I have had a brief conversation with a fellow Twitterer (@PoliticsTeacher) about my earlier post explaining the rewards system that I had developed in my previous school as Headteacher. The question posed was what I felt about "the penalty systems for the little ones". In a later Tweet the use of detentions for children as young as seven.
As educators our 'front end' conversations tend to focus on being how we positively manage children's behaviour through intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We rarely discuss the sanctions (a word that I prefer to 'penalty') that we use in schools. Most schools will have some form of agreed system of sanctions that are available to class teachers and to the Headteacher. In the current political climate this is likely to receive more public attention in coming months as Mr Gove has repeatedly stated that one of his key objectives is to ensure good discipline in classrooms.
In my school, we spent a considerable amount of time consulting with three main groups when developing our approach to the use of sanctions. With each group the aim of the process was to identify which behaviours they saw as being most disruptive to learning, which they considered to be the most serious (not always the same) and what sort of sanctions they saw as appropriate to be applied in school.
As you might expect there was some variation in opinions. For example the pupils rated consistent chattering in lessons as being very serious and disruptive, whilst teachers saw this as having a manageable impact on learning, and parents were more concerned about physical violence (which was actually very rare). I am not offering an opinion as to which of these groups is right – other than to say the all are.
The challenge as a school leader was to take the information from the consultation and to make some decisions that would consider these views. The result of the consultation was a ladder of behaviours with a ladder of consequences. I use the word consequences deliberately. The consequences included from the teacher dealing with the instance by talking with the child, removing Golden Time allocation (part of the rewards system), recording repeated behaviour in a record book, removal of play time and other more serious sanctions.
Parents were very concerned about the physical safety of the children, and wanted acts of violence dealt with very severely. There were a significant number who would have been happy to see exclusions used regularly. However, the system that we adopted followed a principle of 'proportionate response'. If tempers had flared and both parties needed to accept some responsibility then the sanction would most probably be less than if someone had acted unprovoked.
Training is the most important plank in ensuring that the behaviour and sanctions systems work. Everyone should understand the system. Once a system is agreed on, all staff in the school were expected to work within the system. The pupils had the right to know how they would be dealt with if they chose to behave outside the system. The parents had a right to know the system, and to have faith that it was being applied.
However, a well defined system must have some flexibilities and tolerances. Personally I have never believed that any child comes into school with malice in their heart, and this informed my processes and decision making. Understanding the causal effects on behaviour is crucial when choosing to apply sanctions. At the less serious end of the scale a teacher makes decisions about when to inform parents that there has been bad behaviour. At the more serious end a Headteacher or Senior Leader has to make difficult decisions about exclusion from a classroom or even exclusion (often publicly called expulsion) from school.
Parents have often told me that they would like to know as soon as something happens. This is not practical or even desirable. Consider the time that it would take to have three conversations every day to discuss each low level transgression of a classroom rule. Teachers would become so overburdened with this duty that they would lose time to plan and resource high quality learning experiences (which would result in more instances of low level transgressions). It is not desirable because behaviour management relies on more than a paper trail system. It relies on relationships between the staff and the learners which are built on trust and respect. If a teacher is talking to parents every time a child transgresses, I don't believe that a good working relationship can be developed. The child will have no respect for the teacher, nor will they develop a trust in them.
Teachers make good choices about when to involve a parent. They use professional judgments all the time about when to involve a parent in the process. Our system had guidelines, but ultimately I trusted my staff to make the right call. Where a decision about parental involvement was not clear then they talked to me or a Senior Leader and were given advice based on and guided by experience. One certainty was that if a teacher had to talk to the parents of a child who had been on the wrong end of poor behaviour, then they would always talk to the parents of the perpetrator – avoiding parents finding out from each other.
Going back to my belief about children's inherent goodness, I believe there is a need for a coherent system of sanctions that is understood by all, including the flexibility that teachers and leaders have in applying this. However, I also believe that it is more important that a policy focusses on the promotion of positive behaviours through intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Value the positive, and the positive will value you?
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