Clear direction setting sits at the heart of effective leadership. As I outlined in a previous piece, effective leaders know where they want to go, what to focus on and how to take people with them.
In August 2020, Berwickshire High School staff agreed that the number one priority should be the continuous improvement of teaching and learning. We focused time and resources on the development of four areas, summarised by the acronym “Pace”: pedagogy, attainment, curriculum and ethos.
This article explores some of the specific initiatives relating to the E in Pace, ethos, which underpins everything.
Serious behaviour issues
Jump back to Berwickshire High School in 2019-20 and there were serious issues with student behaviour. While most students were generally well-behaved, the disruptive behaviour of a significant minority was having a seriously detrimental impact on ethos and the learning environment for everyone.
For example, it wasn’t uncommon for students to be roaming corridors during lesson time and swearing at staff. Setting off the fire alarm was an almost weekly occurrence (sometimes multiple times a week, including during exams).
In a focus group with students, I was told about times when they had effectively been “held hostage” in classrooms because teachers felt the need to lock doors as a result of the disruption in corridors.
Walk into Berwickshire High School today and the picture couldn’t be more different. Corridors are calm and classrooms are generally well-ordered and purposeful. Visitors often ask, “Where are all the students?”, given the peaceful environment across the school.
Most importantly, students and staff report that they feel safe and happy.
In their reinspection visit, inspectors reported: “With strong and supportive leadership from the headteacher, all senior leaders are working effectively with young people and staff to set clear expectations for learning and behaviour…The school environment now offers a calm and orderly context for young people’s learning.”
The inspectors added: “Staff are highly visible and approachable, and almost all young people demonstrate maturity, respect and courtesy in classes, social areas, and outside the school. Staff and young people report that the school is a more pleasant and rewarding place to learn and that they feel safer.”
So, what has changed? What did we do to bring about such a transformation? This article outlines five initiatives that have been pivotal.
1. Consequences
As hard as it might be to believe for many, Berwickshire High had no formal system of consequences beyond warnings, reprimands and restorative conversations. While such approaches can and do work in many instances, sometimes there is a need for consequences that are more formal, such as lunchtime and after-school detention, and temporary internal and external exclusion.
An example might be if a student swears at a member of staff: introducing more formal systems of consequence has had an immediate, positive impact on student behaviour, which continues today. It is now very rare that a student would swear at a member of staff.
2. Your classroom, your rules
Like many schools across Scotland, Berwickshire High had a whole-school policy that made clear the actions staff were allowed - and not allowed - to take to manage behaviour in their classrooms.
For example: issue a first warning, then a second warning. However, I would argue that while consistent expectations and rules for students across a school are important (such as lining up quietly outside classrooms), I don’t believe such consistency is required when it comes to the actions teachers can take.
If, for instance, a student knows that a teacher isn’t allowed to use “sanction X” until there have been at least two warnings, this disempowers the teacher and creates the unnecessary scenario whereby a student can say: “You’re not allowed to do that.”
It is right that teachers should be expected to manage behaviour in their classrooms (within reason - access to external support should also be available if required) but to do that effectively, teachers should be empowered to set their own rules. From August 2020, this is the approach we took.
3. Professional development
To help support teachers with the management of behaviour in their classrooms, we established a voluntary professional development programme that focused on behaviour management skills, using shared reading, discussion and workshops. Staff feedback about the impact on their practice has been extremely positive.
4. Mobile phones
In August 2020, Berwickshire High School became one of the first state schools in Scotland (perhaps the first) to effectively ban the use of mobile phones in school.
While students are allowed to bring their phones to school, the rule is that these aren’t allowed to be seen, heard or used in the building. That includes during transitions between lessons and at break and lunchtimes. If students wish to use their phones during these times, they can do so outside.
More than four years on, this policy continues to be extremely effective. If you visit the school, you will find students talking to each other in corridors and social areas, not staring at their mobile phone screens.
5. Recognition of positives
Proportionate consequences are important, but so too are systems that recognise positives, including effort and achievement. With that in mind, Berwickshire High School introduced a variety of formal approaches that went beyond informal recognition (such as verbal praise).
These included a strengthened house-points system, “in recognition” cards that are sent home by teachers - to recognise particularly high standards of effort, achievement or something special a student has done - and use of our weekly bulletin to highlight student achievements in the classroom and beyond.
The approach Berwickshire High School took to resetting standards of student behaviour was bold and transformative. The positive impact on ethos was immediate and continues to pay off today.
Hopefully, this article proves useful to any school interested in what can be achieved through a focus on the right things, in the right way.
Secondary headteacher Bruce Robertson is the director of Next Level Educational and author of Power Up Your Pedagogy and the three books in a series titled The Teaching Delusion. He is on a one-year career break from his role as headteacher of Berwickshire High School
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