Dancing around the behaviour crisis

My submission to the inquiry into teach shortages in New South Wales

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

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There are several factors that influence teacher recruitment and retention. In this submission, I will focus on a highly significant one that is often overlooked.

When the results of the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) came rolling in during December 2019, there was justifiable concern about the continued decline in performance of Australian 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science. Yet this was not the whole story. PISA also conducted a survey of students’ experiences of school (OECD, 2019). As part of this survey, students were asked how often they encountered issues in their classrooms such as ‘noise and disorder’ or ‘the teacher has to wait a long time for students to quiet down’. From this, researchers constructed an ‘index of disciplinary climate’ and ranked countries from those with the best to those with the worst disciplinary climates. In 2018, of 76 countries surveyed, Australia ranked 69. In comparison, the United States ranked 28 and the United Kingdom, 24. New Zealand, ranked 66, was the only other major anglophone country at the same end of the ladder as Australia.

It is tempting to dismiss this as a chance result, but it is not. In the previous 2015 round of PISA, Australia ranked 63 out of 68 countries on disciplinary climate (OECD, 2016). There has been a crisis of behaviour in Australian classrooms for at least the last seven years.

We may therefore assume there would be a concerted focus on researching ways to improve the climate in Australian classrooms. And yet, when discussed at all, researchers and commentators tend to dance around the issue. Why? I will return to this question later.

We should bear in mind this squeamishness about naming the problem when we read articles on teacher recruitment and retention that focus on push factors such as stress and workload (Gundlach & Slemp, 2022; Southall et al., 2022). What could be causing this stress and what could be causing this workload? Part of the answer is linked to classroom behaviour and the ways that we attempt to manage it in Australian schools.

For example, a 2021 survey of 570 Australian teachers conducted by The NEiTA Foundation and the Australian College of Educators (ACE) notes that:

“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”