Why do teachers not follow the behaviour policy?
There used to be one reason. Now there are many.
This blog post was written with the help of my long-suffering fiancée Gwen. Thanks also to everyone who replied to this tweet.1
When I started teaching, the behaviour policy was often little more than a fabrication. Managers created it for the sake of governors and inspectors, but they did not use it and did not expect anyone else to take it seriously. This was why teachers did not follow the behaviour policy. However, in recent years, I’ve worked in schools where the behaviour policy was meant to be used and (at least some of) the school’s leaders believed in it. Nevertheless, I still find it common for teachers not to use the behaviour policy. There are several reasons for this.
Lack of Support from Senior Leadership
It’s easy to see why teachers don’t apply the behaviour policy in schools where it isn’t enforced consistently by senior leadership. Teachers might log incidents and give sanctions, only to find that managers don’t follow up, or worse, blame them for causing problems by enforcing rules. In one school, I applied the behaviour policy exactly as written on a poster on the wall of my classroom. This included writing names on the board to warn pupils. After some difficulties with pupils competing to get their names on the board2, the school’s deputy head asked me why I was doing this. I pointed to the poster. Her response was to tell me: “Oh, don’t do that.”
I’ve worked in schools where teachers who used the behaviour system most were assumed by managers to be bad at managing behaviour. In reality they were often just the most diligent in applying the policy. The number of detentions a teacher gave was seen as evidence that they were struggling, not that they were doing their job.
Behaviour Policies That Don’t Work
Sometimes, behaviour policies are so badly designed they can’t be used. I worked in a school where the policy listed all the prohibited behaviours but referred staff to a separate “Sanctions and rewards document” for consequences. That document didn’t exist. When I asked around, people said it never had.
Some schools have behaviour policies that are contradictory, incomprehensible, or simply unworkable, although nobody openly admits it.
There are also schools where the systems are unnecessarily complicated. Recording sanctions might require so much paperwork that it becomes impractical. I’ve worked in schools where you were expected to phone home every time you gave a detention. This was a huge deterrent to enforcing rules if you have a full timetable. Some systems have so many categories for classifying incidents that they can be extremely hard to navigate. In many schools, you could only hope to manage behaviour if the system allowed you to sanction several pupils in one go, rather than going through each incident individually.
Cultural Factors That Undermine Behaviour Policies
In many schools, using the behaviour policy is seen as a sign of weakness. In some schools, you can expect pupils to kick off if you enforce the rules, because hardly anyone else does. Using the behaviour system makes you look like you are either new to the school, or are acting out of some malicious grudge.
It’s not just about pupils, either. There are reputational consequences for teachers who are seen as relying on the system. If you’re regularly issuing sanctions, you can find yourself labelled as failing to manage behaviour, rather than being seen as someone enforcing standards.
Parental Complaints and Lack of Consequences
Parental complaints can be one of the most frustrating results of following a behaviour policy to the letter. If a behaviour system is good at keeping parents informed, teachers might see parents demanding explanations for everything logged, even when no actual punishment is involved. You may find yourself explaining well-established rules to parents, or referring those parents to the Senior Leadership Team.
I’ve worked in schools where, if a parent complained, detentions would be deleted without the teacher being informed. I once had a class I only taught once a fortnight. It took months to figure out why certain pupils were ignoring sanctions. They knew my detentions wouldn’t happen, and I didn’t.
Appeasement Disguised as Relationships
Some teachers tolerate appalling behaviour for the sake of maintaining their relationship with the class. I once had to intervene when visiting a Year 9 lesson, when a boy sang an obscene version of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads3 to a girl in the front row, without the class's teacher doing anything. Behaviour policies are frequently ignored to keep kids happy. It’s appeasement.
Flawed Policy Design and Implementation
Too often, behaviour policies are designed without thinking about the teachers who will have to use them. I’ve seen schools where strict policies from the headteacher are undermined by middle management who don’t believe in them.
In one school, a new behaviour management system was so broken that detentions kept disappearing. Eventually, they had to bring back the old system after months of failure.
Policies need to work for new staff too, especially cover teachers who don’t know pupils’ names. When I covered classes, I would spend the first ten minutes just collecting names and making a seating plan, because without that, it’s impossible to apply the system effectively.
Why This Matters
The result of all this is that behaviour standards slip, as staff become accustomed to poor behaviour over many years and start to accept ‘good enough’ rather than striving for improvement. New teachers may face the worst classes until they either adapt to the low standards or leave the profession altogether. Behaviour in a school is only ever good when everyone holds the line.4
I don’t know whether AIs need to be thanked, but just in case, I will credit ChatGPT with the creation of the subheadings for this blog post. If you have any feedback on this experiment, please let me know.
This is why I don’t recommend writing names on the board as part of a behaviour system.
It’s possible to pronounce both the word “Virginia”, and the word “Country”, in quite an offensive way.
After writing this blog post, I noticed that I assumed that all schools have centralised (computerised) detention systems. This is naive. There are still schools out there where teachers have to give up their break and lunch to do detentions, and scheduling detentions for the worst-behaved becomes largely impossible. Schools like this are another reason teachers frequently don’t follow the behaviour policy.