An interesting report landed over the weekend.
TeacherTapp, the school survey service, prefaced a promotion of their Behaviour Barometer by publishing the findings of their research (Fletcher-Wood, November 2024).
Having grappled with this topic for decades, I hope to carve out time to absorb and critique the content over the coming days and weeks to see the extent it aligns or veers from the perspective I have arrived at.
Well, the conclusions appear compelling:
“Accountability is no longer teachers’ top source of stress – instead, it’s behaviour… Teachers say the number one priority for improving their school should be behaviour… Leaders who want to cut workload, improve wellbeing and keep their teachers can begin by improving behaviour“ (pp.7, 9).
We are also reminded, “This is just the national picture – each school is different” (p.4). Indeed they are - and then some.
"Ofsted’s Below the Radar (2014) contains a couple of sentences which are largely lost amidst the headline findings. Beyond the emphasis on whole school organisational responses to quell low-level disruption, it hints at complexity. It mentions (but does not elaborate on) the fact that children are well-versed at adapting their behaviour according to context and circumstance:
This variation is at the heart of the problem and is confirmed by inspection evidence, which shows that variation in behaviour not only exists between schools but can also be found across different classes within a school. … behaviour in different classes commonly varied from good to inadequate and, on occasions was outstanding. … The same students were observed behaving impeccably in other lessons with different teachers. Students echoed these observations by indicating that their behaviour varied according to the teacher."
(Ofsted 2014: 10, 23; emphasis added, in Warren & Bigger, 2017, p.121).
Statista reports there are currently more than 10.6 million pupils in the UK education system. Multiply that by five days a week, 39 weeks a year, and the result is an almost infinite number of interactions.
My work focuses on the nature and quality of those interactions.
Here lies perhaps my first distinction: I have come to emphasise exchanges and interactions rather than getting fixated on behaviour. Mere semantics? Perhaps. Yet I’ve found this perspective to be a crucial ingredient in gently challenging the status quo. It opens the door to exploring an often-overlooked dimension - one that reveals nuances and patterns beyond the constraints of uncritically accepted phrases or the moralistic discourse that so easily labels behaviour as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’
