Classroom Behaviour Management in Further, Adult and Vocational Education

Moving Beyond Control?

Denise Robinson, Denise Robinson

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350076174
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Éducation
• Sous-sujet: Formation des enseignants

Guiding you through research and practice, Classroom Behaviour Management in Further, Adult and Vocational Education offers a new perspective. The authors help you to understand how you can create a positive classroom ethos and learning experience in the further, adult and vocational education sector. They explore the need to engage with students' previous experiences, be they positive or negative, and look at why it is important to engage with the wider economic, social and political issues at play in the classroom to understand how these may influence behaviour and responses. You'll find a wealth of information on a range of topics, including:
Understanding behaviour
Teaching strategies
Institutional practice
Professional Standards Each chapter supports your learning with reflective activities, exercises, question and answer sections, case studies and suggestions for further reading.

1 Introduction and Background to the Education and Training Sector

DENISE ROBINSON

The purpose of this book

The extent of disruptive behaviour in the sector is wide and it is having an impact on the college image in general and recruitment, retention and achievement in particular.

MITCHELL ET AL. 1998: 23

Such was the perception of behaviour in Further Education (FE) colleges in a research report published some twenty years ago by the FE Development Agency. Disruptive behaviour, as it was termed, was widespread due to social and economic changes with its consequential impact on individual students. More recently, the University and College Union (UCU) (2013) has identified similar behaviour with similar causes but now extending to those adult students required to attend courses to maintain their unemployment benefits. In addition, since 2015, all young people up to the age of eighteen are required to participate in some form of education, training or work with training (see DfE 2016). This has raised questions on student motivation (Wallace 2017) with its implications for behaviour. A similar scenario is presented regarding schools: ‘We want to make sure that teachers have the necessary powers to maintain order in the classroom. It is unacceptable that poor pupil behaviour is the greatest concern of new teachers and a common reason why experienced teachers leave the profession’ (DfE 2015).

This highlights the concern and the negative effects on teachers themselves of poor student behaviour. However, given the implementation of the ‘Raising of the Participation Age’ (DfE 2015), changes to the National Curriculum with a shift towards exam-focused ‘rigour’ and away from application, and anxiety expressed by students that vocational qualifications are perceived negatively (Atkins and Flint 2015: 5), there is a concern that an increasing number of students will become de-motivated. It has long been assumed that students in the Education and Training (ET) sector were present on a voluntary basis and clearly focused on achievement of qualifications for occupational and vocational careers. Yet, both ET and school teachers increasingly face disengaged, demotivated students and seek strategies to understand and connect with such students.

What is needed to support teachers and trainee teachers in their professional training and development is the provision of a text which provides a deeper, critical understanding alongside practical advice in managing behaviour when teaching students, whether this is in the wider learning and skills sector (sometimes referred to as either the ET or FE sector) or, indeed, for those students (14+) in schools, some of whom will progress into the ET sector. It is somewhat different to other texts on behaviour management in that it draws together teacher educators (all of whom are practitioner-researchers in the ET/Schools sectors) with a shared conviction of the need to engage trainee teachers in a dialogue of critical analysis in their developing professional practice. The intention is the development of the underpinning analytical capacity in trainees and teachers to apply appropriate strategies rather than merely a set of tools to apply in a mechanistic fashion.

This chapter acts as an introduction to the rationale for the book, its focus and its overarching theme. In doing this, it expounds an approach which supports trainees and teachers to analyse their contexts, students and roles in a meaningful way, leading to deeper understanding and applications that will bear fruit. It highlights the interplay between the range of public research and writings and that of practitioner research. This accentuates the role of practitioner research skills and application (as now demanded by professional bodies) and later chapters provide real examples of this. This does not diminish the value of published research; rather it makes the field of research more accessible, giving confidence to both trainees and teachers to explore issues such as behaviour through their own research and to share with other practitioners. Essentially, the approach is one of challenging a technicist approach which has a danger of reducing teaching to a set of formulae.

In this regard the book supports the aspirational approach of the Education and Training Foundation (ETF), the Department for Education (DfE) Professional Development standards and the Higher-Level Apprenticeship in Teaching and Learning. Furthermore, it supports the growing number of trainee teachers in the ET sector who, increasingly, request teaching experience in the Schools sector, mainly in the vocational subjects for 14+ students. This underlines the need to be aware of the various comparisons between schools and the ET sector and is addressed to a limited extent throughout this book.

The focus is not on ‘deviant’ students or those who have been excluded and moved to Pupil Referral Units. It is, rather, on what might be referred to as ‘standard’ students and standard learning situations. The term ‘standard’ belies the reality of teaching; there is no one standard student, class, institution or environment. However, the experience of teachers of a seemingly underlying phenomenon leads to an exploration of issues that goes beyond hints and tips (although these are useful) and even sophisticated strategies and prompts questions about the deeper condition of society.

But what do we mean by ‘bad’ behaviour? As cited earlier this might be referred to as ‘disruptive’ behaviour meaning almost any behaviour which leads to a distraction or disturbance which interferes with learning. This might include chatting, ignoring the teacher, or reading messages on mobile phones at one end of the spectrum, with more extreme examples such as swearing, challenging the teacher’s authority, racist/sexist abuse and even physical threats or acts at the other end. The age of the student is not a determining factor; ‘bad’ behaviour can be displayed by adults as well as younger teenagers. Examples of these behaviours will be found in various chapters in this book.

Backdrop to the sector

The ET sector is a large, complex but low-profile sector. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Cinderella service’ (Randle and Brady 1997), although it makes certain ‘star’ appearances in government policy, these tend to be one-offs with the media and the population at large having little interest in them. Yet it continues to educate many more people than in the other education sectors. To understand the environment in which the sector is operating and its potential impact on participants, the following statistics and comments may be useful. Note that statistics are difficult to gather not only because of the complexity of the ET sector but also as responses for data collection are given to the ETF on a voluntary basis. The focus of most publications tends to be on English provision although the ETF does collect data for all four nations of the UK.

Institutions

• There are around 1,150 publicly funded FE providers in England delivering learning to around 4 million learners.

• There are 273 FE colleges (including 64 Sixth Form Colleges) in England with twenty in Scotland and thirteen in Wales.

Students

• FE colleges educate and train 2.2 million people in England alone in colleges, Adult and Community Learning (ACL) and Work-Based Learning (WBL) (AoC 2017); Wales has 172,470 equivalent students (Welsh Government 2018) with 22, 000 in Scotland (Auditor Scotland 2017). This compares to the 1,563,900 18-year-old students undertaking degrees in universities in 2016 of whom 10.6 per cent were from low-participation areas (UUK 2017).

• There are 773,000 (37 per cent) of 16–18-year-olds in colleges, compared with 442,000 (22 per cent) in schools (AoC 2017).

• There are 313,000 people undertaking apprenticeships through colleges (AoC 2017).

• There are 16, 000 14–15-year-olds enrolled at FE colleges (AoC 2017).

• Around 150, 000 students are studying at HE level in colleges (AoC 2017).

Policies and agencies

There is a long history of what has been referred to as ‘benign neglect’ (Lucas 2004) in terms of policy-attention to FE colleges and the wider sector. This appeared to change from the 1980s when the introduction of ‘initiatives’ such as the Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative proliferated and, later, greater interest in policy from the New Labour government (1997–2010) with the introduction of various quangos (such as the FE National Training Organization and the Standards Unit) which sought to improve standards through direct intervention and regulation. The approach changed with the coalition government’s (2010–2015) position as stated by John Hayes, the then skills minister, that, for example, it was ‘crucial’ that the new Education and Training Foundation should be ‘truly of the sector, by the sector and for the sector’ (Hayes 2012). Despite such policy moves (including the deregulation of the requirement for teachers in the ET sector to be teacher qualified), policy direction continued. The present government has promised a new industrial strategy which indicates a return to greater state intervention. In February 2018, the prime minister announced a review of post-18 education and training, declaring that she wanted to ‘give every young person access to an education that suits their skills and aspirations’ and repeating from an earlier position (May 2016) that she wanted ‘to make Britain a Great Meritocracy’.

There are several problems here. There have been numerous prime ministers and others who have announced reviews of vocational education, decrying its low esteem and identifying how the country needs to improve its vocational education and training if it is to maintain its economic position and competitiveness. This dates to the early nineteenth century when the government realized that other countries (and particularly Germany) were seemingly making great strides forward in their economies and that their vocational education and training (VET) systems were supporting such improvements. Policy initiatives have each been given a fanfare as the way to improve VET and raise its profile as a genuine alternative route to academic and university education. Over the last thirty years much has been said about ‘parity of esteem’ between vocational and academic study and qualifications but it has proved to be a chimera. Why should this seem to be so difficult to achieve? Hyland (2010) suggests that such objectives ‘present a fundamental challenge to the deep-seated prejudice and negative valuing of vocationalism that is endemic in the system’ and that until this abates it will continue to be difficult to improve the standing of vocational qualifications. Indeed, there has been further questioning of the ‘parity of esteem’ in research undertaken by Shields and Masardo (2017) which contends that students entering university degree courses with vocational qualifications are less likely to achieve a first- or upper second-class degree.

Furthermore, the aspiration of achieving a ‘Great Meritocracy’ may be a misunderstanding of the notion of meritocracy. The term was first coined by Michael Young in 1958 but was projected as a dystopian scenario where those of intellect and academic qualifications would become a new, dominant class. A meritocracy will lead to some winners, having greater opportunities to climb the social ladder, but many ‘left-behinds’. The other side of upward social mobility is, of course, downward social mobility, so rather than promote meritocracy, it is suggested that the focus for improvement should be across the board social equality that improves the lot of all (see the Social Mobility Commission’s report 2017). The report states: ‘Britain is a deeply divided nation’ and highlights under-investment in areas of deprivation (rural and coastal areas, old industrial areas, for example).

The sector has been subjected to policy churn and an ever-changing set of agencies and ministers (Norris and Adam 2017). Thus:

• According to the Institute for Government (2017), since the 1980s there have been twenty-eight major pieces of legislation, forty-eight secretaries of state with relevant responsibilities, and no organization has survived longer than a decade. There have been at least two industrial strategies in the last decade alone – and we are now moving onto a third.

• In the three decades up to the 2015 general election there had been sixty-one secretaries of state responsible for skills policy in Britain. Between them they produced thirteen major Acts of Parliament and skills policy had flipped between government departments or been shared between departments on ten different occasions (City and Guilds 2014: 1).

• ‘My opening remark to Principals of FECs was always – “I speak to you a few months before the opening of the LSC [Learning and Skills Council], and a few short years before it closes.” This cynical view of education quangos was indeed borne out. Although the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC), created as a result of the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, lasted for nine years, the LSC bumped along for seven, and there has been an alphabet soup of no less than six successor bodies to the FEFC over the last 16 years’ (David Melville 2018, reflecting on his role as CEO for the FEFC, 1996–2001).

Apprenticeships

More recently, one policy area of VET has received a much higher profile compared to previous years. Apprenticeships have a long history dating back to 1563 but came to their peak in the 1960s with one-third of all boys leaving school to become apprentices (Mirza-Davies 2015). Decline in numbers and their perceived utility to employment practices and expectations led to reforms to improve the standards and employer requirements. The Conservative government (2017) pledged a target of 3 million apprentices by 2020. However, these latest reforms seem to be experiencing problems. The target for the numbers of apprentices fell short by 61 per cent in 2017 compared to the same period for 2016 and in its first inspection of providers a report by Ofsted March 2018 stated: ‘Apprenticeships are “not fit for purpose”’ (Ryan 2018). Furthermore, the ETF, established by the coalition government in 2012, appears to be in some disarray given the withdrawal of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) from the Board of the ETF in March 2018. Given the government’s policy of improving social mobility via the provision of lower-level apprenticeships, the question arises as to how this may impact on perceptions of opportunity on the part of those families seeking prospects for their children. Furthermore, evidence of VET’s lack of parity with academic qualifications is provided in research on student perceptions where students from lower social grades are more likely to study vocational qualifications than academic Advanced (A) levels (UCU 2014) and ‘perceived...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction and Background to the Education and Training Sector
• 2. Why We Must Never Become Classroom Managers
• 3. Reflections on the Language of Disruption, Learning and Conflict
• 4. A Critique of Common Current Approaches to Behaviour Management
• 5. Affirmative Mental Health Leadership
• 6. Using Research-Informed Teaching to Support Behaviour Management in FE
• 7. How to Improvise Decisions in the Face of Disorder
• 8. Reflective Practice, Restorative Practice and Trust in Behaviour Management
• 9. Ethos and Culture across the Compulsory and Post-Compulsory Sectors and Its Impact on Behaviour Management
• 10. The Use of Professional Standards for Teachers and Trainers in Promoting Positive Behaviour
• Index
• Imprint