In the first of a series on behaviour, Amy Forrester says that schools that lack a systematic approach to behaviour risk adding to teacher workload, undermining teacher wellbeing and ultimately increasing job dissatisfaction and attrition rates
Teacher workload is a perennial problem and school leaders have their work cut out trying to create whole school cultures and systems that don’t add to it or that don’t compromise teacher wellbeing.
Key to this is a school’s approach to behaviour. According to Ofsted, behaviour also has an impact on attrition rates, with teachers who decide to leave the profession naming behaviour as a significant contributing factor. A survey by think tank Policy Exchange found that 72% of teachers knew of at least one colleague who had cited behaviour as the reason they left the profession.
At a time when education needs its best and brightest teachers, schools leaders need to create working environments that deal with behaviour swiftly and effectively. A teacher’s workload should not increase because a child decides to behave inappropriately. Unless there is a system that does not penalise teachers for having high expectations of students, behaviour will continue to grind down teachers.
So how do schools deliver this?
- Centralised systems: a centralised behaviour system is vital. Often, this may take the form of whole school detentions running each day that any teacher can put a student in to. No teacher should ever have to face the decision of sanctioning a student, and thereby having to stay at work later, or seeing their own family. By having a centralised system, you support teachers to enforce your school’s behaviour policy. It’ efficient too: instead of having 15 different teachers spending an hour running a detention on the same evening, you can have one person running a whole school detention.
- Low-impact processes: recording and communicating behaviour incidents can be a huge addition to teacher workload. It doesn’t have to be this way. With technology allowing for instant electronic communication to parents, schools can build systems that allow for a quick and efficient way of informing parents about sanctions or detentions. School systems must therefore be quick and efficient – any more than three clicks of the mouse to record an incident is too much. If you want your teachers to challenge behaviour, your systems need to have the smallest possible impact on their workload.
- Supportive leadership: where school leaders shy away from supportive leadership of behaviour the result is that teachers soon stop challenging behaviour, fearful that they will not be supported. Equally, judging staff by their use of a behaviour system is illogical; surely, you want your staff to use it? School leaders shouldn’t be drawing conclusions from high usage, rather they should be thanking those staff for doing as they have been asked. Schools must ensure that their behaviour leaders will stand boldly and unashamedly with their teachers in implementation of school policy. They should proudly stand with their staff in holding the line. Any move that undermines a teacher will result in them not feeling supported and deter them from managing behaviour effectively in the future. The implementation of any policy is only as strong as the staff who are implementing it. Anything that dissuades staff from doing so will not lead to excellent behaviour in a school.
Unless schools get these three key areas right, teachers will be over-burdened with workload, and their wellbeing will suffer. While in theory it may sound easy, in reality behaviour leaders in schools must be tenacious in their work. Without this, teachers will inevitably become burnt out and lack the drive and passion that our young people deserve; safe, secure schools where learning is disruption free.
Amy Forrester is Director of Behaviour and Futures and an English teacher at Cockermouth School, Cumbria. She is the Tes behaviour columnist and tweets at @amymayforrester.