Why behaviour matters
And why I am sceptical about school shaming
I was 25 when I became head of science at a ‘school facing challenging circumstances’ in West London. I had worked there for a term and only after my appointment, as deputy to the head of science, did I find out she planned to leave.
What did the official designation of facing challenging circumstances mean? Essentially, the school was unsafe. I taught in a classroom on the ground floor of a crumbling science block and one issue I had was disruptions and interruptions. This was exacerbated by a system of a split lunch that was intended to stagger use of the small canteen. This was not based on student age but on the vagaries of the timetable, enabling students who should have been in class to hide among those legitimately on lunch.
One day, one such a group of students were hanging around outside the fire door that led out from my classroom. I opened the door to move them along and a heavy metal retort stand from the classroom above fell a few centimetres in front of my face. Although I tried, I never found out who had thrown it out the window.
When a masked student threw a lump of ice at one of my teachers—who ducked just in time, causing it to shatter on the whiteboard—I did manage to find out who did it. Unusually, the deputy principal backed me and took the issue to the principal who dismissed it as kids throwing snowballs. Lighten up.
There were literal bin fires and constant low level anxiety among teachers and students. But for all the dangerous events that took place, general disruption was far more frequent. As an example, during split lunch, a student would fling my classroom door open and shout at the class, ‘Where’s that brer?’ He knew it mattered little if I found out who he was. Some students found it funny. Most stared blankly, apathetic as they watched minutes of their precious education drain away. And it was precious. A large proportion of my students were refugees from Kosovo and Afghanistan and they just wanted to learn. I knew this because, in quiet moments, they would talk to me about it and their frustrations. Yet this was the deal they had been given.
I was able to build relationships with some kids and once they knew me, they could be quite cooperative. The police were frequent visitors at the end of the school day and the difference with which the kids treated them and us, their teachers, was vast. Part of that relationship building was down to a—patchy—application of discipline. I had inherited a system of science department detentions. It was no good just setting these, we had to take turns to meet a child at their final class of the day and escort them. Even then, some would refuse and so I would find myself phoning parents and asking them to bring their child back. Sometimes, this worked and once the students knew you cared enough to follow through, the relationship would often transform for the better. Kids would open up. They seemed more trusting. But when it didn’t work, there was nowhere else to go.
And kids were always having their items ‘jacked’. In other words, an older and bigger student would demand they hand over an item such as a phone or their new trainers. Sometimes we found out about this but mostly we didn’t.
When a new principal arrived, he asked me what needed to be done. I wasn’t as focused on teaching methods or curriculum back then. It would have been irrelevant. I told him we needed a whole-school behaviour policy. He agreed and despite it not being quite as extensive as I proposed, it made a huge difference. Subjectively, kids were happier and outcomes in GCSEs soared. Yes, these are linked.
I was reminded of that school when I visited Michaela Community School in West London last year. It serves a similar community. It is supposedly very strict, with lots of rules, but I saw not a single reprimand or sanction issued the whole time I was there. Instead, it struck me as a happy place with warm teacher-student relationships. When I asked my guides how it compared to their primary schools, they agreed it was much better, with one explaining there was ‘no bullying’ at Michaela.
And yet to create and run a school like Michaela requires guts and determination. There was a concerted campaign against it opening and there have been periodic press campaigns against it since, all by people who don’t think this is what school should be. It doesn’t fit their romantic ideology. They don’t understand that the alternative is not some creative hippy collective, but the school I worked at back in the day.
And this is the context I bring to stories about Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy (MVPA). Anna Fazackerley, a reporter for The Observer in the UK with an eye for fake news, has written a classic school shaming piece. These are characterised by a whole lot of lurid allegations — first years were ‘screamed at’—being levied that the school, for reasons of student confidentiality, cannot respond to specifically. All the school can do is make some general statement at the end.
In this case, responding to the shopping list of allegations, MVPA note, “We have… had external reviews by [schools inspectorate] Ofsted and the local authority – in none of these were any concerns raised.” I am in possession of no evidence either way and if the school is in breach of its duties then it should be held to account. However, if Ofsted and the local authority have both investigated and found nothing, that’s pretty compelling.
Warwick Mansell, a campaigning education journalist, unwittingly revealed that this has been going on for some time. On Twitter/X, he pointed to a similar shaming story about the school in MyLondon, but didn’t initially realise it was from 2022.
This time, a local primary school headteacher takes aim. Again, we get the sense that this headteacher doesn’t approve of the MVPA model. He suggests that it actively discourages enrolments from children with special educational needs and disabilities and notes, rather unhelpfully, that he also discourages such children from enrolling there.
Nevertheless, MVPA note in the response that, “Mossbourne schools have the highest proportion of students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in the Borough of Hackney.”
It’s hard to fathom, but I get the sense that MVPA has to respond to many such allegations. That just goes with the territory of being the wrong kind of school. Leaders who want to run good schools in challenging circumstances need to expect this.
Notably, both articles have to admit that the children at MVPA obtain very good GCSE results. And based on my own experience, I bet they’re generally pretty happy, too.
If you have enjoyed this post and especially if you have shared it with others, you really should become a paid subscriber to Filling the Pail. As a Pailer, you will have full access to all my exclusive Curios posts, keeping you up-to-date with the most important news in the world of education, as well as the entire back catalogue of posts. You can also comment on posts and let me know what you are thinking. At just $5 AUD per month or $50 for a year, a subscription to Filling the Pail costs far less than it should, given the hours that go into writing it, but you will help me to do a few nice things for my family. A group subscription is a great way to share this knowledge around your workplace, guilt free, and right now, there is a 20% discount.
Although my comment here may be a tad tangential to your thesis, I hope you and your readers find it relevant.
Two points:
(1) I sometimes hear educators (and lay people, too) assert that it is necessary to "get behavior under control" before it is possible to teach content and skills. I want to observe that effectively teaching content and skills is a powerful behavior management tool. When teacher engage students in learning activities, the level of misbehavior decreases. In addition, as students who are engaged in learning activities find themselves succeeding, they develop the idea that they *are* capable...they have increased self-evaluations, they're happier, and they're more eager to take on new and challenging tasks. Then, like the proverbial snowball on a slope, their behavior becomes even more student-like (i.e., appropriate).
(2) Educators should be *teaching* appropriate behavior.Just as we teach tool skills such as reading and content such as history, so too should we teach appropriate student behavior. This is a foundational concept in many school-wide behavior systems such as Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports or Safe and Civil Schools. Don't expect the students to lick appropriate behavior off the grass; show them what it looks like, have them to practice it, and ensure that behaving appropriately causes rewarding consequences to occur.
Okay, thanks for the opportunity to spout off...I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.