Behaviour and Discipline in Schools

Devising and Revising a Whole-School Policy

Peter Galvin, Jayne Nash, Andy Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134107056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 2000. This handbook is designed to support schools in the process of devising and revising their approach to managing the behaviour of pupils at a whole-school level. It is concerned primarily with the development and implementation of a whole-school behaviour policy. The handbook describes a process of development that, it is suggested, schools will find helpful in achieving good behaviour.

1
Introduction

This handbook is designed to help senior managers improve and, where appropriate, maintain, the good behaviour of pupils in schools. The focus in this handbook is on what needs to happen at a whole-school level in order for the school, as an organisation, to have a positive and powerful effect on pupil behaviour. It is written with high schools in mind but we believe that, with some adaptations, the basic processes and key areas can also be applied to primary and special schools.

An examination of the process of improving and maintaining good behaviour is facilitated by asking senior managers to consider two key questions:

• Is your school as well-organised as it can be to achieve good behaviour?
• How do you know?

Schools as learning organisations

In setting about the process of answering these deceptively simple questions schools will generate a number of specific answers and, on an ongoing basis, further morespecific questions with further more detailed answers or suggestions for improvement. This handbook will support the process of generating clear and detailed solutions to the complex problems that developing a whole-school approach to behaviour inevitably throws up. Before moving to these specific processes and practices we would like to suggest that senior managers in schools take a moment to consider the broad context in which this development process takes place. We suggest that in order for schools to get greatest value from their commitment to improving behaviour they consider the concept of schools as learning organisations. We believe that with this concept underpinning the detail of any work done, senior managers will have the best possible mindset for achieving school improvement in this vital area.

In his excellent book The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Senge et al. 1994) Peter Senge uses the writings and experiences of a number of practitioners who have worked to promote the reality of ‘organisations that learn’. This is a substantial book – over 560 pages – and those who sense that they might find this area an interesting one are recommended to read the whole book. What follows is a somewhat idiosyncratic and necessarily limited summary of the main characteristics of this complex area.

Learning organisations have the following abilities; they:

• Understand the importance of linking organisational growth and performance and individual growth and performance. Roberts et al. quoted in Senge et al. (1994) write that, ‘Every individual in the organisation is somehow stretching, growing, or enhancing his capacity to create.’ At the same time they also make sure that this learning is relevant to the ‘core purpose’ of the organisation.
• Increase the possibility that people feel they are doing something that matters to them and to the larger world. They do the latter by making sure they keep in touch with what is happening and what is important in the larger world.
• Ensure that visions about the direction of the organisation emerge and continue to emerge from all levels of the organisation. Roberts et al. (again quoted in Senge et al. 1994) write, ‘The responsibility of top management is to manage the process whereby new emerging visions become shared visions.’
• Empower people by ensuring that self-discipline comes to replace imposed discipline. O’Brien, (quoted in Senge et al. 1994), writes, ‘Just granting power without some method of replacing the discipline and order that come out of command-and-control bureaucracy, produces chaos.’ Learning organisations encourage ‘voluntary followers’ rather than people who are controlled.
• Recognise that the single biggest learning tool in an organisation is conversation. ‘When faced with contentious issues we have so many defence mechanisms that impede communications that we are absolutely terrible …’ – organisations must, ‘become good at conversation that isn’t polite,’ writes O’Brien.
• Have, Senge writes, the capacity to develop ‘great teams’ which in turn facilitate ‘deep learning cycles’. ‘This “deep learning cycle’” says Senge, ‘constitutes the essence of a learning organisation – the development not just of new capacities, but of fundamental shifts of mind, individually and collectively.’ Roberts et al. (quoted in Senge et al. 1994) write, ‘People are more intelligent together than they are apart.’
• Encourage people to feel free to try experiments, take risks, and openly assess the result. They give the message that no one gets killed for making a mistake.
• Ensure that, as Roberts et al. put it, ‘People treat each other as colleagues. There’s a mutual respect and trust in the way they talk to each other, and work together, no matter what their positions may be.’ In this way they increase the likelihood of visions about the direction of the organisation emerging from all levels.
• Provide people with evidence of their new skills and capabilities. In other words they provide feedback to people on how they are doing such that people, ‘change because they want to, not just because they need to.’ This knowledge is made accessible to all of the organisation’s members so they can understand how their actions influence others. Learning organisations produce knowledge. They increase their capacity for effective action, they show that they have capabilities they didn’t have before and they can see the ‘value-added’ from the data they collected.
• Are prepared to challenge their ‘sacred cows’, to put structures in place to test whether the accepted ways of doing things really are effective. They avoid ‘shooting the messenger’ when they bring potentially negative information. Roberts et al. add, ‘People feel free to inquire about each others’ (and their own) assumptions and biases. There are few (if any) sacred cows or undiscussable subjects.’

All of the above may, at first sight, seem rather ‘luxurious’ considerations for the hard-pressed senior manager faced with the reality of complaints from staff about the behaviour of Wayne, Dwayne and Sharon, or of 7PW and 10HT. We believe, however, that it is possible to make the link between these guiding principles and the practicalities that follow. We suggest that with these broad underpinnings as points of reference, senior managers continue their initial deliberations by considering the following school- and behaviour-related issues which, in turn, form the focus for the rest of this handbook.

It is suggested that senior managers in schools that see themselves as learning organisations need to:

1. Have an understanding of how the school improvement and school effectiveness literature informs actions in this key area and consider what they can learn from it.
2. Be familiar with how current government legislation impacts on the area of behaviour and discipline and consider what they can learn from it.
3. Make sure that the school has a coherent and consensus-based philosophy or a set of values upon which the process of achieving good behaviour is based and which guide staff to their and the school’s collective vision of the future.
4. Be able to implement a developmental process that consistently seeks to improve pupil behaviour and isn’t afraid to examine accepted practice for its strengths and weaknesses.
5. Use this process to put in place a structure that supports those policies and practices that will guide staff and pupils in their efforts to be successful.
6. Understand, and use to good effect, the ‘soft’ or people side of any process of change such that individual similarities and differences in staff skills and attitudes to working in this area are recognised and used to the benefit of all.
7. Be committed to supporting an experimental or project, even risk-taking, mindset which facilitates the monitoring and hence evaluating of the effectiveness of any actions taken and any procedures that have been put in place.

This introductory chapter will give the reader more detailed information on each of these key themes, which then underpin the rest of the handbook.

1.1 The school effectiveness literature and pupil behaviour

Research into school effectiveness

In the 1960s the idea of producing a set of materials about how schools could organise to improve their chances of getting good behaviour would have seemed either misguided or impossibly ambitious. Many educationalists would have been expressing their concerns about the inability of schools to make an impact on, or to improve the life chances of children. They would have probably subscribed to the, then popular, view that schools didn’t make a great deal of difference and that what made a difference to the educational outcomes of pupils – both academic and behavioural – were factors like family background, community influence, early childhood experiences and the skills and attitudes of the individual pupils themselves. At this time the view was fundamentally that what ‘emerged’ at the end of the educational process (children’s achievement and social skill levels) depended primarily on what ‘went in’ and that what happened ‘in between’ did not make a great deal of difference.

By the 1980s a number of key studies in the area of school effectiveness and improvement (Power et al. 1967, Rutter et al. 1979, Reynolds and Sullivan 1979, Mortimore et al. 1984) were beginning to present a fundamental challenge to this view, and a new set of beliefs became more dominant:

• Schools could and did make a difference to learning and behaviour outcomes.
• Some schools made more difference than others even though they may have had similarly disadvantaged or ‘difficult’ intakes.
• It was possible to identify the factors within a school that determined this difference and to harness them as a basis for change.

A wide range of such factors emerged from the school effectiveness studies, supplemented by the Elton Report (DES 1989), and these have been summarised by Galvin et al. (1990) as:

• Good leadership at senior management level.
• A healthy degree of involvement in planning and decision-making from staff, pupils and parents.
• Sensible (i.e. offering guidance without being overly prescriptive) and well-communicated policies and procedures for managing pupil behaviour.
• Strategies for helping staff consider and develop their classroom management skills.
• Effective pastoral systems which give flexible support to those individual pupils and members of staff who are not succeeding within the established system.
• Mechanisms for considering and modifying, where necessary, the nature of the relationship between curriculum and behaviour.
• Systems for monitoring the effectiveness of all of the above.

More recently, these factors have found an echo in another topic generating considerable concern. In Exclusions from Secondary Schools (DfEE 1996), a report on research carried out by HMI, five factors were identified as being crucial in reducing exclusions:

• The effectiveness of the school’s behaviour policy – ‘Schools vary considerably in the rate of exclusions and the extent of that variation cannot wholly be attributed to differences intrinsic to the intake of the school… It is more closely related to the policies and provision of the school themselves.’
• The application of suitable rewards and sanctions.
• The effectiveness of strategies to monitor exclusions.
• The quality of pastoral support.
• The extent of curriculum modification.

As the world-wide research into school effectiveness has continued to develop the picture seems to have become more complex and, paradoxically, more clear. For example, in an article entitled ‘The future of school effectiveness and school improvement’, Reynolds (1995) pulled out from this research literature a set of major findings showing school effects to be less powerful than the original studies had suggested (although still relevant and important), less influential than classroom level variables, more prone to change (for better or worse) over shorter periods of time than was first thought (i.e. two to three years rather than five to seven), and more focused in terms of influencing different sub-groups within schools and different types of behaviour (such as academic or social behaviour). Attention is also turning from studying ‘school effectiveness’ in isolation – Hopkins (1996) has warned that further studies run the risk of producing only longer lists of ‘effectiveness correlates’ – and towards the area of school improvement initiatives.

Implications for behaviour policies in schools

In light of the above, we suggest that the school effectiveness and improvement research still offers an essentially optimistic message: schools can and do make a difference to the behaviour of pupils. Whilst the consensus from the school effectiveness research has shifted somewhat over time, and outcomes run the risk of becoming too complex to guide practical initiatives, we believe that there are a number of important implications for schools attempting to achieve and maintain positive behaviour:

• One of the most significant demands upon those involved in the process is maintaining both morale and momentum. Trying to add, for example, 50 per cent value in the area of behaviour when it is only possible to add up to 12 per cent (from Reynolds 1995) could take a heavy toll on morale. Understanding what represents realistic expectations for improvement in this area is vital. Senior staff, middle managers and class teachers need to blend ambition with realism when they set about the task of improving pupil behaviour.
• Schools need to pay particular attention to the capacity of the policy to inform what happens in classrooms. The classroom is inevitably where we would expect the policy to make an impact on teacher and pupil behaviour. A well-designed and implemented policy will help reduce large variations in practice by differentially improving and supporting the classroom skills of individual teachers. Providing this support will be a vital part of the ‘soft’ side of organisational development to which we will refer in more detail later in this handbook. Similarly, because school effects have been shown to impact differentially upon academic sub-groups or departments (Reynolds 1995), we shall return to the importance of setting up projects within departments and year groups.
• Schools need to engage in an on-going process of improvement. It should not make sense to say ‘we’ve done behaviour’. Each year – indeed each term – should see schools engaged in some kind of review of how the work is going, with targets revisited and revised.
• While we accept that schools that are effective in achieving good academic outcomes are not necessarily as effective in terms of good social outcomes, or vice versa, we stick to the contention (Galvin 1999) that good practice in the area of the curriculum can also inform good practice in the area of managing pupil behaviour. Schools should be continually looking at what they do well in the area of the curriculum and seeking to apply the same principles to the area of behaviour.
• Research findings on the differential effect of schools on sub-groups within the school (based on ethnicity, ability, socio-economic status, gender), support the need for any policy to be capable of differentiation such that it meets the needs of all subgroups and individuals – both staff and pupils. This is a message we shall return to later in this handbook because we believe that sensitive differentiation of the school’s behaviour policy goes a long way to determining whether the policy ‘lives’ after it has been devised.

Policy is a word we hear a great deal in schools. In the present climate of OFSTED inspections, schools are expected to have policies covering all sorts of areas. One common complaint is that policies do not achieve what they are supposed to achieve: a level of staff consensus and consistency that enables the school to function more effectively in that area. Reynolds (1997) talks of the need for staff cohesi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Using this handbook
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Getting started: tasks for senior management
• 3. Moving the process on: the coordinating group
• 4. Conducting a behaviour review
• 5. Involving others in the developmental process
• 6. Using a staff development day to progress the process
• 7. Beginning to put a policy together
• 8. Putting the behaviour policy into practice
• 9. Staff support
• 10. Ongoing monitoring and evaluation of projects
• References
• Index