Three things I learnt from a year on the road

I spent last academic year supporting schools all over the country with behaviour. Unsurprisingly, I found common threads in what makes successful schools successful — and the pitfalls that schools keep falling into, over and over again.

1. If schools were half as good at using behaviour data as they are at using academic progress data, life would be very different

Leadership teams in high-performing schools have a very clear picture of what is going on with behaviour. They know which pupils need early intervention. They know which teachers need support before things become seriously difficult. They see trends across year groups, subjects and locations — and they have robust data on the effectiveness of the interventions they have used.

Most schools do not have this. They react to behaviour incidents rather than anticipating them. The data exists in most MIS systems; it is rarely used well.

2. If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities

Over and over again I see schools trying to get better at a hundred things simultaneously. Teachers are being asked to change their approach to behaviour, reading, assessment, PE, lesson structure — all at the same time. The pressure on schools and school leaders to improve fast forces them to be counter-intuitive about embedding practice that will serve them well for years to come.

The best schools focus on incremental organisational habit change. They identify one or two high-leverage things and pursue them with patience and consistency. Everything else waits.

3. Set speed limits before you start issuing fines

I hear about many schools trying to improve behaviour by increasing sanctions — longer detentions, isolation rooms, zero-tolerance policies. But focusing on the type of consequence is almost always premature. What you should do first is define your expectations.

Local authorities do not install speed cameras before putting up road signs showing the speed limit. And yet many schools do exactly this. They also try to change too many behaviours at once — a bit like someone in January who is simultaneously doing Dry January, giving up chocolate, quitting smoking, and going to the gym every day. They will fail because there is a limit, at both a personal and organisational level, to the amount of habit change we can achieve simultaneously.

The best schools take an instructional approach to behaviour: they teach expectations and explain why they are needed. Only once expectations are clear do they begin to think seriously about consequences.