You may not have realised it from some of the coverage, but the department for education’s Behaviour Hubs programme has been an encouraging success. Amid a widely accepted trend of worsening behaviour across the country, we would do well to learn its lessons.
Worthing High School has never claimed to be anything other than a ‘normal’ mixed comprehensive school. We’re a coastal school with above average levels of SEND.
Since 2021, however, we’ve had the privilege of being a lead school for the Behaviour Hubs programme. In that time, we’ve worked with ten schools throughout the southeast across local authorities including Eastbourne, Kent, Berkshire, Hampshire, Surrey and West Sussex to name a few.
These schools operate in a variety of contexts and require different levels of intervention and support. But what has been really clear from all the interactions we’ve had with staff and pupils is that the schools involved have made significant improvements.
This is borne out through action plan audits, reviews and surveys. The support and challenge schools received led to better consistency in their approaches to teaching and learning, better behaviour in and out of classrooms and greater staff engagement.
Of course, the interim report published last week isn’t without caveats. For example, some of the headline findings were not vastly different from the project’s baseline data.
But reports focusing on pupils’ perceptions that behaviour had worsened in these schools, as was the case in these pages last week, don’t do the hubs programme justice. Consider, for example, that staff ratings of pupils’ behaviour as positive went from 44 to 49 per cent, against students’ rating falling by 2 per cent.
Our experience tells us that when schools join the programme, the same happens initially as happens with any policy shift or change in a school. If leaders carry out an action plan based on an honest audit and the whole staff team administer the action plan consistently, there will always be some level of resistance.
There will always be some level of resistance
When it comes to behaviour, that push-back is most likely to come from those pupils whose are already present the school with challenges.
So we were not surprised to see that pupils’ perceptions differed from staff’s. What any experienced school leader would infer from that (and as we have seen in the schools we have worked with) is that things are beginning to change.
Consistent application of policies, ensuring everyone is doing the same thing at the same time with the same levels of consequence will deliver the desired shift over time.
Yes, initial challenges can be significant, but by the end of the project, pupils, staff, families and communities can see the difference a robust behaviour policy makes.
Robust here doesn’t mean that the approach is just about negative sanctions. It’s at least equally about looking at how praise and rewards support the school in achieving a positive learning culture.
Nor is it a silver bullet strategy. Rather, it is a raft of strategies that are consistently and rigorously applied by all staff and pupils.
And this isn’t a one-way system either. The programme has allowed my own school to reflect on its own practices, its behaviours and its attitudes and made us much stronger and more consistent. Importantly, it has improved our ability to work with and support others too, and to share that expertise. This can only benefit partnership work in the round.
It’s clear that behaviour in our schools is not going to change overnight. However, the DFE programme has made a significant impact for all of the 663 schools that took part. Like many of my colleagues who were involved, I sincerely hope that it will find a way to continue in the future.
If we want to retain the best leaders, teachers and support staff, and if we want to create better learning environments for all, we must help those schools which are struggling to achieve that goal.
In that effort, the Behaviour Hub model has shown that working in partnership for meaningful and qualified support works – no matter what the headlines say.
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