If you tolerate this then your children will be next

Exploring the tension between compassion, consistency, and the limits of what schools should tolerate

If you’re going to manage children’s behaviour you need a healthy balance of carrot and stick. Positive reinforcement is great, but at some point children confront us with behaviour that requires sanctioning. After many years of the education system tolerating woefully low standards of behaviour (we all have our particular horror stories) the pendulum has swung to the right with more and more schools are adopting a culture in which any infringements of school rules are met with non-negotiable sanctions, often permanent exclusion.

Zero tolerance systems, especially those popularised in the US during the 1990s and 2000s, offer a cautionary tale. Originally intended to create safe, orderly environments by applying fixed consequences to specific infractions - no exceptions, no excuses - they quickly revealed their flaws. Instead of fostering consistency, they bred absurdity: children suspended for bringing paring knives to cut fruit, or for making finger guns in the playground. Disproportionate exclusions became the norm, disproportionately affecting marginalised students and feeding what’s been called the ‘school-to-prison pipeline.’ By removing discretion, zero tolerance removed judgement, meting out the same punishments for lateness as for violence and treating mischief the same as malice. And when consequences are automatically applied, they often become both cruel and ineffective. Schools that rely on blanket sanctions tend to alienate the very children they most need to reach.

Arguably the context is quite different in the UK where the ‘no excuses’ approach has been far more about intolerance of so-called ‘low-level disruption’. But here’s the thing: there really isn’t all that much evidence available, and what there is seems to contradict the effectiveness of zero-tolerance policies.

The goal of an effective disciplinary system should be to ensure a safe school climate, while avoiding policies and practices that reduce students’ opportunity to learn.

Despite the strongly intuitive assumption that orderly classrooms will result in better learning, research indicates a negative relationship between the use of school suspension and expulsion and academic achievement across the whole school, even when controlling for demographics such as socioeconomic status. Why on earth should that be the case?

It turns out that strictly adhering to a zero-tolerance policy ignores the normal adolescent psychological and biological development. Professor of Neurology, Frances E. Jensen, explains the science in The Teenage Brain: as we develop, synaptic connections between parts of the brain are myelinated in a gradual process which moves gradually from the brain stem to the frontal lobes. By adolescence, the brain is only about 80 per cent of the way to maturity. That 20 per cent gap, where the wiring is thinnest, goes some way toward explaining teenage stereotypes: mood swings, irritability and impulsiveness; an inability to focus, follow through, and connect with adults; and their temptations to use drugs and alcohol and to engage in other risky behaviour.

This immaturity is also psychological. As any secondary school teacher will know, your average teenager is subject to peer pressure, takes unnecessary risks, doesn’t think about consequences and finds self-control tricky. But if this just part of normal development then does this make punitive behaviour policies unreasonable? According to some psychologists, certain characteristics of secondary schools are often at odds with the developmental challenges of adolescence, including the need for “close peer relationships, autonomy, support from adults other than one’s parents, identity negotiation, and academic self-efficacy.”¹ No one’s suggesting some students don’t make very poor choices, but if teenagers are being punished for being, well, teenagers, isn’t that a bit absurd?

If we accept that zero tolerance is too much, the implication, of course, is that we ought to tolerate some poor behaviour, but how much? As Edmund Burke said, “There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue”² but where is this limit? I don’t think anyone would be prepared to argue that we should tolerate 100%, so is 50% acceptable? What about 25%, or perhaps 10%?

Clearly, having a discussion about the percentage of poor behaviour which ought to be tolerated in schools is absurd. Maybe we’d be better off debating whether some kinds of poor behaviour are just ‘high spirits’? The trouble with this is that it’s devilishly difficult to distinguish between good-humoured banter and bullying. What might to some look like ‘letting off steam,’ to others feels like inhabiting a climate of intimidation and fear.

Just as senior leaders work in a very different school to their more junior colleagues³, the experience of teachers and students, in the same school, can be hugely different. And, of course, it follows that the experiences of children within the same school varies enormously also. Some children may thrive on a tide of rufty-tufty boisterousness. Some children can get the most out of lessons where shouting the loudest gets the most attention. Some children are fortunate enough to have the resources not to need school nearly as much as some of their less privileged peers and can succeed despite unruly classroom environments.

One issue is the attitude of some parents – often middle class, advantaged parents – who actively work against their children’s schools being safe, orderly institutions. Of course parents ought to support their children, but some undermine teachers at every turn and take their children’s part to an unhelpful degree. As a parent, I always strove to support my children’s school’s right not to accept excuses for bad behaviour. Of course, as I’ve argued before, there are usually reasons for such behaviour (and some of these reasons may even be good ones) but these reasons, heartbreaking though they may be, are not an excuse to break the rules. But I’m not sure most of the bad behaviour in schools can be laid at the feet of the most disadvantaged. In my experience, badly behaved children from more affluent backgrounds often present more of a problem.

The late comedian and Radio 4 panelist, Jeremy Hardy’s routine on ‘bright children‘ gets to the heart of the matter: middle class parents routinely excuse their children’s terrible behaviour because they’re “so bright”:

That’s why they’re doing so badly at school, because they’re so bright. Teachers don’t understand their answers, you see, because they’re so bright. The reason they misbehave in the classroom is because they’re bored, because they’re so bright. They’re not being stretched. Hermione’s so bright and that’s why she misbehaves; she’s so much brighter than the other children. That’s why she sets fire to them, I think.