Recently published figures from the Department for Education show that there were almost a million suspensions from English schools during the 2023/24 academic year.

Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, responded to these figures by declaring that the “reasons for disruptive behavior often lie beyond the school gates and have their roots in wider challenges, including everything from poverty, to access to support with special educational needs and mental ill-health”. A few lines later came the familiar call for “additional investment”.

Of course, poverty plays a part in the issue, but what head teachers seem reluctant to admit is that many of the reasons for disruptive behavior lie within the school gates. After all, it is much easier to blame “poverty” than it is to accept that you might shoulder some of the blame yourself for the behavior on display in your school.

Ultimately, these suspension and exclusion figures suggest that many schools in England need to change their approach to bad behavior. Of course, the threat of suspension or exclusion has to exist. Take that away and you turn into Theresa May trying to negotiate a Brexit deal without having No Deal on the table.

But schools must have a holistic strategy which makes it highly unlikely that kids will ever get themselves into a position where they could be suspended, let alone excluded.

When it comes to behavior management, if you sweat about the small things, the big things will — more often than not — look after themselves. It may sound far-fetched, but the thinking goes that if you are giving kids a detention for not doing up their top button, you’re not going to be faced with pupils bringing knives into school.

When I taught in Croydon, I witnessed well-meaning educators putting their arms around the shoulders of poorly behaved kids because their lives were so difficult. Yes, life is difficult, but pupils will not start to behave until they are consistently held to account for even slight misdemeanours. Fail to do this, and you have an institution whose culture is determined by the kids rather than the adults.

The Government claims to be tackling the root causes of poor behavior in schools. However, it does so while simultaneously passing legislation to reduce the number of branded uniform items a school can mandate — a policy that will actively harm behavior in classrooms. Effectively policing uniform is exactly the kind of “small thing” that is so essential to managing behavior in schools. This legislation will make it much harder to police uniform, given it forces schools to surrender stricter controls over what kids can wear.

Creating an effective behavior policy does not take place at a click of your fingers. It takes an enormous amount of thinking, commitment, and hard work. But if heads were more willing to admit that the problem – and the solution – lies within the building, these shocking suspension figures would soon start to drop.

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Sam Bayliss is a teacher at Michaela Community School. 

DailyBayliss

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