Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Good evening and welcome to this very special web chat
from inside the Department in Westminster.
A survey by the Department this week found that three-fifths of teachers
felt that others were being pushed out of the profession
by bad behaviour.
So what is the solution to disruption in the classroom
and is it really that bad?
Luckily, we have two of the country's greatest experts on the subject
here this evening.
Both of whom have written books on this
but more importantly they have spent many, many years
in front of the whiteboard dealing with disruptive pupils.
Over to the furthest left is Tom Bennett.
Tom is a teacher, author and blogger extraordinaire
who also still finds time to answer teachers' questions every day
on the TES behaviour forums.
And to my direct left is Charlie Taylor,
a former teacher and headteacher
who is now the Government's Behaviour Adviser
and very recently has been appointed
the new Chief Executive of the Teaching Agency.
Welcome to you both.
- Thank you very much. - Thank you.
My name, incidentally, is Michael Shaw.
I'm the Deputy Editor of The Times Educational Supplement.
My role this evening is just to pass on the questions
that have been sent in by teachers.
We are lucky to have a handful
of select teachers in the audience here tonight.
If you're watching this live, do send us tweets to #behaviourchat
or you can also post comments on the Department Facebook page.
But before we move on to those questions,
perhaps just a bit more about our panellists.
Tom, is it right that you were teaching this morning?
Yes, teaching today, a full-time teacher.
This is my night job. My day job is teaching.
Excellent. And how long have you been teaching for?
Ten years now, coming up for.
I took to writing about it about five or six years ago
when I started to realise that there were a lot of things
that teachers could actually say
and add to the general discussion about education.
And what's the question you get asked most often on our forums?
The question that most people ask is,
'I've got one child in my class that won't do as they're told,'
that's the most common one.
Excellent. Well, I'm sure we'll get asked that one later on.
Usually, yes.
And, Charlie, you've been both a teacher and a head.
Indeed, yes.
I'm still on secondment from my school
which is The Willows School in West London
which is a special school
for children with behavioural difficulties.
And you described when you first arrived at the school,
- it was quite like a war zone. - It was very hard.
Some very experienced teachers had very recently left
and the school was in a bit of a state.
It took a bit of time to get things sorted out.
Right, we're moving on to the first questions now
and we'll be going to our studio audience.
Do any of you here have any questions?
Anyone at all? Oh, brilliant, fantastic.
Can you just pass the microphone across?
Chris Gibbons from Stonewall, the national gay equality organisation
and we work to tackle homophobic bullying in schools.
I was just wondering with specific reference to initial teacher training
and the new remit of TA and obviously Charlie's new role with that,
what will the Department and TA be doing
to make sure that all newly-qualified teachers
feel equipped to deal with the range of behavioural issues
including all forms of bullying such as homophobic bullying, for example?
I think it's a very good question
and I think we have to make sure that teachers are prepared
when they first go into the classroom.
When we talk to many trainee teachers,
they feel that things could have been better
when they were being trained.
And I think we need to ensure that the training of teachers
happens not only the kind of theoretical bit
but actually there's a real practical sense.
And what the best trainers do is they not only train the teachers
but they also give them practical steps to be able to help out
and to get things right, so I think it's really important
and I think the work that Stonewall has done on this
is really important as well.
Have you anything to add to that?
From a teacher's point of view, from a school's point of view,
I think the most important thing a school can do
is to really step up to that kind of problem
and instead of trying to bury it or hide it under the carpet,
the school needs to make an issue of it and get it public
and be really vocal.
Do assemblies, do whatever they have to do
to diffuse any situations before they arise.
Excellent. Well, we've already started things off
and we'll have more questions from the audience in a minute,
but we're already starting to get questions in
from Twitter and Facebook.
One of these is, 'My summer-born child was too young for school
and always in trouble. How can he be helped?'
Summer-born children,
obviously a consistent problem in the education system.
I think that the summer issue is significant and substantial.
We all know of the evidence
pointing towards different levels of underachievement.
If you say 'getting in trouble', if by that it means he's causing trouble
or involved in trouble,
I think the parents and the school
need to really park the whole summer child thing
because that's not a significant factor here.
Because you get children across all spectrums of the year
who behave or misbehave.
So I think that's a bit of a red herring.
What you need to do is tackle the behaviour,
the reasons for the behaviour
and also externally deal with the behaviour as and when it occurs.
So not even in the first few years of primary school,
will it not have the biggest impact?
I think any good primary teacher or Early Years teacher
will be looking at making sure that the ones that most need nurturing
get the nurturing, so that's possibly the intervention.
But once you get a few years into school it's not a significant impact.
And I think one of the interesting things
is how often children who are simply summer born
get diagnosed with special educational needs.
That seems to happen more often.
And I think sometimes one has to accept, as a teacher,
that there are children who are going to be less mature
than other children within your class.
That doesn't necessarily mean they're summer born or not, as Tom says.
But it's about the school having a response to all the children.
And I think if we get pulled too far down this issue
that my child is summer born and therefore and therefore,
actually we could end up ultimately not doing the things we need to do
which is making sure the child is in school, succeeding.
A very useful question.
Obviously tonight's questions we're hoping mainly from teachers
rather than from parents. This isn't Super Nanny.
Another question we've had is that 'What should happen with SEN children
who don't respond to star charts or praise?
How should you deal with those?'
I imagine with your background as a head of a special school,
you'll have some good ideas on that.
Yeah, we have a very wide range of responses
to children with behavioural difficulties
and I think sometimes the use of star charts and praise
actually very often isn't enough.
Some children have got so stuck in patterns of behaviour
that the first thing is actually teaching them how to be different.
And I visited a fantastic school,
Bartley Green in Birmingham the other day,
where they consciously have classes for children who are struggling
and they really focus on teaching good behaviour.
And if you go into nursery schools they do that very well.
As you go up into secondary schools, often that doesn't happen.
So the first thing is about being really clear
and teaching the behaviour you want to see.
The second thing is actually there are other interventions
that work very well, too.
There are some children who get themselves in such a state
that actually they just need to be looked after
for a little bit of time by the school.
They need to be brought back into the bubble of the school
when children are going through a really difficult time
and then we can help them.
But therapeutic interventions are sometimes helpful.
Also checking that there isn't an underlying issue
in terms of a special need undiagnosed.
And also just having a supportive environment which helps children
with clear boundaries, as well, and that's essential, too.
Do you find star charts and most kinds of praise systems work?
Yes, absolutely, but as with any behavioural strategy
it's just one arrow in your quiver.
You use strategies if and when they occur.
Special educational needs is such a broad area
that it would be impossible to say
this is what happens with children with special educational needs.
You do work with that one child.
And praise and rewards are a fabulous way of motivating people
and sometimes a little bit of coercion,
a little bit of discipline and direction
is also necessary, too.
The important thing is that the parent and the school
works together in a partnership
and they talk to each other constantly.
That leads us on to our next question we've just had in
which is what if parents won't cooperate with a badly-behaved child?
What strategies can you do to get the families onboard?
I think there's two things there, really.
The important thing is that when you go to really good schools,
what they say is they don't operate in spite of their parents,
they operate as much as possible in partnership with their parents,
they spend a lot of time reaching out to parents.
Often parents, you feel quite uncomfortable going into schools.
There is a resonance about going into school
that has the smell of boiled cabbages and chalk
that can send us spiralling back to our own childhood
and our own unfortunate experiences of school for some parents.
And, therefore, one of the things is actually reaching out to parents,
making them feel welcome.
But also being very clear early on about what the expectations are
and what you expect from parents
and what you're going to expect from the child.
And I think when there's too much rigour in there,
when parents don't really know what's expected of them,
that's when they start to push the envelope a bit.
But I think more clarity with parents is really good.
Anything else to add to that, Tom?
I would always argue that 99% of parents around the world
want the best for their children.
And if the teacher in the school starts off a relationship badly
with a parent, even if perhaps the parent instigates that,
the school really has to work hard to make sure
the parents also realise that that's exactly what you want for them, too.
I always start my parental conversations off with,
'Hi, your son or daughter can be really great
but I need your help getting them back on track.'
And that's the kind of language you use to speak to parents.
And as soon as you go down a more confrontational way,
as Charlie was saying, you open up all these background images
and it just all falls apart.
Have you found that parents have got more combative with schools
over the recent years?
I think if you talk to teachers they'll certainly say
that there are groups of parents who probably do push harder
than they used to.
I think there is also a job for schools to do actually
which is about educating parents how to complain, how to raise an issue.
Some parents get very het up, they fly off the handle,
they come storming into the school
and they start screaming and shouting.
And actually it's completely reasonable
for parents to make a complaint, to come and raise issues.
But they need to do that in the right way.
They need to do it in a way
that means that teachers aren't being put in a difficult position,
they're not being shouted at.
And one of the things schools can do is to train parents about
if you've got a problem, this is how you deal with it
and this is what we expect
and this behaviour we won't put up with.
Thank you for that.
We'll take another question now from our studio audience,
some of whom are very busy tweeting.
Any questions at all?
Yes, please, the gentleman here.
My name's Alex and I'm from Anti-bullying Pro
which is, at the moment, a Department-funded programme
that works with about 300 schools
to encourage young people and staff to tackle bullying.
So we give them practical ideas, a bit of inspiration.
But my question is,
I know the Department have recently slimmed down the guidance
when it comes to bullying which may have left some schools
a little unsure of what they should be doing.
I wondered if the panel could talk about any particular examples
of good practice they've seen when it comes to schools tackling bullying
because obviously it's a massive priority
because people spend about 11,000 hours of their life
in full-time education.
It's really important that every single hour is a happy and safe one.
We'll start with Tom on that one.
I absolutely agree with the slimming down of the bullying advice.
Simply because from my experience in schools
whether you get 1000 sheets of paper or 100 sheets of paper,
it doesn't matter, what matters is somebody reading it.
And if that means that it's 10 sheets of paper
and it's the best advice possible, then that's what counts.
And secondly, I would say that the thing that really makes
a school system effective to beat bullying
is to have people in school who give a damn about it.
That will always be the main thing.
It's exactly the same as the other gentleman's question, as well.
There's got to be people in school who think that bullying's an issue
who are actively looking for it and are actively dealing with it.
It doesn't matter how many policies you have.
So that's key people on the ground.
I absolutely agree with that.
I went to Bartley Green School in the West Midlands
and one of the things, they had a very simple system
where children could log on and just report a bullying incident.
It was very quick, it was very efficient.
One of the kids showed me how it worked.
And the teacher could give loads of information and data
about what was going on around bullying.
And it wasn't a huge bureaucratic burden,
it wasn't taking up lots of people's time.
But it was just a way that children could log a concern
and that could then be dealt with.
Excellent. We have another question that's just come in
which is 'Do you know of any new technologies
that could help behaviour?'
I know you were saying you were in a school today where pupils had iPads.
Do you think there are any technologies that might help?
The school I was in today was using Sims a lot
in order to track and keep an eye on progress with behaviour.
And I think in a school like mine where we're held to account
not only for the academic progress of our children
but also the changes we make in terms of children's behaviour,
we've got lots of systems in place that actually measure that.
In some schools there are systems you can buy into
that help to log every incident.
And I think for schools particularly who are trying to move things on,
who really want to change the whole culture of the school,
I think some of these IT systems are really useful to do that.
We don't use a lot of IT for that in my school at the moment
but that may be because I've got Luddite tendencies.
But certainly I've seen schools where it's been very effective.
I think I probably exceed Charlie in his Luddite tendencies
in that I feel that technology and education
is very much like a dishwasher.
They're a fabulous labour-saving device but somebody has to fill it.
And if nobody fills it, the plates stay just as dirty.
I think there are some really good behaviour tracking systems out there
which makes it very much easier for you to, for instance, collate data
and see if there's a pattern or a trend in a child's behaviour
and that is the big improvement.
But, as ever, it needs to be filled in, it needs to be used,
it needs to be attended to and that's, again, where you need people
who are tight and are on that and care about it.
We've got another question that looks like it may have come from a parent
but I think it's still valid, certainly for primary schools.
'How can I teach my child about boundaries
and where is the line between naughtiness and testing boundaries?'
The difference between naughtiness and testing boundaries
is a philosophical question which I haven't got the time to go into here
even if I could answer it.
The question about teaching boundaries
is the science of it is simple, the execution of it is difficult.
Simply because the science says you set boundaries,
you make them clear and then you stick to them.
And if the child crosses those boundaries
they experience a consequence of some kind
which shows them that the boundary's been crossed.
Now those five steps are the simplest thing in the world
and in fact it's the basis of all my behaviour management advice
for teachers in general.
So I've kind of talked myself out of a job here.
But the reason why it doesn't happen and it falls apart
is because it's not applied and it's not consistent.
So set the boundaries, decide what's a boundary for yourself,
tell them what a boundary is.
I'm not a big fan of negotiating boundaries
simply because I'm an adult in a classroom
and I know what's best for them,
which sounds authoritarian because it is.
And then just repeat, repeat and rinse until they learn.
Do you think it's as clear as that?
I absolutely agree.
I think the way to do it is actually to take a step back
and to plan what you think the boundaries should be.
I think the worst way of setting boundaries
is that you try and set them as you go along.
So as you're confronted by bad behaviour you think,
'Ooh, is this okay or not?'
The way to do it is to actually step back and think
this is the kind of stuff I'm prepared to put up with
and this is where I'm going to draw the line.
Then when you come to dealing with a situation,
you deal with it calmly in a non-reactive way
rather than just following the child around and responding.
I'd like to ask one of the questions we've had on Facebook quite a bit
in the build-up to this web chat.
And that is what strategies would you recommend
for improving low-level disruptive behaviour in a classroom?
Over to you, Charlie.
Low-level disruptive behaviour is what frustrates teachers
more than anything else.
You hear the big stories of chairs being thrown around
and teachers being attacked.
Actually, thank goodness, those are very rare.
The low-level disruption of individual children,
one or two children or groups of children,
I think the main thing is this:
First of all to be absolutely clear
about what the rules are within the class
and to be prepared to follow through with rewards and praise
and consequences for children who are doing the wrong thing.
Get absolute clarity about that.
There's basic stuff about things like seating plans.
Being assertive about the seating plan.
If child A is not coping because they're sitting there,
be prepared to move them
and if it means they don't sit with their mates,
that's completely fine as well.
The other thing with disruptive children
is trying to unpick why they're being low-level disruptive
and actually if it's the quality of teaching that isn't good enough,
if the quality of lessons isn't good enough,
if there isn't a real understanding,
for example, of a child which special needs
who is sitting there not able to read,
then that feeds in to low-level disruption.
Isn't that shifting the blame to teachers,
to say it's about motivation?
Well, you deal with what you're confronted by
and if you have a child
who's low-levelly disrupting your lessons constantly,
yes, you can have very clear boundaries in place
but also you need to respond to that child
and if what you're trying isn't working
then it's time to have a plan B as well.
And your tips for low-level disruption.
Just echoing what Charlie said,
it's not the teacher's fault the misbehaviour's occurred
but it is their responsibility to deal with it.
That's what we're paid for.
So there is a subtle but important distinction to be made there.
Low-level disruption, as you said,
teachers worry about chair chuckers but that is relatively rare
demographically.
Low-level disruption is the Kryptonite of the classroom.
It is the drip drip effect, it carves a ravine,
it carves a valley from a mountain over time.
And it will destroy teachers.
And the reason why it's so difficult to deal with
is because it seems like it's not really that big a deal.
I don't need to deal with it because it's just somebody humming
or rocking on their chair or whatever's disrupting their education
and that's how I define bad behaviour -
disrupting the education of the classroom.
Are there any particular examples of low-level disruption
that you've found especially annoying?
Pen clicking.
Imitating a Scottish accent.
Badly. I don't mind if it's done well.
One quite topical question that's just arrived is
'How do we avoid behaviour problems
when the raise in participation age kicks in?'
A bit of a repeat of what happened about 30 years ago
where suddenly teachers found themselves
with pupils who were a few years older.
If students are having to stay on until 18, 19,
what does that mean for teachers
and will that affect your behaviour strategies?
I would say that the behaviour strategies in essence
from primary school up to school-leaving age,
no matter what age it is, are relatively similar.
I mean the basic skeleton of it.
As they get older, obviously with, for instance, A level pupils,
you allow them much more managed freedom, I would call it,
because that's a natural part of growing up
by allowing them to perhaps take off the stabilisers
and use their tricycles by themselves.
But the basic fundamental is still exactly the same.
You tell them what you expect of them and then you call them out on it
when it doesn't happen.
And as children get older, what a lot of teachers do is
they think, 'They're A level kids, I can't keep them behind.'
or, 'I can't call home,'
because they're wearing trainers and jeans
and they call me 'man' and 'bruv'.
And it's all exactly the same.
Isn't there a risk that if you treat them like primary school pupils
they'll react to that?
You treat them like young adults and you can respond to that.
They still need you to be an adult. This is the thing people forget.
I still regard them as being, not childish, but young adults.
Not adults, young adults.
And they're getting there with our help.
And when we talked about the consequences,
positive reinforcement just does not go away.
For goodness sake, you give a sticker to a 17 year old
and they still...
If you started awarding stickers to Tom and I now
both of us would think that's pathetic.
And afterwards we would be...
At this point, I'd be giving you both gold stars.
We haven't earned it yet.
I should take another two questions from the audience.
This question here, please.
We'll just wait for your microphone to arrive.
Hi, I'm Sarah. I work for Teach First
and I'm a former teacher.
At my former school they are introducing something called
restorative practice, I don't know if you've heard of it.
They're rolling it out quite a lot in Hull at the moment
and it involves using other pupils to facilitate discussions
between children who've been disruptive.
I was just wondering if you thought there was any scope
for investing in that across the country?
My feelings on restorative justice are this:
If it's done in a very well-organised system
where people absolutely understand the process,
where people are thoroughly trained
within the way that restorative justice works
and if there is a real sense that the restorative justice process
is actually a voluntary process
that, for example, the victim and the bully can go through,
if there's a real understanding and underpinning and training of it
then it can be effective.
Where I get nervous is where people take on restorative justice
in a piecemeal way.
A few years ago I used to do some work with an anti-bullying charity,
Kidscape, and one of the things they said is we quite often got cases
where restorative justice has gone horribly wrong
and effectively a bullied child and a bully
were placed in the same classroom.
So restorative justice is proven to be excellent
but there has to be a real commitment from the school
and the people within it and the leaders within the school
to make sure that it works.
If I can just add to that.
We're echoing each other a lot, I do apologise.
I've seen this work really badly in schools.
And one of the things I get on the behaviour forums is
often people say, 'I've been told to use this
and it's gone horribly wrong. What am I doing wrong?'
My answer is you're doing nothing wrong.
Every strategy is an arrow in your quiver.
You use the strategy that's appropriate.
If you've got, for instance, two girls who are best friends
and they've fallen out and they've had a fight,
restorative justice is a very effective way
to get them back together because it makes them talk to each other,
and maybe get the families involved, whatever's required.
If you get a situation where the school adopts, for instance,
a restorative justice only approach,
you may as well say we're using a gold star only approach
and see what problems that leads to as well.
I think in terms of bullying it can be disastrous.
It's a terribly strategy sometimes. Use it sometimes but in its place.
I would keep it really firmly on a leash.
Thank you for that question.
One we've had from several teachers on Facebook
was, 'Do you think avoiding creative lessons
is an effective way to maintain good behaviour?'
Should your lessons be very drab and straitjacketed?
That way you'll be able to guarantee you can control the class.
I think it's a risky strategy in the long term.
I think there's a real temptation
for teachers when they're working in a school with challenging kids,
when they've got a class who's very twitchy,
that there's a race to the bottom.
And in the end you think the way to contain these kids
is to get them through the door, plonk a work sheet in front of them,
get their heads down and keep them going.
Actually, in the longer term...
And I worked in a school where that seemed to be
the one and only behaviour management strategy.
If you end up doing that and you end up stop being creative
and stop being interesting and stop making lessons exciting,
in the end you pay a heavy price.
I think creative is another very nebulous concept
and you have to be careful how it's used.
What I usually say to teachers who are struggling
with very difficult classes who are openly confrontational,
is I usually say for a while, for a short time, park the group work.
Park the fun stuff, park the dancing bears and holograms
and get back to something which is very structured
with short-term goals, easily-achieved goals
but then increasing challenge, and so on.
Emphasising structure is enormously useful as a behavioural tool
in the right situation.
But creativity is a very vague concept.
It can mean lots of things.
Creativity should be something which is threaded through
and integral to your entire teaching career
so it's a difficult thing to remove entirely.
Some of the broader questions we've had
are about whether you think behaviour itself really has got worse
over the past 20 years or so.
I mentioned the attitude of parents before,
but do you think it's roughly stayed the same?
The survey from the Department this week found that only 6%
of the teachers who responded
thought there was poor behaviour in their classes
which would actually surprise quite a lot of people.
It's very difficult. I've taught for 10 years
so what do I know that's happened in 10 years
in the schools to which I've been exposed to?
I would say in those 10 years behaviour has been fairly constant
in the schools that I've been exposed to.
When it comes to data like that I'm always deeply suspicious
because you've got a massive response bias
and also what does bad behaviour mean and who quantifies it?
And unfortunately, I would say
that a mistake has often been made in the past.
The people who tend to collect behaviour data
often have a vested interest
in it being skewed towards a certain end of the spectrum,
if I could be polite about it.
That includes schools, it includes teachers who don't report,
it includes people higher up in the Department.
There's lots of different ways in which this can be skewed.
So I think that's a different issue and a bigger issue to tackle.
I would broadly say that in the last, say, 50 years
of Western, European style democracies
we've seen what Frank Furedi calls a crisis of adult authority.
Which is to say that deference and authoritarian deference
has eroded a great deal.
You no longer get people tipping their hat to you
because you're a teacher. That's gone. Forget it. It's over.
I'm not saying you have to earn it either.
What I'm saying is you have to build up the authority
with children these days.
Do you think we exaggerate the problem of behaviour in schools?
The way I see it is generally the trajectory of behaviour
is actually that things have got better than they were.
When I first started teaching
you go to some schools and there were real no-go areas.
I went into a school quite near here and a teacher said to me,
'I wouldn't really go down that corridor at lunchtime.'
We've moved on from there.
I think generally most of the behaviour most of the time
in most of the schools is pretty good.
I do think there are a group of children who are very anxious,
who are very damaged, who are perhaps more violent, more aggressive
than they used to be.
And I think that that group has probably got bigger
in the last few years.
I think the general trend of behaviour in our schools,
and I think that's because of the expertise of teachers has improved,
and I think the philosophy of managing behaviour has improved
since I first started teaching, means that behaviour is better.
Whether the behaviour that children coming in with is any better
I wouldn't be sure about.
But teachers, I think, are doing a better job.
We've only got a few minutes left
so I'll try and fit in as many questions as possible.
One question is, 'Would banning mobile phones in schools help?'
Up to local headteachers, a local decision.
You wouldn't implement a nationwide ban?
Nationwide, no way. Some schools like having mobile phones,
they like getting...
I mean, I was in a lesson the other day,
it was a DT lesson and they got all their phones out
to take a photograph of the work they were doing,
put it back in their pockets
and it didn't cause any disruption whatsoever.
Completely fine. Didn't have a problem with that.
If that's what the school wants to do, that's fine.
In some schools that works absolutely fine,
in other schools it's a complete disaster
because it's an internal distraction for them
so I think schools should be allowed
to make up their own policy on that one.
The next one is a scenario question.
I think this has come from Leanne Kathleen-Muir.
It's the start of term,
you're unsure of the names of the people in your class,
so how do you effectively apply consequences?
This sounds like the same situation supply teachers find themselves in.
One of the things you do is first of all you sit them down
in the order that you want them sat in, very quick.
You ask them to get their books out,
you ask them to get their planners out, if needs be.
If it's someone you've just seen do something in the school
and you don't know who it is,
you take a snapshot inside your head
and you find someone who does know who it is.
But the important thing is you follow up.
If it takes you a week or a day, you follow up
and you let them know you will never give up
until you find out who they are.
And you can normally find one of the other kids to grass them up.
The Huggy Bear of the school.
Yeah, I'd say that.
When I first started teaching I worked as a supply teacher.
My aim was always to know all the names of the kids -
this is primary, I was only teaching one class -
to know all the names of the kids by morning break time.
So that for the rest of the day they'd all get called by their names.
Did you have any tricks for learning them?
Yeah, I used to get them on the carpet at the beginning of the lesson
and we'd just play a game with me remembering their names.
It was all interactive and entertaining.
On policies, one question we've had is,
'How often in your average school day
do you find yourself implementing the behaviour policy?'
I can answer that one quite easily.
Behaviour policy isn't something that happens when a child misbehaves.
Behaviour policy is something
that happens constantly throughout your teaching.
So it should be an integral part of the practice.
I would say in my school behaviour policy is lived all day, every day
- by all the staff. - That's what I meant to say.
That's the phrase I wanted to use.
- So it's every lesson? - Yeah.
Excellent.
One gender related question which is,
'Do you think punishing boys and girls in different ways
is appropriate?'
Making boys wear girls' clothes or something?
I imagine it's whether you need different types of sanctions.
Do you shout more at boys?
My feeling with this is that what you don't want
is an unintended consequence from a sanction.
And the danger is actually...
The point of any sanction... What I do now, the sanction I impose
is going to make the behaviour less likely to happen next time.
So what you have to make sure when you're giving a sanction,
is there an unintended consequence
that will actually encourage the child to behave like that again?
Thank you.
And if you had one final tip for all the teachers out there
on the best way to handle behaviour, what would that one tip be?
Seating plan.
Routines, routines, routines.
Than you very much for that.
I'm afraid we'll have to draw it to a close there.
You can carry on asking questions to Tom
on the behaviour website of the TES.
He will be on there most days checking questions.
And Charlie Taylor's excellent checklist for schools
as well as his reports on attendance and on alternative provision
can be found on the Department website.
It only remains for me to get everyone to thank our panellists.