When I arrived to work on behaviour with a primary school in the northwest of England it was clear that the headteacher had done her homework. She greeted me with, “I’ve seen your stuff, Paul. I know about your obsession with having just a few rules, so I have reduced mine to five golden rules.”
I said I was impressed. After all, who could argue with rules that are golden? I suggested that we might ask some of the children if they knew what the rules were. “Oh, that would be perfect,” she said, with an ‘I know your game’ smile. “I have just spent the last five weeks taking each rule in turn as an assembly theme. The children definitely know the rules.”
We came across a 6-year-old running an errand and I stopped him in the corridor. “Funny question,” I said, but do you know what the rules of the school are?”
“Ummmmm … Ooooooooooo,” he pondered. He immediately assumed the face of an extremely hard thinker while looking wildly from side to side (presumably looking for the rules poster). “Errrrrrr, is it ‘don’t wear hats’?”
The headteacher looked crestfallen. “Is ‘no hats’ one of the golden rules?” I asked her as we walked away. “No,” she said, masking her irritation well. “No, it’s not hats.”
Moments later a Year 5 pupil came into view, and so I asked her the same question. “Ummmmm … Ooooooooooo,” she said, and she too scanned the walls. “Is it ‘no hoods’?”
“Is it ‘no hoods’?” I enquired of the head, but she was already muttering and walking away briskly. I caught her up. “OK,’ she said, ‘I know what the problem is – I know why.”
It seems that as the children come into the building on a cold, rainy Rochdale day wrapped up against the elements, they are met with a cacophony of staff voices repeating the ‘Hats and hoods off’ mantra. It was the only rule about which all the adults were consistent. As a result, the children thought the most important rule of the school was ‘No hats and hoods’.
We walked into a Year 6 class, and instead of asking the children, I approached the class teacher and asked her the same question. She stared at me with a ‘Who the hell are you to be giving me a policy quiz in front of my boss?’ look, then searched frantically in her planner for the answer.
Inconsistent adults
If nobody can remember the rules, if everyone has to look them up, then nobody really knows them. When adults really know the rules, you hear them referenced in every interaction on behaviour. You might be surprised at just how clear it is to the pupils that the adults are inconsistent.
Just imagine dropping litter on the floor and every adult who intervenes does so not just in a different style and with a different emotion, but also using different reference points. From ‘Would you do that at home?’ to ‘Our school environment is very important’, ‘I can’t walk by, it’s not safe to leave it there’, ‘Litter is a pet hate of mine so I am going to …’, ‘You are disrespecting everyone’ and ‘Pick it up, you filthy wretch!’
In a blizzard of different values, rules and commands, we ask children to find their own route to discipline. It should be no surprise to anyone that confusing, flexible, ignorable boundaries are no boundaries at all.
Take a tour of your school, collect all the rules posters from every environment and all the signs prescribing the expectations of learners, stand back and look at them. Count them. Now test yourself. How many do you actually know? Is it any wonder that there is no true consistency?
A chaos of rules
The children don’t know the rules. The adults don’t know them either. Nobody knows them because the list is so ridiculously long. In many schools there will be a code of conduct that extends to more than 60 rules. There will be between 10 and 20 upfront rules, then a collection of bizarre rules hidden deep in the policy or disguised in the uniform code – rules on length of socks, hairstyles, guns, knives, drugs, badgers, atomic weapons.
There are rules for speaking (‘No repeated talking’), rules for language (‘No inappropriate language’ or ‘No offensive comments’) and rules for thinking (‘Do not do anything dishonest’). Crimes extend to those more commonly found in military environments – ‘poor role model’, ‘failure to cooperate’ and ‘refusing to give your name’. Learners are referred to as ‘offenders’, ‘troublemakers’ and ‘the disruptives’. In policies like these, practical guidance to staff is scant, with an air of ‘do whatever you can’.
And that’s not forgetting the ‘catchalls’ – rules so open-ended that reading the detailed rules is a complete waste of time: ‘Do not do anything to damage the reputation of the school/college’. ‘Do not engage in any dangerous activities’, ‘Love thy neighbour’. There’s also the language filled with threat, such as ‘suspension’, ‘exclusion’ or ‘permanent record’.
There can also be policies which are so subjective that any application of them invites protracted and impossible argument: ‘Behave in a way that does not offend’, ‘Have a pleasant manner’; ‘Do not wear hoods, hats or any type of headgear, except for bona fide religious reasons’; ‘Behave in ways that respect the needs and aspirations of others’.
Where rules should live
The rules of a successful classroom are not just plastered onto the walls but woven into behaviour interventions. If you need to have posters in every corridor or in every learning space, then you can be sure that nobody knows them.
In the home, parents don’t plaster the walls with rules. There’s no list of ‘don’t’s in the bathroom, no rules for using the stairs etched into the carpet – yet the home is not a lawless, anarchic place with children jacked up on doughnuts, swinging on the shower curtain and launching themselves down the stairs.
It is not enough, of course, in the home or in education simply to know the rules. They need to live every day in conversations between adults and learners. Why would you need a poster if you really knew the rules?
School or prison?
Alcatraz had 52 rules. Most education institutions have more rules than Alcatraz. The following phrases are all found in a school/ college behaviour policy or in prison regulations (from Alcatraz, among others). See if you can decide which ones are which…
1. Withdrawal of privileges
2. Possession of contraband of any sort is a serious offence
3. You are required to work at whatever you are told to do
4. Working hard and contributing
5. Do not carry a knife
6. Act at all times with due regard for your safety and for the safety of others
Answers
1. School 2. Alcatraz 3. Alcatraz
4. College 5. School 6. School
Paul Dix is a behaviour specialist and executive director of the consultancy firm Pivotal Education. This article is an edited extract from his book, When The Adults Change, Everything Changes (£16.99, Crown House Publishing)
