Imagine pushing a boulder up a hill, and after enormous effort, getting it to the top — only for it to roll back down. You push it up again. It rolls back down. This goes on indefinitely. At some point the only rational response is to stop pushing and ask: why does it keep rolling back down? And what would we need to do differently for it to stay at the top?
This is what behaviour management in many schools looks like. The same students, the same incidents, the same interventions, the same conversations — and at the end of each term, you're roughly back where you started. Not because the staff aren't working hard enough. Because the boulder keeps rolling back down.
The most common reason is the behaviour policy.
Most school behaviour policies are not terrible documents. They are usually clear enough, reasonably comprehensive, and signed off by governors. The problem is not what they say. The problem is that almost nobody reads them — and of those who do read them, a significant proportion don't implement them consistently.
Ask any group of teachers to describe their school's behaviour policy from memory. The responses are revealing. Some remember the headline expectations. A few remember the consequence ladder. Most are vague about the detail. And almost none could tell you what to do when a student refuses to follow an instruction from a teaching assistant, or what the escalation path is when a consequence is challenged.
The policy is the boulder. And it keeps rolling back down because it was never really at the top.
"The problem is not what the policy says. The problem is that almost nobody reads it — and of those who do, a significant proportion don't implement it consistently."
The solution is to separate what you believe from what you do. Most behaviour policies try to do both at once — articulating the school's values alongside the operational procedures — and end up doing neither well. They are too long to be used as a reference, too vague to be used as a guide, and too formal to be useful in a real situation.
The answer is two documents.
The practice document is the one that matters for behaviour. It describes, specifically and without ambiguity, what every adult in the school does in every foreseeable situation. What do you say when a student refuses to sit down? What happens when a student swears at a teaching assistant? What is the exact script for issuing a consequence? What do you do if a student disputes the consequence publicly?
When every adult in school knows the answer to those questions — and when the answers are the same — you have a consistent system. Until then, you have a policy.
Jim Collins, in Good to Great, describes how the best organisations achieve consistency not by being rigid but by being clear. Clarity about what matters allows people to make good decisions in the moment, without needing to escalate every judgment call upwards.
Most schools are aiming for a kind of consistency that is impossible: 100% uniformity, all the time, from every adult. That will never happen. What is achievable — and what actually changes behaviour — is 85% fidelity to a clear system. If 85% of staff are implementing the same procedures in the same way, students experience consistency. The 15% of variation becomes tolerable noise rather than the signal that the system is optional.
The question for school leaders is not "why don't all my staff follow the policy?" It is "what would it take for 85% of my staff to implement the same practice, reliably, in real situations?" The answer almost always starts with the practice document — and with the training needed to make it real.
One practical test: take your current behaviour policy and highlight every sentence that tells a teacher or teaching assistant exactly what to do in a real situation — specific enough that they could act on it tomorrow morning without any further guidance. Highlight those sentences in green.
Then highlight in amber every sentence that describes a principle, a value, or a general aspiration — things that are true and important, but that don't tell anyone exactly what to do.
In most school behaviour policies, the green is sparse. The amber is everywhere. The ratio tells you everything about why behaviour isn't improving as fast as you want it to.
Chapter 11 of How to Be Supportive and Strict — "Build a supportive and strict school" — walks school leaders through building a behaviour practice document from scratch, including the amber/green audit process and how to achieve 85% fidelity across a whole staff.
Future Behaviour works with senior leadership teams to audit, rewrite, and implement behaviour practice documents that staff actually use. If your policy is gathering dust, it might be time to change the document.
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