Australia's classroom behaviour crisis

My submission to the Australian Senate's inquiry into, "The issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms."

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

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Below is the text of my submission to the the Australian Senate.

Data from the OECD and from Australian surveys of teachers demonstrates that we have a behaviour crisis in Australian classrooms. Many of those in authority in Australian education subscribe to bad ideas which prevent us from naming or tackling the problem. Some conflate the issue with one of students with disabilities. We need to overcome this reticence and we need to avoid calls for introducing simplistic top-down solutions. Better training for teachers in classroom management is part of the solution but not all of it. Instead, we need to collect better data so we can identify best practice and we need to deal with behaviour at a whole-school level. Teaching more children to read would also help.

The problem

Australian classrooms have been in crisis for years and nobody has taken responsibility. It is therefore encouraging to see the Australian Senate make it a priority.

The terms of reference of this inquiry write of the ‘declining ranking’ of Australia in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) index of disciplinary climate — an index based on the perceptions of 15-year-old students about disruption in Australian classrooms. While technically correct to state our ranking is declining, a ranking gives a misleading picture due to the larger number of states and jurisdictions that participated in this survey in 2018 compared to 2015. In 2018, Australia finished 69 out of 76 jurisdictions* (OECD, 2019). Similarly, in 2015, we finished 63 out of 68 (OECD, 2016). This is a roughly consistent position and perhaps surprisingly so when we consider that the 2015 survey asked about experiences in science classes and the 2018 survey asked about experiences in English classes.

Worrying though this data is, it was collected in a period prior to the recent COVID-19 pandemic — a major disruption that plausibly imposed an additional impact on Australian classrooms. Hard data is difficult to find after 2018, but one instrument does suggest a decline since the pandemic began.

Researchers associated with Monash University surveyed a sample of teachers before the pandemic (Heffernan et al., 2019) and then three years later (Longmuir et al., 2022), using the same instrument. During this time, the number of teachers who reported they feel unsafe at work rose from around a fifth to around a quarter, with the majority of those responding indicating students as a source of their concerns. A fifth of teachers feeling unsafe at work is worrying. A quarter is more worrying still, particularly given the current context of an acute teacher shortage (Kidson, 2022).

Some of the anecdotal feedback from teachers in these surveys is deeply troubling. For instance, in 2019, one respondent wrote:

“I’ve had to confiscate knives from students and I’ve been punched in the stomach while pregnant by a student.”

In the 2022 follow-up, a respondent states:

“I have been assaulted by a student which involved both physical, sexual and emotional attacks for an extended period of time. Often, I have to make a decision on if I should protect students from other students and put myself at physical risk. All advice is to never do this which means the psychological guilt of not protecting an innocent child comes into play.”

We can triangulate the findings of the Monash surveys with that of a similar survey conducted in 2021 by The NEiTA Foundation:

“Behaviour management was… frequently nominated by teachers as the greatest challenge they face. Teachers explained that just a small minority of disruptive students can have a large and negative impact on the majority, and that managing these behaviours takes even further time away from teaching. Sixty-eight per cent of teachers indicated that they spend more than 10% of their day managing individual student behavioural issues. Seventeen per cent said that this consumes over half their day”

In such a context, it is difficult to argue that there is no problem to address — that there is nothing to see here. And yet, in an odd way, many of those with power do precisely this. For instance, Senator Penny Allman-Payne has suggested that mention in the inquiry terms of reference of the OECD index is ‘problematic’, as is the the mention of ‘teachers’ views . Presumably, this would problematise the views of teachers as expressed in the Monash and NEiTA surveys (Christian, 2022). Allman-Payne is not alone in such opinions and they fit within a wider framework of ideas.