665610
YJJ0010.1177/1473225416665610Youth JusticeDeakin and Kupchik
earch-article2016
Article
Tough Choices: School Behaviour
Management and Institutional
Context
Youth Justice
2016, Vol. 16(3) 280–298
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1473225416665610
yjj.sagepub.com
Jo Deakin and Aaron Kupchik
Abstract
In the light of recent disciplinary reform in United States and United Kingdom schools, academic attention
has increasingly focused on school punishment. Drawing on interviews with school staff in alternative and
mainstream schools in the United States and the United Kingdom, we highlight differences in understandings
and practices of school discipline. We argue that, in both countries, there is a mismatch between mainstream
schools and alternative schools regarding approaches to punishment, techniques employed to manage
student behaviour and supports given to students. While these disparities mirror what one would expect
based on the distinct institutional arrangements and organizational priorities of alternative and mainstream
schools, they pose particular problems for children transitioning between the two types of school. In this
article, we raise a series of questions about the impact of these mismatches on children’s experiences and
the potential for school disciplinary reform to achieve lasting results.
Keywords
alternative education, exclusion, restorative practice, school discipline, school punishment
Schools’ practices for preventing and responding to student misbehaviour have attracted
a good deal of attention over the past few years in both the United Kingdom and the
United States (e.g. UK Department for Education, 2010, 2015; US Department of
Education, 2014a). There are many reasons for this, including fear of violence in schools,
recognition of racial inequality in the distribution of school punishments and concerns
about implementing ineffective policies. Furthermore, since relatively few young people
enter the juvenile or youth justice systems, yet the vast majority are educated within state
schools, growing attention from criminologists to the issue of school punishment represents a substantial step towards understanding the role of State punishment in the lives of
youth (see Kupchik et al., 2015). Indeed, concerns about growth of a ‘school to prison
Corresponding author:
Jo Deakin, The University of Manchester, Oxford Rd, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
Email: jo.deakin@manchester.ac.uk
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pipeline’ (Kim et al., 2010) and the relationship between exclusion and incarceration
(McAra and McVie, 2013) make school punishment an important issue for the field of
youth justice both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.
Corresponding with the recent attention to the issue, both the United Kingdom and the
United States have seen policy changes regarding how students are punished. In the
United Kingdom, policy reform has mostly represented an effort to empower teachers,
reduce student exclusions from schools and address students’ needs. In the United States,
reform has largely represented an effort to reduce the use of exclusionary punishment and
racial disproportionality in school punishment.
We know little about whether these reform efforts have succeeded in achieving lasting
change in relation to how children are disciplined at school or about their potential for success. The effectiveness of school disciplinary reform depends largely on how school staff,
at various levels, understand the policy objectives underlying reform and how they put
these understandings into practice. These understandings and actions are influenced by the
types of institution in which school staff work, since staff members facing distinct institutional arrangements will face different sorts of challenges and organizational priorities.
In this article, we highlight differences in understandings and practices of school discipline
across different school environments, as reported to us in interviews with school staff at alternative schools (where students are sent if excluded from their mainstream school long term)
and in mainstream schools in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on data
from a sample of staff working in both mainstream schools and alternative schools in the
United States and United Kingdom, we present an overview of disciplinary reform in both
nations and explore how reform is conceived by these staff in various agencies. We argue
that, in both nations, there is a mismatch between mainstream schools and alternative schools
regarding approaches to punishment, techniques employed to manage student behaviour and
supports given to students. While this mismatch, in approaches, techniques and supports, is,
perhaps, to be expected given the differing remits of mainstream and alternative schools,
there has been little attempt to explore the nature of these distinctions or their impact on
young people experiencing both types of institution. We hypothesize reasons for the distinctions we find, with a focus on how these distinctions mirror the different institutional arrangements across types of schools, and we raise questions about both their impact on children’s
experiences and the potential for school disciplinary reform to achieve lasting results.
More broadly, this article provides a timely example of how different organizational
priorities (and practitioner responses) shape institutional approaches to dealing with
young people’s problematic behaviour. We highlight the central role of the practitioner in
interpreting policy and practice initiatives, and the daily pressures they face, within the
context of their institution.
School Disciplinary Reform
United States
Since the 1990s, schools across the United States began to turn towards criminal justice–
oriented security practices and personnel and began relying more on exclusionary punishment (called suspension in the United States). Despite decreasing rates of student
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victimization, schools established video surveillance systems and locked gates, imported
(full-time, uniform and armed) police officers and drug-sniffing police dogs and increasingly suspended students, mostly for relatively minor misbehaviour such as defiance of
authority or insubordination (see Kupchik, 2010). These trends mirror broader trends in
governance. As some have observed, schools’ obsession with rigid security and harsh
punishments closely resembled the contemporaneous concerns with security and style of
governance that have fuelled mass incarceration (Simon, 2007).
Others have noted the congruence between contemporary school punishment and security and other neo-liberal school policies such as school accountability through standardized testing; both sets of policies manage downwards through similar accountability
provisions (Kupchik and Catlaw, 2013). Students and their parents – particularly from
middle-class families – are now treated as consumers who are able to choose among several options, including the public schools serving their geographic areas, public schools
serving other geographic areas into which they can request admission, magnet schools
serving students with particular skills (e.g. for performing arts, for science and math, etc.)
or publicly funded ‘Charter’ schools that are operated by private companies. Public
schools often must compete for students or face losing revenue if their enrolments (and
the per-pupil funding attached to each student) decline (Kupchik and Catlaw, 2013).
Over the past few years, there is some evidence that the pendulum of criminal justice
reform might have swung the other way, as policy makers in the United States have sought
to reduce the use of exclusionary punishment in schools. Reform efforts have occurred at all
levels of government: local, state and federal. At the local level, several cities have passed
school discipline or security reform, such as Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Columbus, Chicago and Philadelphia, all of which changed their policies in 2014 alone (e.g.
Hein, 2014). A few states, including Colorado in 2012 and California in 2013, have done so
as well (see Adams, 2013; Padres & Jovenes Unidos, 2014). These state and local initiatives
have sought goals such as reducing the numbers of arrests at school, implementing restorative justice rather than exclusionary punishment and restricting the use of suspension.
The Federal Government has been active on this front as well, pursuing multiple strategies for reform of school punishment practices. Much of the federal effort has been framed
around the severe problem of racial disproportionality in school punishment, based on
repeated research findings that youth of colour, particularly Black youth, are significantly
more likely to be punished in school than are White youth. Importantly, research finds that
this racial gap in punishment begins as early as pre-school (US Department of Education,
2014b) and exists even after controlling for rates of student misbehaviour (e.g. Rocque
and Paternoster, 2011). Although racial disproportionality has been the primary frame for
proposing reform, the federal government’s proposed changes have been broad. In January
2014, the Federal Department of Education and Department of Justice released a joint
‘Dear Colleague’ letter expressing the goal of limiting exclusionary school discipline (US
Department of Education, 2014a). This was accompanied by several resources, including
one that described alternatives to exclusionary punishments. The primary thrust of these
documents was to encourage and support schools’ use of strategies such as restorative
justice, counselling, encouragement of positive behaviours and conflict mediation, in an
effort to reduce reliance on suspension, expulsion and arrest of students.
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United Kingdom
Across the United Kingdom, but most notably in England, a similar pattern of rising
exclusion rates throughout the 1990s, and a subsequent return to restorative practices, has
been in evidence, albeit within a different contextual framework. While in the United
States, the reform of school discipline is presented as an effort to end the school to prison
pipeline and racial disproportionality in school punishment; in the United Kingdom, it is
typically couched as an effort to empower teachers, reduce exclusions and address students’ needs (Kupchik et al., 2015).
For decades, reforming education policy in the United Kingdom has been high on the
political agenda. Concerns about student behaviour and the management of discipline in
schools, in particular, have produced a plethora of policies addressing school discipline
(Maguire et al., 2015). These policies are driven by national and international agendas
such as the ranking of education systems (Maguire et al., 2015) and typically shift between
competing political ideologies. The Conservative Government’s Education Reform Act
(1988) pushed a market-led philosophy of education based on the principle of competition
between schools, encouraging choice and using a narrow definition of the ‘successful
school’ based on exam results and exclusion rates. This neo-liberal approach to schooling,
mirroring changes in the Youth Justice System, thrusts schools into a culture of exclusion,
exacerbating and perpetuating wider socio-structural problems (Parsons, 1999). The legacy of the Conservative neo-liberal approach to education continues to endure despite the
cultural shift away from exclusionary practices towards more restorative forms of behaviour management.
New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, secured with the slogan ‘Education, Education,
Education’, provided an opportunity for the incoming government to act on their proposals for reform. Faced with record numbers of school exclusions, 135,000 from 1995 to
1996 (Smith, 1998: 6), New Labour prioritized policies to address social exclusion in
general and school exclusions in particular. Linked to wider debates about social exclusion, the damaging consequences of school exclusions had been well-documented in academic studies and the media (Audit Commission, 1996; Graham and Bowling, 1995;
Parsons, 1999) and consequently, reducing the record numbers of school exclusions
became a significant government priority (Steer, 2005, 2009). Reflecting the restorative
turn within youth justice and responding to evidence of a relationship between school
exclusions and youth justice intervention (McAra and McVie, 2007), developments in
behavioural policy eschewed the labelling effects of exclusion. However, critics argue
that little changed in practice, as schools continued to rely on an authoritarian populism,
where individuals were singled out for exclusionary punishment without critical reflection of the broader issues that might be causing misbehaviour or influencing school punishments (see Parsons, 1999; Vulliamy and Webb, 2000).
However, alongside the notion of individual blame in the United Kingdom, we have
also seen the rise of restorative practices in schools and the publication of numerous handbooks and guides for teachers. While many schools have embraced restorative practices
as a behaviour management tool, its use is not unproblematic or consistently applied. Still,
restorative practice presents opportunities for schools partly in its application, but also
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because ‘the underpinning principles … have challenged assumptions about the legitimacy of everyday statements such as “schools must maintain the right to exclude”’
(McCluskey et al., 2008: 414).
The Coalition government’s education policy, and now the new Conservative government’s policy, with their emphasis on choice, selection and diversification have further
encouraged school autonomy. For instance, behaviour policies can be, and have been,
differently interpreted and enacted. Each school is required to set out its behaviour management decisions to be scrutinized by Ofsted (the UK Office for Standards in Education,
Children’s Services and Skills: a government body set up to inspect and regulate schools
and other education services) but a significant degree of independence and freedom in this
area is evident. This combination of financial autonomy and regulatory demands for
schools to offer their own interpretations of codes of practice has led to significant variation in restorative and exclusionary practices, often resulting in practices that do not meet
students’ needs. Additionally, and again reflecting current concerns levied at the Youth
Justice System, the voices of children are typically absent in the decision-making process
(McCluskey, 2014; Slee, 1995).
Current Study
As we describe above, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, recent policy
reforms have sought to alter school disciplinary practices. Yet we know little about what
has changed or is changing regarding actual school practices or their perceived impact on
students. In this article, we address this question by analysing perspectives of school staff
on discipline, student behaviour and current discipline policy. Given the importance of
‘street-level bureaucrats’ in shaping policy implementation (Lipsky, 2010), it seems clear
that school disciplinary reform requires consistency in how school staff practice behaviour management across mainstream and alternative schools, two types of schools that
must work together to manage the behaviour of excluded students.
Our research is cross-national, as we study views of exclusionary punishment in the
United States and the United Kingdom. Given their similarity in criminal justice systems,
trends in punishment and political discourse on law and order during the post-War era,
these two nations have been used as comparators in many criminological studies (e.g.
Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; Garland, 2001; Jones and Newburn, 2006). These two
nations have shown great similarity in school disciplinary practice and political rhetoric
on the topic, with both nations trying to move away (rhetorically, at least) from the use of
exclusionary discipline that has marked their disciplinary systems since the 1990s, as we
discuss above. In a recent study, Kupchik et al. (2015) analyse policy discourse and practice of school punishment and security in the United States and England; they find that
although US schools emphasize accountability and punishment more so than English
schools, their punishment rates are strikingly similar. Furthermore, the disparity in political rhetoric that they do find across the two countries, where the United States focuses
more on zero tolerance punishment and England on restorative justice, has receded in just
the past 2 years, as the US government has sought to replace much of its exclusionary
school discipline with restorative practices.
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Table 1. Interview respondents.
UK respondents
US respondents
Institution type
Individual role
Pupil Referral Unit
Academy high school
Pupil Referral Unit
Local authority
Academy high school
High school
Academy high school
School district
School district
Alternative school
Alternative school
Alternative school district
High school
High school
Juvenile reform school
Deputy head teacher
Assistant principal
Head of school
Children’s services officer of inclusion
Head teacher
Director of inclusion
Assistant principal
Placement coordinator
Placement coordinator
Principal
Principal
Director
Dean of discipline
Assistant principal
Placement coordinator
Despite these similarities, educational systems differ considerably across the two
nations in the details of how schools are structured and administered. English school
heads report to local authorities, while principals in the United States report to a school
district superintendent; education in England is guaranteed until age 16 versus (typically)
at least age 18 in the United States and so on. The use of both nations as research sites
allows us to consider how school discipline and disciplinary reform is perceived differently across locations with similar policies and political discourse, but different institutional structures.
Our data come from a series of interviews with school administrators and other staff
whose positions involve discipline and student supports. The two authors leveraged professional contacts near their home institutions to gain access to a variety of local schools,
school district offices, alternative schools and one local authority office. We included both
mainstream schools and alternative placements, including Pupil Referral Units in England,
and both alternative schools and a juvenile reform school in the United States, in order to
assess the entire continuum of school exclusion; this way we understand the supports and
punishments given to youth in their home schools, when they are excluded from these
schools and after their return. We focused only on secondary schools.
Within each location, we followed a purposive sampling logic by interviewing staff
who are most involved with student discipline, the removal of students through disciplinary exclusion and the return of these (or other) students who had been excluded. We
completed a total of 15 interviews, 8 in the United States and 7 in the United Kingdom.
Interviews were completed by either one or both of the authors, or, in only two cases, a
student research assistant trained in interviewing techniques. In Table 1, we list the interview respondents, the nation in which they work, their position and the type of agency or
school in which they work. Interviews lasted between 35 minutes and 1 hour and 45 minutes. They were transcribed by either a professional transcriber or (for three US interviews
only) a student research assistant.
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All interview transcripts were coded and analysed using Atlas.ti software. Both
authors analysed the data and verified each other’s coding. Analyses began deductively,
with a list of codes pertaining to hypotheses about: (1) supports for students in both
mainstream and alternative schools, (2) patterns of exclusionary punishment and (3)
opportunities for students who had been excluded to return to their original (mainstream)
schools. While coding for these themes, we also inductively searched for additional
important themes. The analyses we report in this article were derived through such an
inductive process, since these unexpected themes emerged from the data. They were
clear and consistent across respondents in the United States and United Kingdom and
identified by both researchers.
Results
Although this research project initially set out to understand how cross-national differences impact behaviour management and treatment of excluded students, we found striking similarity across nations. We repeatedly heard consistent messages from similarly
situated interview respondents in the United States and the United Kingdom about the
challenges and pressures they face, their understandings of students’ behaviour management needs and their efforts to implement school behaviour management strategies. We
also found that the distinction between mainstream schools and alternative schools was
surprisingly consistent across nations. Thus, we set aside a cross-national comparison and
instead turn to an analysis of distinctions between mainstream and alternative schools that
can inform our understandings of wider institutional policies and practices within youth
justice.
The data reveal a complex set of behaviour management and support processes at work
in mainstream and alternative schools. These processes are influenced by structural and
financial pressures as well as moral and political positioning of individual head teachers
and governing bodies. In considering the behaviour management and support practices in
schools, our data reveal a mismatch between mainstream and alternative provision schools
in terms of: (1) overall approach to behaviour management and student needs and (2) the
application of behaviour policies into practice. These distinctions mirror and, we hypothesize, result from a third mismatch we find between mainstream and alternative schools:
(3) responses to institutional pressures. As we discuss below, these distinctions conform
to disparities in the level of competition for students and resources faced by mainstream
versus alternative schools, leading us to hypothesize about the differing effect of marketbased institutional arrangements on school behaviour management.
Approaches to behaviour management and student needs: Naughty or needy?
Recent policy trends in both the US and UK schools emphasize the reduction of exclusionary discipline and a move towards restorative practices (Hein, 2014; McCluskey,
2014; McCluskey et al., 2008). However, despite the seemingly straightforward directives, we found a variation in approach adopted by the schools in this study. Distinctions
between mainstream and alternative schools in approaches to behaviour management and
punishment stood out as we analysed the data. While mainstream schools tended towards
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a punishment approach to discipline, alternative schools favoured preventative, reformative approaches addressing causes of behaviour, vulnerabilities and students’ needs.
Respondents from both groups of schools discussed the need to facilitate students’
positive engagement in schools. All the respondents acknowledged the important role of
the school as a whole, and of individual staff, in supporting students. The word ‘support’
was used frequently by all respondents, such as in the following examples:
It’s making sure that students engage well and are happy and safe and secure in school and got
the right environment to do the best they possibly can, put in the support that, you know, we
think they need to keep them here. (United Kingdom, Mainstream)
We try to make their behaviour plan and discussion holistic, where everyone’s involved so that
we can really hammer hand-on specific supports. (United States, Mainstream)
We are becoming more and more successful at what we’re doing in our, in our buildings and our
alternative programmes, and we’re developing supports at the school. (United States, Alternative)
However, despite this universal agreement that students need appropriate support, there
was little agreement on what that ‘support’ should entail. Respondents’ acknowledgement
and understanding of how appropriate supports can, and should, be achieved varied significantly. Their descriptions of interventions and practices revealed a variety of diverse
views and approaches.
In both the United Kingdom and the United States, we consistently found a general
view among alternative provision staff that mainstream schools do not provide adequate
counselling or other forms of therapeutic services for children with behavioural problems.
While it was acknowledged that the high student-to-staff ratio in mainstream schools precluded high levels of individual support being offered, wider support structures within
schools were not seen to be sufficient.
In contrast, alternative provision schools in this study discussed efforts to build relationships with students and in the process prevent misconduct through therapeutic practices. They focused less on discipline and punishment and more on meeting students’
social and emotional needs, where they would try to uncover why students act up and
attempt to either resolve underlying issues or allow students space to work through these
issues without hurting themselves or others. For example,
We don’t have a behaviour policy: we have what we call a relationship policy. We have quite a
clear coding of what’s acceptable and what’s not and how things are reported. (United Kingdom,
Alternative)
Well, we, when we look at discipline for us, we’re looking more at therapy, we’re looking at
treatable moments …. We wanna educate our staff to deal with those challenging behaviours
that we de-escalate immediately, we don’t ever wanna escalate the problem and nine times out
of ten, if you have the right relationship with the student, even if they’re upset and even if they
are taking it over the top or, you know, getting aggressive, the right person can de-escalate that
in moments and that’s part of the training that we do. (United States, Alternative)
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Typically the approach of the alternative schools focused on causes of misbehaviour
and providing the appropriate means of support to address the needs of the child. The
provision of services was prioritized to address the specific social and emotional vulnerabilities of their students.
Conversely, mainstream schools were more likely to focus on the behaviour itself: prioritizing student accountability and poor decision-making in students’ behaviour and frequently perceiving troubled young people as naughty rather than needy. In line with
findings from earlier studies (Vulliamy and Webb, 2000), rather than focusing on social
and emotional health, mainstream schools operationalized support as behavioural accountability and disciplinary structure.
For example, the following respondent at a mainstream UK school discussed the
development of a purpose-built internal exclusion centre within the school grounds.
This was a form of punishment rather than a reparative attempt to address students’
vulnerabilities and needs, and the behavioural management approach is clear from the
language used:
When we opened the centre … we got six of who we thought were our worst students in terms
of number of repeat exclusions, creating most problems, most disruptive and so on and put
them in here and it was an absolute nightmare. [We’ve] got a very experienced team and we
really struggled because putting six students, who are really naughty, there were no positive
role models in there, it took one to come in with an issue that they’d brought in from outside
and then the others sort of picked up on the mood and the vibe and then that set them off …
it was a very, very challenging time and it wasn’t very successful at all. Staff that came over,
cause we use our teaching staff from the main site, they came over and it was just impossible
to teach even six of them, and also quite a lot of the place … was trashed quite badly. (United
Kingdom, Mainstream)
The internal exclusion process in this mainstream school was not designed to address
student’s social/emotional needs or the causes of their behaviour.
The following respondent, from a US mainstream school, likewise highlighted behavioural interventions – usually consisting of behavioural contracts that force a student to
promise good behaviour or risk further punishment – as a key component of the management strategy:
As I wrap up my school year, I’m gonna be sitting down looking at reading interventions,
math interventions and behaviour interventions, so, I might be pulling all that data. Who are
the kids that didn’t succeed … this year? Who are the kids that had … more referrals this
year? Do those kids have behaviour intervention plans? If they don’t, I need to make sure I
hit the ground running, starting that up the beginning of the school year. (United States,
Mainstream)
Behaviour management is a challenge for all schools. It is clear in our data that mainstream schools take a different overall approach to that employed by alternative placements, in which ‘support’ is defined as firm and consistent accountability in the former
but as therapeutic intervention in the latter.
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Application of behaviour policies into practice: Restorative practices and
exclusion
Schools’ different approaches to behaviour management and punishment were reflected
in their on-the-ground actions. Their use of exclusionary punishments (both temporary
exclusions or suspensions and permanent exclusions or expulsions) is indicative of the
overall ethos of the school in relation to the management of behaviour.
Staff at both groups of schools view exclusionary punishment as unfortunate, even if
they believe that exclusions might have a positive impact on classroom order. In general, staff view fixed-term exclusions (suspension) as the most severe form of punishment before permanent exclusion (expulsion), which could be imposed as a last resort.
These respondents understand that exclusion/suspension can lead to other negative consequences for youth, and that it is something to be avoided, as described by these staff
members:
We actively try to keep as many students in school as we can. (United Kingdom, Mainstream)
We desperately don’t want to permanently exclude. Because we know the outcome for a child
if you permanently exclude them. And it’s grim … In this local authority, when we permanently
exclude, we know the waiting list to get a child into a PRU is about six to eight weeks. When
they get into the PRU they are then on such a minimal provision, and they’re not accessing the
services that they need … And so it sits very heavily with us when we know we have to say
‘Right, there is nowhere else we, as a mainstream school, can go with this child. We need the
governors to exclude this student’. (United Kingdom, Mainstream school)
Yet the stated willingness of staff to exclude students, and thus to expose youth to these
negative consequences, differed between alternative and mainstream schools. For mainstream school staff, the onus seems to be on students to behave appropriately, or else they
will suffer these consequences that come from exclusion. While this might be a negative
result, staff described it as necessary, almost an inevitable consequence resulting from
student misbehaviour, as if the school has no other options available.
For example, consider the following quote from a US mainstream school administrator,
who was describing how the school might respond to a child having difficulty when
returning back to the school from an alternative placement:
… let’s say, we notice that they’re not doing so well in the morning because of two classes, then
they’ll go to [an in-school alternative classroom] for two classes, come out for the remainder of
the classes … If we notice that they’re not doing well within that setting, then we go back up to
recommend, recommending them to alternative placement ‘cause maybe this isn’t the setting
for them in terms of being successful. (United States, Mainstream)
Here, the onus is on the student; if she is not doing well, it’s time for her to return to an
alternative placement rather than the mainstream school addressing her needs and
difficulties.
In the following exchange, a UK mainstream head of school describes how he implemented his approach to exclusions upon assuming his position. As heunderstands it, the
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key to effective behaviour management is the consistent and firm use of exclusions in
response to rule violations:
Head of school:
Interviewer:
Head of school:
Interviewer:
Head of school:
I was here for two years as deputy before I took over as head. I
was marching kids out the building left, right and centre when I
first came here for doing things. So, the headteacher at the time
was absolutely trying to limit the amount of exclusions I was
doing.
Really?
I probably did three hundred that year. But we had kids smoking in
the building. We had kids swearing at staff on a more than daily
basis. No uniform rules. No make-up rules. Pretty much no limiting
behaviours. And we had to put a marker down and say, ‘that’s not
acceptable’, and be very consistent about it. So I was consistently
applying policy. He was very worried about the numbers, because
they were huge.
And, and what changed?
We carried on doing it. … We carried on excluding for exactly the
same things. … It was the pupils that were fed up with the behaviour. I mean, the staff were, because they didn’t want to be sworn at
and they didn’t want kids messing around in the lessons. But the
pupils that were here at the time were the ones who really appreciated the fact that the behaviour started to improve, and they could go
learn the lessons. And they would frequently come and be quite
vocal about it. You know, ‘I’m glad you got rid of such-and-such.
I’m glad I can now work in silence’. Et cetera, et cetera. So maybe
starting and being consistent. You have to start, and it will be quite
high to start with. But it will naturally come down if you stick with
it, I think. (United Kingdom, Mainstream)
Mainstream school staff thus see exclusion as an important component of behaviour
management, even if it is an unfortunate outcome. Most mainstream school staff we interviewed did mention a middle-ground, where students who misbehave were sent to an inschool alternative educational room. Here they would be segregated from the general
population for a portion of the day or an entire day, and they would receive counselling
and anger management in addition to academic instruction. Yet these interventions are
secondary to and dependent on the prerequisite exclusionary punishment, illustrating
mainstream schools’ prioritization of punitive segregation of troublesome students from
the general population.
In contrast, alternative school staff did not espouse the value of exclusion in response
to student misconduct. Consistent with their different view of student ‘support’ that we
discuss above, these staff were more likely to discuss therapeutic interventions and restorative justice techniques that are practised in and outside of classrooms. As one alternative
school principal in the US stated,
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When we look at discipline for us, we’re looking more at therapy, we’re looking at treatable
moments, we really don’t wanna take the negative tone. (United States, Alternative)
The following head of a PRU noted how staff in her school are not allowed to exclude
students and instead taught how to address the youths’ problems:
… we do do training on classroom management. And around how not to engage in some of
these teenage secondary behaviours. And it doesn’t sit well. Because some teachers, particularly
if they’ve been in the job a long time, they’re not reflective. And they don’t like to accept that
the issue actually might be closer to home than they like. So that’s one of the things that we try
to get them to accept that we’re always learning and there are always ways to deal with this. And
there’s some great resources out there that we use with them. And say ‘Right, how do we make
this better?’ Cos it’s, you know, leave it as it is and it’s not gonna change. And our staff aren’t
allowed to say ‘I won’t have that child in my classroom’. Which I know in some schools, some
staff do do that. But we say ‘You can’t say that’. So … (United Kingdom, Alternative)
Unlike comments from mainstream school staff, alternative school staff did not frequently discuss the need to send disruptive students to any segregated area within their
schools in order to receive therapy. Instead they described restorative justice and social/
emotional counselling as being integral aspects of student/staff interactions throughout
the school. The following US alternative school principal describes how restorative practices even start each day for some students:
Principal:
We come in, we do check-in, in-search, so all of our students are searched
when they come in, it’s a minimal pat down search and we go, make sure
there, there’s no contraband, no drugs. They have breakfast and then
most students start their academic day. Some students will go into, what
we call, restorative practises, it’s community. Are you familiar with
restorative practices?
Interviewer: Yes.
Principal:
Okay. So, we, they participate in community, they participate in groups,
individuals and they have their four core classes, for the middle school.
Same thing for the high school and then, in addition to the four core, in
the high school, we offer online learning to gain the additional credits
that they need. So, but they have their, their courses and they have lunch
and they, of course, we have the community in their groups in the afternoon as well. (United States, Alternative)
Competing priorities: Students’ needs, limited resources and institutional
pressures
As we describe above, mainstream and alternative schools operationalize student ‘supports’ differently, with resulting disparities in their use of exclusionary punishment versus
restorative practices. Although we have insufficient data to fully explain this result, our
data lead us to the following hypothesis: that these different responses to behaviour
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management are the result of different institutional arrangements facing mainstream and
alternative schools, which themselves are the manifestation of different market-based
pressures placed on the two types of schools.
Schools face tough choices in relation to managing students’ behaviour. Consistent with
Tucker’s (2013) UK-based study, our findings suggest that in both the United Kingdom
and the United States, mainstream schools face competing pressures for limited resources
alongside great external pressure to enhance care and support under increasing scrutiny
and a culture of performativity. In the United States, schools must release annual report
cards that report their standardized test scores and behaviour problems; in an era of neoliberal competition, in which parents can choose to enrol their children in out-of-district
public schools or in publicly funded charter schools, these reports are important political
statements with financial repercussions. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, Ofsted measures and reports schools’ performances, holding schools to account for the attainment,
behaviour and progress of their pupils. Along with national league tables based on exam
results, Ofsted reports influence parental choice and can deeply affect the number of applications to a school. Head teachers may fear that a poor Ofsted report will result in a lower
academic standard and increases in behavioural issues in subsequent years. Additionally,
with increasing cuts to school budgets, and with many schools moving to self-governing
academy status, the United Kingdom has seen a decline in support services in schools,
making the management of difficult behaviour even more challenging. In both countries,
schools are expected to meet performance standards regarding student academics and
behaviour, while they struggle and compete for necessary operating budgets.
This pressure to produce respectable academic scores (high standardized test scores)
and behaviour measures (few exclusions) means that mainstream schools are incentivized
to remove difficult students long term. These students tend to be low-performing, academically (e.g. Rocque and Paternoster, 2011), thus they may lower the school’s mean test
scores. In support of this hypothesis, a head teacher at an alternative provision school in
the United Kingdom suggested that under-achieving pupils may be excluded from mainstream schools for low-level disruptions in order for the school to meet academic targets
and expectations:
… we get mainly Year Elevens coming through to us and I think, again, it’s that emphasis of
shift, that it’s those tables that, those league tables that show the schools and children who
perhaps aren’t going to meet what the school was expected and let them down, let numbers drop
overall etcetera. They’re put out for slight disruptions and often we do have students who you
think, ‘Why on earth have they ever been excluded, you know, they’re nice, they’re polite, hardworking and they’re here and it’s just a silly, it might have been a one-off incident?’ (United
Kingdom, Alternative)
Similarly, if a young person frequently receives fixed-period exclusions/suspensions,
the school would be better off excluding the student long term, so that they no longer
contribute to discipline or misbehaviour data. Fear of a bad Ofsted score encourages
schools to think about rules and behaviour management, not providing for student services. A UK local authority described this process in reference to a school in her
jurisdiction:
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… the headteacher has been brought in there with a purpose of bringing the school’s standards
up to what’s considered an acceptable level. At the moment it’s an under-subscribed school, it’s
an unpopular school, it’s got a poor reputation. They want to make it one of the best schools in
[this area]. And in order to improve their standards, they need to remove the children they feel
are impacting on their standards. Whether that’s by permanent exclusion or otherwise. (United
Kingdom, Local Authority)
At the same time, when mainstream schools exclude students long term, they also
forego the money attached to those students. In one school we studied, the head teacher
described her school’s efforts to make sure that disruptive students, those whose grades
were poor, and those who she defined as ‘at risk’ stayed at the school. They did so by
creating an in-school alternative educational programme housed in a building that was
separate from the rest of the school. The programme was borne out of the desire to reduce
costs (and Ofsted-recorded exclusion figures), not by a desire to reduce exclusionary
practice and its subsequent impact:
As a city, we spend millions and millions of pounds on putting students into alternative provision
… So we asked to have one on our site and really, the brief was to use it for students, to keep
them here rather than send them, and spend money on sending them to other places. (United
Kingdom, Mainstream)
Additionally, after a period of exclusion in alternative provision, some mainstream
schools admitted financial motives among their reasons for accepting previously permanently excluded children back onto the register:
We do have a very inclusive policy about, you know, if you mess up and come back, give them
a bit more time in provision and then get them back in, because we want them back in, this is
costing us a lot of money, and school’s the best place for the child, not in provision. (United
Kingdom, Mainstream)
Alternative schools might be underfunded as well, but they do not face the same pressure of performance expectations and market competition. Alternative schools are a last
resort option, where students are sent if they are removed from mainstream schools; they
are not on the menu of choices for parents who wish to find the best school for their children. They also face fewer pressures to achieve high test score results, since their mission
is to address students’ behaviour within an educational environment that maintains students’ progress at grade level, not to excel academically. Parents and local officials do not
expect alternative schools to excel in this way. Furthermore, in the United States at least,
where students more frequently return to mainstream schools, test scores follow students,
not schools; since few students are at an alternative school for an entire year, their test
scores are typically used to evaluate the mainstream school from which they came, not the
alternative school.
We suggest that, without the same market-based pressures that shape the landscape of
mainstream school priorities, alternative schools are less concerned about minor student
disruptions and therefore less eager to exclude students who might cause disruptions.
They have the flexibility to address students’ behaviour over time, using restorative
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practices, without the need to show immediate results or high test scores. This distinction
would help explain the consistent differences we heard across mainstream and alternative
schools although further testing using larger samples of schools is necessary to investigate
it more thoroughly.
Conclusion
In this article, we have highlighted differences in perceptions of school discipline from a
sample of staff working in both mainstream and alternative schools in the United States
and the United Kingdom. In both nations, there is a clear mismatch between mainstream
schools and alternative schools, regarding approaches to punishment, techniques employed
to manage student behaviour and supports given to students. Differing funding streams,
remits, objectives and pressures facing each type of school may go some way to explaining their different behavioural management approaches. Our data reveal a complex set of
nuanced considerations that schools negotiate in making decisions about behaviour management and support, and in particular about the use of exclusions versus restorative
practices.
Principals and teachers in mainstream schools discussed the pressures of academic and
behavioural targets and the impact on the school of poor student performance amid the
current neo-liberal climate of competition. By permanently excluding students displaying
problematic and challenging behaviour, either to internal facilities or to alternative provision, head teachers are removing the disruption from their classrooms. This may well
have the positive effect of improving overall behaviour and the academic achievement of
the remaining students, but will also, for the most part, increase permanent exclusion figures and reduce the school’s income. The exception, here, occurs where a school has its
own internal exclusion facility since exclusions are not recorded and reported in the same
way and funds for excluded students do not leave the school. But, in the majority of
schools, principals and head teachers are obliged to weigh-up the pros and cons of each
course of action – decisions that are made more pertinent by concerns about dwindling
access to support for students displaying challenging behaviour and a chronic lack of
resources. It is in this ‘weighing-up’ process that local factors and priorities (and how
these are interpreted by schools, head teachers and other practitioners) become relevant,
while some schools and head teachers are determined to find the right support for children
displaying problematic behaviour, others are minded to remove and exclude in the interests of the other students, and still others seem to be guided largely by financial priorities
rather than the interests of the child.
In contrast, alternative providers do not face the same pressures as mainstream schools.
They remain largely immune from the pressure of market competition and performance expectations, and while they, too, face budgetary cuts in most areas, their approach, and resources,
is largely focused on pastoral and academic support and behavioural intervention.
The distinctions in behaviour management presented here are likely the result of a
complex set of factors including pressures of accountability, market competition,
financial considerations and school ethos. Thus, each individual school’s approach to
behaviour management drives its own unique institutional behaviour policies and
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practices as well as steering the nature of support on offer and the distribution of
resources. These findings thus highlight how the institutional arrangements and market-based organizational priorities facing schools might influence their approach to
behaviour management. While our results are based on exploratory research, with a
sample size of only 15 schools, they present an important hypothesis that can be tested
by larger scale research.
These distinctions are important, since mainstream and alternative schools are intended
to work together in a coordinated fashion as they manage student discipline. Discovering
such distinct approaches across mainstream and alternative schools suggests that disciplinary reform efforts in both nations may achieve limited impact, though the actual effect of
the disparity will become clearer over time as policy reforms are implemented. Our results
raise a number of questions about the impact of different behaviour management
approaches on children’s experiences, particularly when a student experiences a transition
between mainstream and alternative schools, that should be explored as scholars continue
to study school punishment policy and policy reform:
•• Where a mismatch occurs between the behaviour management approaches and pastoral support offered in mainstream and alternative schools, as illustrated above,
how does a young person moving between the two types of school experience this
mismatch?
•• How do mismatches in approach influence mainstream and alternative schools’
ability to work together to assess students’ behaviour management and needs?
•• How do varying behaviour approaches allow for a consistent joint-response to
young people’s misbehaviour?
•• And how do mainstream and alternative schools provide continuity of supports
throughout the process of reintegration to mainstream schooling?
These questions, focusing on behaviour management in schools, sit within a wider
context of authority responses and approaches to young people’s problematic behaviours in criminal justice and community settings. The framework of organizational priorities that shape approaches to young people’s behaviour in schools can readily be
applied to the management of young people in youth offender institutes, secure centres,
youth detention centres or those attending community-based justice interventions. The
key concerns discussed here in relation to schools – inconsistent behaviour management policies and practice within and between institutions and institutional pressures
dictating access to support and approaches to punishment – must also be considered in
relation to young people entering, exiting and moving between criminal justice
institutions.
This research has, perhaps, raised more questions than it has answered. What is clear,
however, is that providing continuity and consistency in behavioural expectations and
support becomes more difficult when schools do not share a common approach to behaviour management. This mismatch might become even more important when attempting to
implement reform. Given contemporary efforts in both the United States and United
Kingdom to implement school disciplinary reform, our findings raise significant concerns
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about the ability of either nation to successfully change processes of exclusion. If the two
types of schools charged with managing exclusions in a coordinated manner are unable to
even define the most basic goals of student behaviour management, it seems unlikely that
these efforts will be successful.
Although the results of policy reform efforts are yet to be seen, our research points
towards promising strategies for school disciplinary policy that offer greater hope of
reform success. Our results suggest that mainstream and alternative schools might
achieve better coordination if some of the market-based school accountability measures seen in both countries were revisited. If schools were positively evaluated for the
implementation of restorative justice principles, rather than evaluated only on test
scores and disciplinary incidents, then mainstream schools might be more likely to see
its value and more fully incorporate restorative practices into their day-to-day practices. In addition to counting restorative practices as positive attributes of a school, it
might be helpful if schools are able to exclude a certain number of students from their
reported test scores; perhaps this involves something as simple as using median rather
than mean test scores, so that schools are less afraid of keeping the lowest scoring
students on their rolls. Finally, it is crucial that schools with greater challenges from
student misbehaviour receive more financial support. This would allow them to implement more effective restorative justice practices rather than exclusionary punishment
– to address underlying causes of student misbehaviour rather than removing students
seen as the problem.
Certainly, our research has limitations. It is intended to be exploratory and as such it
involves a relatively small and non-random sample of informants from only a single
region in each nation. Nevertheless, the consistency of the results, both within nations and
cross-nationally, leave us confident that the themes we discuss above will survive under
scrutiny from further research efforts.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Simon and Hallsworth Visiting Scholar Funds,
University of Manchester. We wish to thank Eli Webster for his research assistance and contributions to this
article.
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Author biographies
Jo Deakin is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Manchester. She
researches and writes in the areas of youth justice, school punishment, youth inclusion and offender
management.
Aaron Kupchik is Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. His books
include The Real School Safety Problem: The Long-Term Consequences of Harsh School Punishment
(University of California Press, 2016) and Homeroom Security: School discipline in an age of fear (NYU
Press, 2010).
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