the exclusion room anyway for some lessons so will just do something minor to be sent there but that would be the same zero tolerance or not.

My sons school is strict but it ditched zero tolerance and SLANT after a short period. Its now one warning then you are out as the teachers preferred it as they were sending out engaged pupils on the no warning ststem. I assume they are still zero tolerating violence though!

My son has gone to a middle school that appears to try to do this. So he's y5.

It's affected his mh. He always tries his best and is conscientious yet now spends a lot of his time being anxious about being told off for minor things. And as been overly and unreasonably reprimanded by one awful teacher who I had to make a complaint about - he was going out if his way to be helpful and she made negative assumptions and jumped to a conclusion without checking first. He then had panic attacks before school on the days he had her for some time afterwards.

I'm a teacher too and believe there's a balance. From what I can see half the staff hate it too and there seems to be a retention issue.

The irony is that it's really not a school full of badly behaved kids. I'd have loved to have taught those children when I was younger.

@OriGanOver

You are assuming this is an issue with just a few students. When actually we are finding that in lessons change over we have fifty to a hundred or so students hanging around texting/ misbehaving/ truanting in the loos.

Have you ever tried to settle a class and start a GCSE lesson when ten different students are arriving from their ‘loo break’ at random intervals. It is incredibly disruptive to learning. And students, even good ones, catch on quickly that they can get away with it.

And for those talking about SEND students. We have a system of toilet passes for those who need them. But I also find that is is my SEND students who most appreciate a ‘warm but strict’ attitude and benefit most from a calm, controlled environment where they can concentrate.

In my experience it is not the SEND kids causing the disruptions and if they are it just requires a bit of intervention. There are many students now who spend all their time at home on devices and have not been patented recently who have no SEND needs and are just focused on not doing any work. These students actively destroy the learning of the rest of the class. should we just let them do this?

I cant remember the details I just remember feeling quite surprised at the information. I doubt you would ever see causation because its research rather than a study per se

I dont know what biases were involved.

And I also referenced in my post about how that translates to other countries with no uniform but then we do have a different social set up, as I said in a preivous post the problem in the UK is that we are anti education, we teach children as a society that its not cool to be clever, motivated, aspirational.

This isn't happening though. There's no spaces and mainstream are catering for children who would have been in SEND 10 years ago. But they're shit at it.

I'm a SEND teacher and I can't believe what I'm hearing from fellow parents of send pupils in some mainstream schools.

Ehcps have increased by roughly a third in 10 years. But no extra send settings.

I honestly don't know if my ds's would have coped better in zero tolerance schools. They certainly did not cope in non zero tolerance behaviour schools and whilst it was their behaviour that was extreme enough to warrant exclusion it was nevertheless low level disruptive behaviour in others that was a trigger often.

I do think that with any policy like this you need to have a plan for what support can be given to pupils who can not cope with this regime that does not involve throwing them on the scrap heap. Educational outcomes are dire for permanently excluded pupils. Support them at school age or basically you will be supporting them for life.

@Boudicasbeard I can't believe anyone would disagree with the examples you give being dealt with strictly.
I'm talking about detention for lost pe kit or pen. Detention for not following slant and sitting in the correct way. This is totally over the top and punishes minor mistakes disproportionately

It's a simple matter of figures.

It is cheaper to provide inadequately for SEN within a mainstream classroom whatever the detriment of the NT kids who will probably do sufficiently adequately regardless.

Excluding kids provides the evidence that a child cannot get an adequate (legal term) education in a mainstream environment. Therefore the government has to provide a more expensive education.

Which has not keep pace with growing levels of ASD/ADHD/SEN.

(Growing levels of any SEN are to be expected genetics, better neonatal care and general medical care.)

It's absolutely this. My setting is supposed to be for MLD and autism. We are increasingly getting pupils who need SLD settings. But we lack the provision and are having to rewrite the curriculum and upskill staff to better accommodate needs. With much less budget than we had even 6 years ago.

It's ridiculous and it's going to create a nation of very mentally unwell children and then adults.

How do uniform infringements equate to disruption? Wearing a coat in a corridor for example is not going to lead you to be sacked in most workplaces. Meanwhile unkindness such as heckling your peers in the corridor or on lunch, excluding peers deliberately via mocking goes unchecked, that sort of behaviour in workplaces far more likely to get you sacked!

@Boudicasbeard

Lots of people work in offices and manage to go to the loo and settle back into work even if there are 50 or so leaving their desks and then returning spread out over the building.

Denying toilet breaks is awful. Schools expect dc to act mature but yet police things like this.

I could not imagine not being able to go to the loo when I needed to. Yes I might hold to the end of a meeting but if I needed to go I could give everyone a 5 minute break, it would be my decision. Not having autonomy over my bodily functions would be awful.

Schools need to get over their power trips.

Regarding successful super-strict schools like the Michaela school, is there an element of selectiveness in the intake? I know the applications process itself is non-selective, but these very successful super-strict schools always seem to be in areas where parents have a choice of schools to apply to, presumably meaning that only parents who have high aspirations for their children and children who are likely to do well in that environment apply. Do schools like this work in small towns and rural areas where there is no alternative school?

Another thought about the Michaela school (not sure if this applies to other successful super-strict schools); it is known for being super-strict but this is only one aspect to its approach. It also has a huge emphasis on gratitude and student/teacher relations which are reinforced daily in things like 'family lunch'.

I am not convinced that simply implementing a zero tolerance policy in a struggling school will in itself make a huge impact. Although I do agree that something needs to change.

I disagree with the behaviour you are lumping together as equally minor. What is a teacher supposed to do with a student that comes without their kit or their stationary?

In schools where this is allowed, I have typically ended up spending around £50 a term on stationary to be made available for students, frequently lending out pens, calculators, rubbers, pencils etc and not getting them back, getting them back deliberately broken, or even getting them back having been ostentatiously carried back up to the teachers desk between the bum cheeks of the student.

And is a child can't participate in a lesson because they done have the proper clothes, the teacher then has to make other arrangements, and sometimes still have them in the room, without safety equipment, ( in the example of DT, or science) and that impedes everybody.

These things have a massive effect on the education of everybody in the room.

I do agree, that detentions for not following SLANT can be way over the top , and I always ban the staring at the pupil who is speaking, anyway, as I find it intimidates children and is not helpful

Zero tolerance is such a horribly puinitive way to run a school. It's assuming the worst about all the kids and effectively treating them like prisoners. A school near us puts kids in isolation for the whole day for forgetting a pen. What about the missed learning for these otherwise 'good' kids. And how on earth do we expect our kids to come out of schools like this with a love of learning or respect for elders or authority? It just breeds contempt.

@OriGanOver

You are an adult. Teenagers do not have the same self regulation and need a framework to work within to help them learn self control.

Do you know how much work would happen in my Yr10 lesson if I let them wander in and out to the toilets? None

Can you run a meeting where you are giving key information while people are talking over you? How about if every five minutes someone got up and noisily left and then came back? How well would that meeting go?

I know two people who went to the first Mossbourne in its early days, which was one of the first of these types of school. High achieving, motivated people who went on to do well academically. Both say they were damaged by the culture and atmosphere - constant anxiety about getting something wrong and being punished, total lack of respect for the young people. They also say that the middle class kids who went into the school with all the advantages were the ones who survived; the ones from the chaotic homes, who already had disadvantages piled up at 11, often ended up excluded or managed out.
As a different example, I was on a course the other day with a woman who received a text message from her daughter's school notifying her of a demerit because her glue had run out.
In my opinion, it is fundamentally wrong to treat children/young people in this way. We need to show respect and compassion. In the philosophy of Ross Greene, kids do well if they can, and if they aren't doing well, we need to identify what skills they lack and teach them those skills. None of us would accept a situation at work where we have to be constantly behaving 'perfectly' (i.e. in the way some neuro-majority people have decided we should) and are publicly shamed if we don't. I don't find eye contact easy and concentrate better if I'm fiddling. I'm also occasionally a couple of minutes late, or forget to do something I've agreed to, or have a pen run out during a meeting, and I would quit my job immediately if I got penalised for these things.

I feel for you, we've just been through almost exactly the same with our DD (14) with the added complication of her having ADHD. Her schoolwork has plummeted and mental health has taken a huge hit.

We're incredibly fortunate that my parents are prepared to fund her going to a small private school with a very good reputation for supporting SEN kids (not an SEN school) and having a nurturing and adaptable environment. She has 2 taster days lined up at the beginning of next term.

I noticed that the pupils are not required to wear uniform but comfy clothes, and are allowed to go to the toilet and get water when they need to. Of course, being a small school that's a lot more manageable, but there must be a middle ground for larger schools? At present DD is only allowed to go at break times or in between lessons, but some lessons are so far apart that this would make her late and end up with her getting into trouble.

Your issue is the control/power you feel you need @Boudicasbeard

Radical, perhaps, but I believe if you gave free reign for toilet breaks and actually built great relationships, you'd manage unnecessary toilet breaks by the relationship and not making them a thing. Universities manage with students popping out for toilet breaks, not sure why you can't?

What schools are currently doing isn't working. You can't get anymore strict without physical punishment and it's still not working. Try things that do work! Evidenced methods of working with children and young people rather than the draconian bollocks that's currently being sprouted.

@OriGanOver

Can you really not understand the difference between a university classroom with a selected intake of those who like to learn and a comprehensive school with a non-selective intake.

You have no idea.

I would happily move to the system you suggest. But only if I could put on my exam analysis ‘Ori’s child failed their GCSE because they spent twenty minutes of every lesson this year in the toilets and gossiped over the lesson instructions for the entire course’.

If you are fine with allowing kids to fail and not holding teachers responsible for the results of kids who can’t be bothered then I would happily move to no rules culture that you think would be better.

I have a great idea. Let’s allow them to be on their phone all the time too. Because that is great for mental health.

Obviously the greatest stressor in the life of a teen is planning their loo breaks. Not the average of ten hours a day they spend on social media.