Zero tolerance’ of poor pupil behaviour can seem like an attractive idea to someone who is starting out as a teacher, but it is a complicated and contested issue in the British education system (just Google ‘Flattening the grass’ – see, for example, the Schools Week article at https://schoolsweek.co.uk/flattening-the-grass-whats-really-going-on-at-ogat-and-delta/). What happens to the pupils who get excluded, sometimes permanently, for minor infractions – or for jeopardising a school’s public examination profile? The outcomes for pupils who are permanently excluded from school are very poor and very expensive. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be good if there was a system which guaranteed that pupils would not be able to spoil the learning of other pupils who wanted to learn?
The literature on zero tolerance (see, for example, Casella, 2003, Dunbar and Villarruel, 2004, Kajs, 2006) provides an indication of the complexity of this concept in terms of both equity and effectiveness, but from time to time, media reports on education throw up reports of schools achieving spectacular success by adopting
a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ of poor pupil behaviour (‘Not so mad hatters now’, TES, 5 December 2003, ‘Leader defends
the fifth sanction’, TES, 13 May 2005, ‘How iron rules and iron discipline helped turn a school around’, The Observer, 10 July 2005). One press report suggested that the mass exclusion of 300 pupils by a London head ‘in one
fell swoop turned a failing school into a triumph’ Hyams, 2004). The school in question was ‘turned round’, but the suggestion that this was achieved ‘in one fell swoop’ is to underestimate the blood, sweat and tears that went into
hundreds of actions over a period of years rather than months, in order to achieve this. There is also the question of whether some schools are ‘off-rolling’ pupils in unethical ways in order to improve attainment outcomes (see, for
example, TES, 4/12/18 https://www.tes.com/news/ofsted-nearly-10k-rolled-pupils-disappear-school-system).
As part of the research interviewing teachers about managing pupil behaviour, I conducted interviews with 14 heads or deputy heads. This is clearly a very small sample, and may not be typical, but the extracts below may be of interest. The idea of excluding pupils from classrooms and schools perhaps sounds quite seductive from the perspective of someone first going to work in the classroom, but most of the heads I spoke to had reservations about zero tolerance approaches:
‘Politicians use this phrase zero tolerance… Moronic phrase… Politicians would never want zero tolerance applied to them… nor would our staff, nor would our parents… and nor would those teachers who say they want zero tolerance in the classroom. They wouldn’t want the head or the governing body to deal with them with zero tolerance. It’s
an unchristian phrase. An awful phrase.’
A friend got her son into a “good” comprehensive school and said to me, (head of a school in Special Measures), “there’s no bullying there, if there is any bullying, they get excluded”. And I thought, yes, they get sent to a school like ours. They have to go to a school somewhere… it’s not a fair contest.’
‘It’s a phrase I loathe and despise, legally, morally, philosophically. It sends a false message about a
fundamentally complex problem and about teachers’ obligations towards their pupils. The community sends its children here. This is the only secondary school for miles around. You can’t lightly exile a very young person from their
community.’
‘The school has a responsibility for every pupil that it takes on roll to give the best education possible for every pupil
who is on roll. You have got to do your best for all of them. You can’t just kick out all the ones who are not perfect pupils and claim that you are running a good school. You’re actually evading the challenge of being a good school.’
‘You can’t have zero tolerance, we’d be putting out about half the kids who come here.’
‘We don’t have the sanctions to support zero tolerance.’
‘I have had to exclude some pupils, but it should be a last resort, when you’ve tried everything else.’
One head outlined the complexities of decision making in this area with reference to a particular case and stressed that many of the decisions over exclusion were far from straightforward:
‘I’ve got a kid 8 weeks away from his GCSEexams and a parent wants him excluding because of a fight with their son. There are some difficult decisions to make; it’s not black and white, clear cut. Sometimes a pupil with a record of difficult behaviour is not clearly and obviously to blame for an incident… it might have been an incident with a pupil who has an even worse disciplinary record. Can I deal with it by some form of internal exclusion… what if there’s another incident…. Do I think about what is the right thing to do ethically and morally… about what the staff think. About what particular middle class parents think… about what it will look like in the papers if there is another, more serious incident… do I just look to protect my own position rather than what ‘s best for a disadvantaged pupil who has been making good progress overall in difficult circumstances? Zero tolerance… the only people who advocate it are people who know nothing about
working in ordinary schools.’
Heads explained that they worked hard to achieve zero or very low tolerance of pupils being able to spoil the learning of others, but some admitted that this ideal was difficult to achieve in practice for some schools, and that if every teacher resorted to sending pupils out of the room for any transgression, school systems would be stretched or overwhelmed. The resource implications of remove systems, ‘on-call’, staff patrols, ‘minding’ of pupils by senior members of staff were considerable:
‘You have to try and find some way of giving them some form of education, within the bounds of what’s possible. This doesn’t mean that you can tolerate bad behaviour that disturbs lessons for other pupils.’
‘You can try and have zero tolerance of pupils seriously interfering with the learning of others… try and make it
non-negotiable that they forfeit the right to stay in the room… but you can’t get zero tolerance per se… you can’t just wash your hands of them and even the first form of zero tolerance is difficult to achieve in practice.’
‘It is the art of the possible… you’ve got to try and provide the best curriculum possible in the circumstances. Whatever it takes within the constraints of available resources. It might be providing a teaching assistant, withdrawing them from some lessons where no good is coming out of them for being in the lesson. You have to try and put together a package
of something that will suit that child and all teachers have to be involved in that and committed to it.’
‘We do have increasing numbers of pupils with significant behaviour problems, the learning support unit which deals with
pupils who are disturbing classrooms has been helpful but it is stretched to its limit and is expensive to staff. It has been helpful to have pupils coming back in from exclusion on partial timetables, just going to the lessons where
hey get on with the teacher, or where they don’t get into as much trouble. This might sound like appeasement, or rewarding bad behaviour but it’s about the art of the possible, schools have got to be pragmatic and you do have to be
flexible and try out all sorts of things.’
‘Like most heads, I have some colleagues who are better than others at handling pupils who don’t want to learn, who don’t want to be there.’
One head stressed the importance of teachers not according difficult pupils ‘victim’ or ‘heroic’ status through their actions or through the use of school systems. For some pupils, beingdisruptive might be the one area which marked them out for attention and status:
‘The idea that you can turn schools into boot camps that will reform pupils is naïve. If you attempt to brutalise pupils
they will become more brutal. The removal room here used to be very unpleasant, cold, horrible, bleak. Now it is warm, there are ICT facilities and pupils can work, and most of them do. They still want to get back with their friends and
to normal life, but the experience does not push them into a “convict” mentality. Spending time in the remove room is not seen by the other pupils as a heroic or intelligent move. It’s important that when teachers take action to impose sanctions on pupils, it isn’t done in such a way as to confer status ondisruption and bad behaviour.’
These views on zero tolerance did not mean that these heads and deputies were against the idea of excluding pupils. In other sections of the interviews, the same heads and deputies spoke of their exasperation in the difficulties involved in excluding pupils who were causing major problems in school, either in terms of threatening the safety and well-being of other pupils, or of seriously disrupting the learning of other pupils and really challenging school systems. What they were not in favour of was excluding pupils for minor infractions of school systems and where the pupils involved were facing very difficult personal problems outside school.
Head Teacher dilemmas
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‘Different constituencies or interested parties want different things in this area; you are under pressure from the LEA not to exclude unless it’s desperate, you have good teachers coming to see you to say that they that they think the kid ought to go, you know many parents would want a lot lower bar on exclusion. One question worth asking is how you would feel if your kid was in the same classes at that pupil, but that can’t be the only question you would ask.’ |
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‘Heads have to make really difficult decisions over whether and how to exclude pupils from lessons or even from the school. This idea that we exclude kids at the drop of a hat… if anything it’s the other way. I feel that in one case I got it wrong… persevered too much trying to keep a pupil in and lost a really good member of staff as a result. They went somewhere else where they felt they could enjoy their teaching more.’ |
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‘There is a massive tension at the heart of the job; the pressure to raise standards and the fact that you went into it to help all pupils, not just the ones who are good at learning. A lot of teachers want to be “Statue of Liberty” type teachers, but there are really tough decisions to be made about doing your best for all of them.’ |
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‘I understand heads resorting to encouraging some pupils to stay out of school. We’ve just explored all paths… personal support plans, partial timetable, isolation, everything, and still ended up excluding two pupils after taking up enormous amounts of time and school resource.’ |
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‘You want to be fair to all teachers and all pupils, but you also feel you should support your staff through thick and thin, acknowledging that everybody makes mistakes sometimes, but as in many schools there are personnel issues…. I know there are certain staff… small minority… who are not really good enough… or who are no longer doing the job well. These difficult issues can’t be ducked by senior staff and governors, but you can’t deal with them overnight… it can take months or even for a year or two years to resolves such problems. |
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‘You’ve got to work with your staff and you can’t run a school without their support, but you can’t just exclude pupils because the staff or some of them want to. You obviously have to take account of their views but they mustn’t feel that they can bounce you into decisions’ |
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‘So often you are dealing not with right and wrong decisions but “lesser evil” decisions. There are times if it’s best if kids go out of the lesson, I wouldn’t say we are relaxed about that, it would be the wrong word, but it would be a lesser evil. It can be quite scary for teachers to feel that there’s no safety valve to stop things getting out of hand, getting worse.’ |
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‘It’s difficult… some ADHD kids have really bad days when the medication isn’t working, where even the lead practitioners in the school can’t reason with them. But it’s not a permanent state of affairs… it’s a really bad day and you are making decisions about whether they stay in the local community for their education.’ |
Heads had different approaches over the handling of exclusions. Some had eliminated exclusion as a policy and kept pupils in some sort of contact with the school almost whatever the offence, others saw exclusion as a necessary evil. There were also different views about sending pupils out of the classroom. Some saw it as a pragmatic ‘safety valve’, others preferred supervision in an exclusion room rather than pupils sent out onto corridors. One head saw sending pupils out as very much a last resort:
‘I don’t like pupils being removed from the classroom. It means they are not learning and that things have broken down. You can also get a little group together who can say “we are special” in a particular sort of way and they have to live up or down to that. I would rather teachers used punishments, used the school system, came and talked about it with me or the year head.’
These variations mean that it is important for student teachers and NQTs to find out what school and departmental approaches are in these areas. It is about adjusting intelligently to whatever situation you find yourself in.
Heads were also keen to emphasise the complexity of issues relating to behaviour management. Some wryly recalled previous ‘solutions’ to problems of pupils behaviour, such as ‘Assertive Discipline’ (see for example, ‘Teaching creed seen as wonder cure for unruly schools’, The Observer, 28 March 1993).:
‘We are talking about complex human behaviour… there are a huge number of variables. Those who see simple solutions to complex issues are being unhelpful.’
‘The Secretary of State’s recent comments just show that they don’t really understand the complexity of the problem.. there are rarely simple solutions, all sorts of factors and variables influence the working atmosphere in classrooms and the extent to which teachers can be comfortable and relaxed in their classrooms. And even though I think things are not too bad here, we never get it completely right, you sometimes err on one side of the line or another when you are trying to balance keeping kids in the classroom and not letting some pupils spoil the learning of others…. You think you’ve made progress and then things change and you get slightly new challenges to the system.’
Several heads emphasised that the institutional nature of schooling, the constraints of the curriculum, the nature of testing arrangements and limits on resources made it difficult for some pupils to have a positive experience of schooling. Some acknowledged that they worked in schools where even their best teachers would still encounter difficulties with pupils. But they all believed that the ability to establish good working relations with pupils was fundamental to teacher effectiveness, and that it was one of the attributes at the forefront of their thinking when appointing staff. They also believed that just as individual teachers made a difference to the degree of pupil engagement in learning, teachers working collaboratively could make a significant difference to pupils’ willingness to commit to the general project of ‘education’.
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