Research School Network: Making your Behaviour Policy Succeed


Making your Behaviour Policy Succeed

by Derby Research School
on the

Making your Behaviour Policy Succeed’ Blog by Bradford Research School – the original can be accessed here.


The EEF recently published its most recent recommendation on Improving Behaviour in Schools. Recommendation 6 is seemingly simple: Consistency is Key. But this simple recommendation is hard to get right, and is often where schools fall down when it comes to implementing an effective behaviour policy. All successful policies are different in detail, but they are successful because they are implemented well. When policies fail, the repercussions are significant. So, what should we consider if we want to implement a behaviour strategy successfully?

Treat the implementation of a behaviour policy as a process

The launch of a behaviour policy is not a single event. It’s a process and occurs in several stages. The planning stage is crucial and such an important aspect of the school should be a result of careful consideration well before the launch’. And when this happens, it is not over. Setbacks and barriers are natural features of any implementation, and we should be ready for these in a behaviour policy. The planning stage can preempt these, but it is crucial that we are able to adapt. The EEF suggest the following questions to consider in their Implementation Guidance Report:

Do we implement changes across the school in a structured and staged manner?
Is adequate time and care taken when preparing for implementation?
Are there opportunities to make fewer, but more strategic, implementation decisions and pursue these with greater effort?
Are there less effective practices that can be stopped to free up time and resources?

Overcommunicate the active ingredients’

Whatever the policy, it will fail if it is not followed with fidelity – if it is not delivered as intended. We see this as a common complaint in schools. For example, in the Ofsted report Below the Radar’ from 2014, the surveys revealed the following:“Over half of the teachers surveyed said that their school’s policy on behaviour was helpful, but only around a third said that it was applied consistently across the school. In some instances, hard-working teachers have their efforts to maintain discipline undermined by the inconsistent approach of other teaching staff to behaviour. Too often, this inconsistency is not being tackled by their senior leaders.“Patrick Lencioni, in his book The Advantage, extols the benefits of overcommunicating clarity’ to ensure organisational health. The active ingredients of the policy need to be very clear to avoid inconsistency. For a behaviour system in particular, this is crucial. These active ingredients are the features which need to be adopted closely and which, if followed, will lead to the successful implementation of a particular intervention. It isn’t a given that these will always be followed with fidelity, so the implementation process needs to build in time to create and sustain clarity. After the original launch, how do you ensure that the messages remain clear? Policies which simply exist on a piece of paper or a hard drive are rarely as effective as ones which are regularly communicated, lived and breathed.

Consistency is key – but personalisation is important

For behaviour policies, clearly specifying the non-negotiables is important, but it is also useful to clarify where we have to be tight and where we can be loose. Behaviour management is not something which exists in isolation; it affects real pupils in real classrooms. So we need to empower the experts – classroom teachers – with the ability to make their own choices in how to deal with particular situations in their classrooms. The EEF recommend to Use classroom management strategies to support good behaviour’, and a good policy is underpinned with the training and support to help teachers on the ground’ manage behaviour. Again, this is an ongoing feature of successful implementation. 

What happens when new staff arrive? 

Who needs more support? 

How do the strategies look different in a PE lesson or a Science practical?

A solid behaviour policy works for all the reasons above, but it will fail if we do not take into account our pupils. Running through the guidance report is the need to understand factors that affect their behaviour and how we can pre-empt and respond to challenges:

Recommendation 1: Know and understand your pupils and their influences;

Recommendation 2: Teach learning behaviours alongside managing behaviour;

Recommendation 5: Use targeted approaches to meet the needs of individuals in your school.

We know that applying the behaviour policy consistently will have many benefits, but how we employ it depends on the individual pupils that we teach. So a school needs to support teachers in being able to identify a range of factors which affect behaviour, and how to deal with them. A school should help pupils who may struggle to develop some of the learning behaviours that will help them succeed. The guidance report is full of useful information to support schools. 

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