As senior leaders in a UK inner-city secondary academy, we took pride in the positive impact that our clear and consistent approach to behaviour management was having. Our recently refined ‘Your Behaviour, Your Choice’ reward and sanction strategies were working well. We welcomed the longer days that came after the Easter break and looked forward to seeing the school bathed in sunshine – it was our favourite time of year when, if history were to repeat itself, negative behaviour usually declined.
Increasingly, however, leadership meetings were becoming dominated by discussions about an emerging spike in negative behaviour of Year 9 (Grade 8) boys. Typically, what started as low-level disruption in lessons quickly escalated to unrest in non-contact times, with increasing incidents of disruption and defiance in corridors between lessons and at break times.
We were still talking about it weeks later. Our usual sanctions were in place and were offering temporary relief, but this seemed different to the patterns we’d experienced before. We could feel the frustration bubbling over for everyone involved.
Vicky Merrick, an Independent Consultant and Director of Merrick-Ed Limited
The breakthrough came when we started to take a fresh look at all the data and information we had on our students.
Investigating student data
The breakthrough came when we started to take a fresh look at all the data and information we had on our students. We challenged ourselves to avoid bias and preconceived ideas about what was happening and why – nothing was off the table. We were determined to find answers to this change in behaviour.
What emerged, for a group of just under 30 of our Year 9 boys, was a high correlation between a rapid increase in negative behaviour and a dip in mean Standardised Age Scores (SAS) in their most recent New Group Reading Test (NGRT) results, sat in March of that year. Students who had previously achieved mean SAS that were average, now were not.
It wasn’t clear at that point if poor behaviour had affected the integrity and validity of the assessment itself, or if the assessment data was trying to tell us something. But, without this assessment data, it’s clear that this emerging need may have been missed.
Our Director of Achievement, Literacy Lead and SENDCO swiftly worked together to qualify what we’d noticed, student-by-student. We retested some students with NGRT to validate any changes. We cross-referenced student books from a range of subject areas, and we engaged with parents again to seek to learn about any changes in circumstances, attitudes or behaviours outside of school that we might not have been aware of.
The impact of interventions
Having validated, interrogated and challenged our hypothesis, we were confident that we had a plan to help this group of boys. We discovered that they were struggling to access the rising level of work in lessons because of emerging reading difficulties and, as a result, they were anxious about the perceived challenges of transitioning to GCSEs later that year.
What followed was a whole school commitment to address the barriers they were facing and to build up their confidence. Some of the identified cohort required rapid, age-appropriate phonics intervention, while others needed support with inference. Investment was made in training a team of appropriate support staff to deliver set intervention programmes over an initial period of 12 weeks after which students sat NGRT again.
The impact was palpable. Within the first eight weeks, negative behaviours had started to reduce and more interestingly, positive behaviour points for these students were increasing. Anecdotally, they were re-engaging with us again. Student voice activities suggested that we had regained their trust to notice what they really needed, and in turn they felt more able to talk to us about what they needed and how they felt.
By mid-July of that academic year, all but a handful had ‘graduated’ from their reading interventions, behaviour patterns had returned to normal and, most importantly, that cohort of young people were excited about starting their new courses in September.
We had regained their trust to notice what they really needed, and in turn they felt more able to talk to us about what they needed and how they felt.
What we learnt during that period was the need to always have our eyes open to what is happening now, and to not rely on expected patterns, trends and presumptions.
A critical point for school leaders
What we learnt during that period was the need to always have our eyes open to what is happening now, and to not rely on expected patterns, trends and presumptions. This is a critical point for all school leaders to be aware of as multiple cohorts of students, whose learning and development have been disrupted in a variety of ways in recent years, approach change and transition points in their education journey.
As GL Education’s YouGov poll has shown, there is value in seeking to deliberately understand how students feel about critical learning skills such as reading and in turn how this is manifesting in their day-to-day experience of school.
Vicky Merrick is an Independent Consultant and Director of Merrick-Ed Limited.
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