We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
Rudyard Kipling
I was a bit taken aback at the vigour and vitriol with which some people condemned Michaela School’s approach to behaviour. The argument seemed to go that if you refuse to accept poor behaviour then you simply pass on the problem to another school. As far as I can see, that’s entirely up to other schools.
Consider this scenario. A town has two secondary schools, New Free School and Old Comprehensive School. New Free School has just opened its doors and has made the decision that it will have very high standards of behaviour and a ‘no exceptions, no excuses’ culture. Failure to follow the rules will result in some sort of punishment. This approach is often applauded by parents until it’s their child who runs afoul of the system. Imagine a parent coming in to complain that it’s unfair their child has been set a detention and being told by the Head, “Well, I’m really sorry to hear that but I’m still not going to make an exception.” Parents are so used to being able to dictate terms to schools that this might come as something as a shock. But the message is clear – if you send your child to our school, then they will have to follow our rules. There may way well be reasons, but there are no excuses.
There are two possible ways out of this impasse. Either parents can reluctantly agree to support the school and the situation is swiftly resolved, or they can escalate matters and refuse to bend. When a rock meets a hard place something has to give. Usually it’s the school, but if you hold your nerve the parent’s only other option is to take their child elsewhere.
Now imagine you’re the Head of Old Comprehensive School. You have a choice to make. If you agree to take on this child you can either say, we have the same high standards of behaviour as New Free, or we don’t. What you accept will be acceptable. Most schools in this position accept excuses and make exceptions because that seems easier in the short term. But you’re storing up trouble for the long term. If all the parents that don’t like their children being made to follow school rules send their kids to Old Comprehensive, very soon you’ve got a sink. Standards of behaviour slip. Maybe results slip with them. What’s a parent to do then? Speaking for myself I know where I’d prefer my children to go (and where I’d rather work.)
So, what would happen if all schools were as intolerant of poor behaviour as New Free? What would happen to the children of parents who refused to support their school? Ultimately, they’d have no choice. And if you cannot choose a school where poor behaviour is tolerated then behaviour would improve. In all schools. The idea that you could argue against a systemic improvement in students’ behaviour makes little sense to me.
But, and it’s a big but, ‘no excuses’ should never be an excuse to victimise the most vulnerable.
Virtual Schools have parental responsibility for the education of Looked After Children and I’ve learned an awful lot from finding out about the problems they encounter over the past few months. It would appear that there are two very predictable patterns of behaviour for Looked After Children. The first is that normally quiet, compliant children often let rip after they’re taken into care. Whilst living with their parents they’ve had to be on high alert, but as soon as they’re relatively safe they can let down their guard. And usually they are angry. Don’t forget, your life has to be almost unimaginably harrowing before social services will take you into care. The second pattern is that normally quiet, compliant children who’ve been in care for years suddenly explode when they hit puberty. This might be because shared environmental influences (carers) begin to wear off, and non-shared influences (peers) and genetic influences (birth parents) tend to make themselves felt. Or it might be because neurological changes cause attachment disorders to start making themselves felt. Why doesn’t really matter – the pattern is predictable.
Now seeing as these patterns are so predictable, it seems reasonable to say that schools should plan for them. If a child is taken into care you should expect their anger and move mountains to make sure you don’t add to their misery by giving them an opportunity to make their school placement break down along with the rest of their lives. Likewise, if you have a Looked After Child who’s entering puberty, there is no excuse for failure to anticipate their likely patterns of behaviour. This doesn’t mean you have to excuse their behaviour or make an exception for rule breaking, but it does mean you do everything in your power to make sure they don’t get to break a rule. Schools that use their ‘no excuses’ culture to get rid of their most vulnerable students really have no excuse.
For what it’s worth, I feel reasonably certain that Michaela would do all in its power to prevent that from happening. They’ve created a strong cultural norm in which it’s ‘cool to be clever’ and bad behaviour is looked down on by peers. They’ve made it easy for students to wear the correct uniform and be properly equipped by running an on site ‘shop’. And they offer an open invitation to parents to come into the school at any time to show just how much their children are learning and enjoying school. Most problems can be anticipated and solved before they become problems.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
How can you be “…reasonably certain that Michaela would do all in its power…” after so little interaction with the place?
Because I know the people involved.
I still think reasonably certain is too strong. But I don’t think we will get anywhere with that so…
Do you think that if a school were to do all in its power to make sure vulnerable students don’t get to break a rule it would have much effect? What more can the school do than make sure that the rules are widely known?
I’m afraid that this patronising attitude is the root of the problem. I’ve worked with SEN pupils for a quarter of a century, and a pretty fair percentage of them have had behavioural problems. Like Katherine Birbalsingh, I don’t accept excuses. And surprise, surprise–these ‘vulnerable’ kids love being in a situation where they know exactly what the rules are. Their problem stems from adults who won’t set boundaries, or if they do, they keep changing them in response the the child’s inevitable challenges.
‘Vulnerable’ is a Guardian weasel word, akin to beggar’s sores. It makes me livid, because it presumes that those concerned are not fully human. And I am sure that we will find that as time goes on, parents of these ‘vulnerable’ children will flock to Michaela.
In West Dunbartonshire, Tommy MacKay introduced a playground behaviour programme which made no excuses in all 43 primary schools. West Dunbartonshire is second only to Glasgow in terms of deprivation, but inside of three years behaviour had changed so dramatically that Prof MacKay was able to start phase 2, which was to introduce synthetic phonics. Since then, illiteracy has been virtually eradicated. In 2007 I was invited to speak at a meeting with their primary school teachers, and it was immensely heartening to see teachers with such confident and positive attitudes. They were justly proud of what they had achieved.
But one of the strange things about this problem is the effect it had on West Dunbartonshire parents. Once you know that your children won’t have to lead the same rackety life where drink, drugs and the dole are ever-present realities, it changes the way you think about your own life. You start taking an interest in your children’s progress at school. You get them up and send them off with breakfast and clean clothes.
By contrast, we once did some work in one of Norwich’s worst primary schools. The staffroom was not a nice place. Teachers blamed the parents for their children’s lack of progress, and mocked them behind their backs. I will never forget the mother who came to us with tears in her eyes–as a traveller, she too had been despised because her reading instruction was so grossly inadequate that she didn’t even attempt to read anything. Yet her own son, who had started making some progress (he scored 93 on the BPVS and was keen to learn) was always in trouble. He had a very poor working memory, and was always forgetting what teachers told him to do. I have always regretted that his mother was so frightened of the school that she wouldn’t come to see us privately.
I do enjoy your knee-jerk polemic Tom. But I’m not talking about SEN.
Thanks
So, you didn’t answer the question.
On another point. In the case outlined above, might it have been the synthetic phonics rather than the ‘no excuses’ that had the major effect on reducing illiteracy?
There wasn’t a question 🙂
If I had in any way been referring to illiteracy then Tom may have had a valid point. But I wasn’t.
I’d prefer it if these comments were kept on the topic of the blog in question rather than seen as a forum to raise whatever disparate and unrelated concerns readers may have.
I’d just like to point out that there is a potential (although not easy) alternative for parents, and it is called home schooling. Personally, I would rather teach my children at home, than be put in a position where I had to send them to a school that had a completely inflexible approach to behaviour. I’m not suggesting that schools should have flexible standards, but what they do need to have is flexible routes of getting to those same standards. There just isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach when it comes to behaviour, otherwise we would find that all adults obey all the rules that society sets, and experience shows us that this isn’t true. We can wish it were true all day long, and create really punitive systems to try and make it happen, but wishing and punishing don’t tend to work in the long run. (Some of the latest approaches used by the police, e.g. getting drivers to consider the effects of their behaviour, seem to be more effective.)
If children, or their parents, refuse to be as compliant as schools would wish, then exclusion would seem to be the logical end result. We are already seeing a culture of fining parents for ‘misbehaving’ (lateness, absence) rather than schools and parents working in partnership with each other. A ‘no excuses’ culture appears attractive at first glance, but in the end our most vulnerable children have to go somewhere and we surely have to do something beyond punishing them to help them change their behaviour.
(By the way, I don’t think you’re right that ‘parents are used to being able to dictate terms’. I don’t have that sense at all from my experiences of the schools my children have attended.)
Thanks Sue – thoughtful comments.
Home schooling is only going to be a viable option for those with the economic independence necessary not to have to work, but you’re right: it’s an alternative.
You’re also right to point out the psychological ‘nudges’ used effectively by the police amongst others. If you haven’t read Thaler & Susstein’s book on this topic I can heartily recommend it. Michaela are very good at this kind of approach and Joe Kirby has written a serier of blogs on motivation, social norms and mindset anchoring which give you a flavour of how they go about this.
David–the point I was making was that Tommy MacKay did not patronise ‘vulnerable’ pupils by excusing their behaviour. Was this off-topic? To suggest that I was dragging in unrelated issues absolutely baffles me. You must have led a very sheltered life if you are unaware of the extremely high correlation between behavioural problems and illiteracy, and the extent to which both are blamed upon poor discipline in the home. You can’t have a meaningful discussion about Michaela’s discipline policy and whether it is merely dumping difficult pupils on other schools without considering the factors I raised.
Tom
The post had nothing to do with illiteracy. I managed to cobble together a book about literacy so I do know something about it.
Children who have suffered serious and prolonged abuse do not muck about in school because they can’t read. If you think otherwise it’s more likely that it’s your life that’s been sheltered.
My point is that if a thing is predictable there’s no excuse for being surprised by it.
David–I’m wondering if you’ve actually read my post, or if you have any conception of what West Dunbarton is like. I pointed out that Prof MacKay started off with a behaviour programme which demanded that all children–and this would include a lot of children who’d had truly terrible lives–adhered to the same standard of behaviour as any other child. Unfortunately, there are far too many teachers whose brains go soft when they encounter children whose parents live in a fog of drugs and drink supplied by their giros and/or petty crime. They think they’re from another planet. We’ve even dissociated ourselves from them by declaring white working class boys as another ethnic group. You never hear about Sikh working class boys, do your?
I’ve had a lot experience in youth work and probation work before I had anything to do with education. I’ve trained boys who were in care to work in the building trades. And the surprising thing is that they are remarkably resilient. Where social workers saw nothing but fucked-up kids, I found that given a chance to achieve and given the appropriate training, respect and discipline, very few of them slipped through the cracks, even the ones who continued to use drugs.
And I think this is what you will never really grasp about Katherine Birbalsingh and myself. Where others see hopelessly damaged individuals in need of their specialist skills, we see potential. I can see this is a threat to the professionalism of a lot of teachers, just like I was a threat to all the social workers in the youth and probation projects I worked on..
I haven’t read anything you’ve written. I didn’t even know you’d written anything. I know nothing about West Dumbarton. And I have absolutely no idea what you’re railing against. I think you have misunderstood that I am writing in praise of Katherine Birbalsingh. I don’t feel threatened by you, just confused as to why you appear to be attacking me.
One point to consider is that the Old Comprehensive head probably has no choice but to accept the student excluded from New Free School whether they like it or not. Even if they have a ‘no excuses’ culture they still, quite rightly, have to follow certain procedures before excluding a student permanently.
It also looks to me, as though Michaela are operating covert selection, meaning some parents may be put off applying. Whether this is deliberate I can’t say, but LA schools are bound by strict rules on this. For example, the uniform is extensive and expensive, (£40 for a blazer for example), the behaviour policy may put off parents who think their children would find it difficult to comply, as the sanctions are severe for relatively minor offences and there seems to be no place for mitigation. In the hypothetical example you quote above, the extreme result could be a social division between the two schools. The Old Comprehensive effectively taking all the Free School rejects and those whose parents don’t think they would fit in and the New Free getting the well behaved students with interested parents. Not what state funded education should be aiming for.
I know I always joke about my absolute comfort searching for the middle ground….but surely there is a moderate position here? My school is an ‘old’ comp, a 300 year old school, but it doesn’t operate easy standards by any means. Neither is it a hard line no excuses culture. Sometimes there are excuses, valid excuses, and sentient beings are perfectly capable of treating different cases on their relative merits. We’ve had a number of visitors round recently: prospective parents, children or primary teachers and the general opinion is that we have a very calm, purposeful, quiet school…one where learning is the priority. I’m happy to say we share with Michaela the focus on children working hard…and on their demonstrating respect to adults and consideration to others. The culture we have established over time means that we don’t have to be so uncompromising about aspects of behaviour though. Parents in our community are happy with what we do. Many of them have been through the school themselves. Other parents choose to send their children to us from a distance. I’m writing about my school for TES – it’ll be in next month – I give a bit more context in that piece.
On one other note, David, you say about the ‘old comp’ having a choice about accepting the child who didn’t settle at ‘new free’….but in many cases, if there are spaces in a year group, heads don’t have that choice. They have to accept the child, and often the child’s parents’ expectations too.
I’m in north Cumbria – as far away from any ‘new free’ school as it’s possible to be according to any map I’ve seen of their locations. Maybe we don’t need them – maybe we offer the best of both worlds.
@Lisa7Pettifer
Another interesting blog David. The school polarises opinion but certainly provides some food for thought. Just one pedantic point though. You state if the comp headteacher decides to accept the pupil…but in reality if there are spaces available in the school then legally the pupil must be accepted. The headteacher simply has no choice. Fascinating stuff though.
Damian
Hi Damian thanks for you comment. Just to clarify, you might have to accept a student but you don’t have to accept bad behaviour. This can be explained to the parent, as I sida in the blog.
No, you don’t have to accept or tolerate the behaviour. Nor should you. You can, and probably will, punish the behaviour and the parents may back you 100%. But not tolerating bad behaviour, doesn’t mean it won;’ happen. The child may continue to misbehave and be prepared to accept the punishment. I have taught lots of pupils over the years who see detention, report card etc. as a way of life! They aren’t doing anything dangerous or outrageous but are engaged in low level disruption which is not extreme enough to expel. As many have commented above, state schools don’t have the luxury of saying like it or lump it.
For that matter, there will, I dare say, be parents who might say: Look, we didn’t want our child to come to this school but we couldn’t get a place at the our first choice. We are, in effect, forced to send our child here and we don’t subscribe to your no excuses policy’. In that scenario, they are stuck with each other.
BUT I do believe that schools can (and do) change the culture so that bad behaviour is no longer the rule.
Struggled with a few of your points, David.
First, keeping the rules doesn’t always equate to good behaviour. Good behaviour usually includes keeping the rules, but that principle doesn’t allow for asinine rules. One school my kids attended required students to have ‘sensible’ hairstyles. You can imagine. What if some rules are daft/counterproductive?
Then there’s making exceptions. Making reasonable exceptions doesn’t automatically mean a school becomes a ‘sink’. Anymore than not making exceptions automatically leads to good behaviour. It could lead to complete disengagement, especially if perceived as unfair.
Third, I think your point about expecting Looked After Children to kick off is a good one. But what if they test the boundaries by deliberately breaking the rules? That’s a pretty predictable one.
I’ve read this blog and the initial one with interest. In many ways I admire much of the work that MFS are doing – and I am intrigued by the ‘zero tolerance’ apporach to behaviour and the ‘back us or move your kid somewhere else’ approach. I would love to work in a school that had such an approach – too much time is spent pandering to parents who refuse to do the ugly side of parenting!
This approach certainly would give the ‘good kids’ a better education than they receive in a situation where poor behaviour is only ‘managed’ rather than actually sorted – in that regard MFS will ultimately get results with their students that are great (and therefore end up with a good OFSTED report etc).
It would be interesting to ‘filter out’ those results of students within our schools currently that have parents who are a significant part of the problem and see how results then look. Certainly at our place most of the students who do not make ‘expected progress KS2-4’ (for one simple measure) would fall off our results and things would be very rosy!
I do have a concern though that those kids with, frankly, feckless parents are being penalised and disadvantaged in their education because of their parents ineptitude which will, more likely, see them turning into the next round of feckless parents. Part of the educational system ethos must be about breaking this desperate endless cycle.
I am not sure that I share your confidence that if every school in the system had the MFS approach that the problem would be simply solved. Yes parents would have to send their child to a strict school (there is no alterative) but in doing so they wouldn’t necessarily be agreeing to abide by and back the school and it’s rules.
When push came to shove about a discipline issue there would inevitably be a standoff between school and the parents. The ‘if you don’t like our rules go elsewhere’ line just wouldn’t work here if there is no ‘elsewhere’ with slacker standards.
So what happens then when the parents don’t back down and, instead, collect their child at 3.30pm when, in fact, they were due in a detention? When they come in to collect the phone that belongs to the child even though school wish to hold it for 4 weeks (can the school legally hold property against parental wishes for a long period of time when it belongs to the child?).
I can see this child bouncing from school to school to school with permanent exclusions that were initiated by relatively ‘minor’ (yet important to crack) incidences such as a phone out on the corridor. Does that break the cycle or prolong it?
I guess where I am going with this is that on a micro school level scale I absolutely agree with the approach but I worry about the impliactions if enacted on a macro scale across all schools. I am far from clear what an effective alternative is though!
What I do know is that the issue is far from a simple one to sort out on a system wide basis!
I don’t get all of this handwringing from people. It is quite simple – the whole change the boundaries, accept excuses, change standards for particular children if the parents demand it has been tried to death in our existing system. What is the net result? It certainly isn’t better behaviour. Not one school which has started to bend its behaviour policy has led to better behaviour – only worse. All that changing boundaries does is lead to further insecurity. In the meantime the effect of the changing boundaries on the rest of the children needs to be managed too – which again I have never seen as reported positively and certainly I have never seen it have a positive effect on my classes.
Every class I have worked in has been the most challenging class in the year, each one usually containing one or two pupils who refuse to follow school rules. All that accepting excuses and changing the boundaries did was make their behaviour worse. While I would enforce the rules in class, SLT would decide to undermine them as they bought excuse after excuse. All this does is undermine the rules set by leaders in the first place and undermine the relationship with the teacher. Leadership team members who allow this are in the wrong and often know it but feel that they can’t be stricter because exclusions may mean Ofsted.
In every case, bar one who I think was suffering from some form of psychopathy, the children’s behaviour would have turned had it been tackled at a lower level. Letting minor infringements turn into major infringements is no way to deal with behaviour. If indeed one needs to pick ones battles then pick them when they are younger and for smaller issues than let it lead to a massive issue. This pattern presents itself over and over again and yet too many in teaching stick the blinkers on or stick on their rose tinted glasses.
So if you truly believe this approach is best then can you give actual examples of children who you have allowed to get away with minor infringements who have then turned their behaviour around. In terms of dealing with vulnerable children the education system is in the grip of madness – repeating the same thing over and over again hoping for a different outcome.
As for ‘where’ will the child go well to be honest if the parent is deluded then maybe forcing them to move their child more than once would in the end have a better effect on both the parent and child because something has to give. They have the option of home education and they are welcome to take it if they do not like schools rules. Let the inflexibility begin – it is long overdue.
teachwell – your comment is attached as a reply to my comment but I suspect it is replying more generally to points made.
Just for clarity though – I explicitly stated near the end that on an individual school level I fully support the ‘no excuses’ approach suggested. My concern was that we are effectively discarding those students who most need our help (ie. those with ineffective patents).
Having a concern does not prevent you doing something but concerns shouldn’t be swept under the carpet. On a system wide view we have to find a solution for these kids otherwise we are just generating the next batch of failed parents.
For absolute clarity here – in my view that solution certainly can’t be allowing them to break the rules or bending the punishments etc. – the rules should be fully, fairly and consistently applied to all.
Every single school suggesting their parents take them somewhere else so they bounce from school to school to school can’t be the solution to my concern either – we need to work with these parents to get them to change their views.
If anyone has a magic wand then wave it now – a school which did that would be truly outstanding.
I hear you and I do think that one of the things that needs to happen is that we have to get actual child psychiatrists on board. They need to be in school actually observing the behaviour rather than second hand advice from people who are too attached to the inclusion agenda to see that we mainstream schools cannot cope with or provide the necessary support to children with serious mental health problems. I feel that some parents can be worked with but others can’t. To some extent schools need to have an explicit policy – which they have been too afraid of in recent decades. Almost a flowchart of what happens and what is expected of parents and the school. The class teacher can not arbitrarily decide that a child is too much hassle to be taught but equally parents who can’t be bothered to change their or their child’s behaviour cannot be allowed to affect the life chances of 29 other children. If a child has had to leave a school because of behaviour then this should be where social workers, etc step in as the child is obviously in some sort of crisis. Perhaps they need to be taught in isolation or in a one-to-one setting. However, then it becomes about money…
Agree wholeheartedly about the need for child psychiatrists & the like to be actually in school observing.
My last school had a centre for kids who wouldn’t meet the expected standards (basically an on-site PRU). It worked for them and, as you correctly point out, it worked very well for “the other 29” kids too!
Won’t have been cheap – I expect the cost was largely met from larger class sizes elsewhere in school. I would argue that any negative impact from those larger classes was more than set off by the gain from not having a disruptive student in the class.
There definitely does seem to be some room for a middle ground here as Lisa says.
On the one hand – a ‘No excuses’ ring drawn around an area is – indeed – likely to raise the motivation of most children to not let things slip where they have it generally in their power to do so (such as having top buttons done up on shirts).
But on the other hand… there simply are times in all of our lives when it just isn’t within our power to be fully on top of a set of rules, or at the very least, it would be unreasonably harsh to have required it of us.
There HAS to be some level of humane, human discretion applied doesn’t there? Or at least a system which takes long enough for ‘black marks’ to build up that children have a chance to learn to adapt and cope and the odd genuinely left-field event doesn’t sink the ship…?
There have been plenty of times (as a child and as an adult) when it wasn’t within my power to be fully on top of a set of rules. I had to pay the consequences. I have railed against the injustice, explained my reasons only to be met with implacable determination. Life isn’t fair. But the same rules for all help to make it fairer
I find children themselves seem to prefer a ‘no excuses’ approach because it also means they’re less likely to be bullied, and also free to work hard without having their learning disturbed or mocked by others. It’s immensely liberating for all who are actually directly involved in the teaching and learning process.
Yes… I can see that there are all sorts of ways in which a ‘no excuses’ approach could tidy-up, order, clarify, sharpen things in the lives of children (indeed all of us), I just can’t see how you can’t have a messy shadow aspect to this which doesn’t strip some of the genuine justice from life – despite the equity and fairness which is gained from its application at the front end.
Even in the courts there are mitigating circumstances taken into account for supposedly fully responsible adults (between the bounds of a minimum and maximum sentence).
I seem to recall from one particular brand of behaviour management (Sue might be able to say more about this), that it isn’t the size of a punishment which is necessarily the most important thing in its status as a deterrent – it’s the certainty of getting it. In other words you can have many of the benefits of a ‘no excuses’ policy with perhaps less drastic things at stake…?
Having said that, I guess one of the keys to the effectiveness of the kind of system that Michaela apparently has, is the pressure it puts on the parents to support at their end, which I guess would be lost with lesser sanctions. So… what do I know?! 🙂
Chris – I think you are assuming no excuses is not humane. All my schools had no excuses policies – I was once put on a report card for a week for turning up late once. At the time I felt it was unfair but actually when I told my mum she just said – well you left on time so why were you late? The truth is I had been chatting and walking slowly with friends – it was a choice. While it was embarrassing to have to go and get the report card signed by every teacher – it was actually an important lesson. All the teachers expressed a bit of shock and then said that I should make sure I wasn’t late again. I wasn’t!!
I would have fallen into the vulnerable child category for quite a few periods of my time at both primary and secondary school. School rules made me feel safe and happy at school. The report card was not done out of malice but out of care. Also it showed me that both when I good or bad I was equal to others – do not underestimate the importance of this to children with troubled home lives. Putting them on a pedestal doesn’t actually help them although it may make certain well meaning adults feel better about themselves. As I already said above – does bending the rules work? Does it help improve the behaviour of vulnerable children? I have never seen this happen so while I am willing to accept I am wrong I am not willing to do it without proof or evidence.
I can see just how many issues could be stopped from slipping into something much worse, and indeed eradicated completely with zero tolerance approaches (isn’t that what we used to call them?)
I also DON’T want to suggest that I find Michaela school’s actual approach inhumane – I really don’t like the fact this is hovering around a particular school rather than a methodology in principle. I know that they must be openly pushing for consideration of their approach, but even so – I don’t know them, and I haven’t been there.
I suppose my point is this: Despite the benefits which I fully get, I simply can’t see how you can consistently enforce a blanket ‘no excuses’ policy without it EVENTUALLY leading to scenarios which any of us would feel were unfortunate and contrary to the spirit of what we were ultimately trying to achieve. I feel that as necessary as it is to draw a line in the sand over which a consequence must come, it is equally necessary to have other lines in the sand which we ourselves will not cross in enforcing the consequences of the first one. Even if that undermines the validity of the first line…
It’s a classic “squaring the circle of human life” thing for me I’m afraid.
One way to resolve it is to be frank that ANY thing we do will lead to imperfections and flawed justice one way or another, and hence simply we should say that ‘In my opinion…’ this or that particular approach has the smallest number of undesirable outcomes, therefore it gets my vote.
Does this explain it better https://www.learningspy.co.uk/behaviour/what-no-excuses-means-to-me/
Yes – it does actually. I think the distinction between having a reason – which you apologise for and strive to overcome as best you can, and making ‘an excuse’ – which you start to see as an entitlement, could be a very fruitful alternative way forward.
I just haven’t quite dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s in my mind yet!
Thanks though
Yes I completely see and appreciate that view. I do believe that we all get it wrong and that children need more than one chance. I don’t think emergencies are an issue but one-offs have turned into consistent excuses and heads feel unable to do anything about it.
You have hit the nail on the head – those who want more leeway can’t find examples of it working but the child is safer than at home on the other hand this needs to be weighed up against the impact on learning and behaviour of the rest of the class. I’ve said it before but 1 person is not worth 29 others.
[…] to two of these, a reason is pretty much the same as an excuse. Since writing about ‘no excuses‘ culture I’ve been issued various challenges (some of them more polite than others) one […]
By the way, what was the content of the lessons like compared to other schools you have visited?
The teachers tell kids stuff and work through ‘knowledge books’. They ask them questions to make sure they’ve understood the content. Barry Smith’s French lessons are something else – lots of back and forth translation with the children having mastered some of the most difficult parts of the language (subject-verb agreement) first. Some lessons are more lively than others, but in all the children are attentive, excited about what they know and can do and hard-working.
I follow your blog with a lot of interest, and I always find your posts thought provoking and challenging. This post and the previous one about Michaela School’s approach to managing their school have to be the most challenging yet as I am quite conflicted about how I feel about these ideas. On the one hand, consistency is hugely important for young people, especially for those who have chaotic lives outside of school. However, I am a huge advocate of using a restorative approach to create a calm, accountable and supportive school ethos. As a fully trained restorative practitioner (and secondary English teacher), I believe in the need for a school to have both high expectations and a high level of support to enable these expectations to be met; rather than high expectations accompanied by a high level of control as, perhaps, it could be suggested is the Michaela school model. I believe in helping young people to understand why and how they need to make the right choices, and how to repair any harm caused by their actions rather than teaching young people to follow rules to avoid punishment. Just wanted to add in my thoughts to the mix. Please be kind!
Not meaning to be overly critical but having taught in a no excuses environment and witnessed first hand its effects within one week of being established, my career and job searching methods have altered. Now, assessing whether to apply for a post in a school, ‘restorative justice’ is a key red flag that will make me cancel my application.
Hi Lisa
I’m not a fan of restorative justice. here’s why: https://deputyjohn.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/restorative-justice/
Cheers, DD
After reading your post about a school’s interpretation of restorative justice, I can understand your reaction. This is not how it works in my school. The type of formal and time consuming meetings you describe happen very rarely and only when it is clear that it is appropriate. In practice, what I see being so successful is teachers’ everyday interactions with students and how teachers manage their classrooms and model behaviour. It is the philosophy behind a restorative approach underpinning how teachers interact with students which makes the difference. Having a ‘restorative justice’ meeting is not, in my opinion, what it is actually all about and if this is all a school thinks a restorative approach is, then they are wasting their time and the valuable time of their teachers. Fundamentally, I agree that there should be no excuses, it’s just what happens after that, when a student has broken the rules, that I am still very much mulling over…
In principle, I can’t see any reason why you can’t have a vigorously enforced ‘no excuses’ line, where the consequences are based on some form of restorative justice principle (though not sure how that translates with having a phone out when not meant to…)
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first time to read it
???! … To read what? And why mention it?! 😀
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