What I find telling about the school behaviour debate is the differing ways the opposing sides construct it.
Let me be clear: everyone should have a voice in this discussion because everyone is affected. We should hear from activists, campaigners, academics and opinion writers because what happens in our schools is everybody’s business.
We should also hear from teachers, although we often do not due to restrictive media and social media policies. This means that when we do hear something approaching the voice of teachers — an angle that feels familiar from staffroom discussions — it can come as a bit of a shock.
Exhibit A is the recent article by Jenna Price in the Sydney Morning Herald — a polemic by any standard. It personally attacks Tom Bennett, the UKs school behaviour adviser as ‘Tory Tom’ and irrelevantly throws in the non-fact that he is a ‘former nightclub bouncer’ — he used to manage nightclubs.
Since I criticised the piece, it appears the editors have contacted Tom and, as a result, made a small change. The claim that, “[Bennett] burnishes zero tolerance and suspensions, even though we know they don’t work,” has been replaced with the clunky, “[Bennett] burnishes very, very low tolerance and suspensions, even though we know they don’t work.”
More significantly, the Sydney Morning Herald has now given Bennett a right-of-reply opinion piece, published today.
I recommend reading Bennett’s piece. What’s immediately striking about it is that he makes his case without personally attacking anyone. The main thrust of his argument is that school behaviour must not be something we just react to, we need to plan for it and we need to teach it. If we do not, it is disadvantaged students who suffer most, including being more likely to be suspended or expelled because we did not address issues early enough.
As Bennett explains:
“[in England] We revised the behaviour guidance given to schools on how to support mental health, focusing on what schools could actually do. We rewrote the behaviour guidance for schools to de-escalate behaviour before it occurred, and to reduce the need to sanction or suspend – while simultaneously upholding the right and necessity of schools to do so when necessary.“
And of course, it is possible to disagree with Bennett’s argument. There are activists who will assert that children with disabilities and disorders lack agency over their behaviour and that poor behaviour is a sign of some underlying need being unmet. If this is the belief, teaching pro social behaviours to these students would be an impossibility.
And there are those who would argue that what school teachers consider pro social behaviours are actually defined by white supremacy culture and are an expression of colonisation. Rather than teach students society’s rules, we need to change society.
I think it’s worth putting these arguments out there without the hyperbole and personal attacks, so that the public are aware of these differing perspectives.
I also think there are aspects of these differences that are unresolvable because they reflect incompatible world views. This is why I believe in school choice. I believe parents should have the right to choose to send their children to a school informed by Bennett’s ideas or a school more closely aligned with Price’s.
Although that would require a lot of people who currently just talk about this stuff to roll their sleeves up and build something.
Isn’t the unmet need argument that we should meet the need and then we will get the desired pro social behaviour? There can be any combination three cases - a disability, an unmet need, a lack of adult behaviour management. Is someone arguing that this means a lack of pro social behaviour should be lived with?