Summary
On paper, your behaviour policy makes sense… so why doesn’t it work in every classroom - and for every pupil?
In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, you’ll learn the 7 reasons why good behaviour policies often fail in good schools - even when leaders care, staff are committed, and the intentions are right.
Drawing on nearly two decades of work with real schools, we unpack the hidden reasons behaviour policies stumble: why copying “best practice" from other settings can backfire, why consistency breaks down under pressure and what happens when policies are launched but never truly embedded into everyday practice.
If you’re a school leader or teacher trying to build a behaviour policy that staff actually use, trust and stick to when things get difficult, this episode will help you stress-test your thinking and understand how to embed an effective policy in your school.
Important links:
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Download other FREE behaviour resources for use in school: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources
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Show notes / transcription
00:00:00 Simon Currigan
If you've got a behaviour policy that looks solid on paper but somehow doesn't work consistently in practice, this episode is for you. I'm going to show you why good behaviour policies often fail in good schools—not because staff don't care, and not because the policy's wrong, but because of a few hidden implementation traps that most leaders never get warned about.
00:00:21
My name's Simon Currigan, and for nearly two decades, I've helped hundreds of schools design and fix behaviour policies that actually work in real classrooms under pressure. And in this episode, I'm going to walk you through the seven factors that I've identified that undermine behaviour policies, so you can stress-test your own policy in school and feel confident it's something staff will actually use, trust, and stick to when things get difficult.
00:01:28
Hi there, welcome to School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and if you were looking for a highbrow podcast about SEMH and behaviour, you're looking for the podcast next door. That one probably has Latin quotes and someone who once read half a neuroscience textbook on the train and never taught in a classroom. This one, it's got me. You've been warned. That said, School Behaviour Secrets is the podcast where we unpick what's really driving behaviour in schools in the real world and how you can make a genuine difference for your pupils, especially the ones with social, emotional, and mental health needs.
00:02:02
And today, we're talking about why good behaviour policies fail in good schools—schools that have good leaders, thoughtful staff, sensible policies, well-intentioned decisions, and yet behaviour still doesn't quite work. The policy doesn't quite respond effectively yet to kids with complex SEMH needs. Maybe there's inconsistency between classrooms, so good behaviour is patchy, or practice excels in some classrooms but not so much in others. Internal exclusions potentially become an issue as a result, or staff start quietly doing their own thing in different rooms. And everyone then feels frustrated because the policy on paper is solid, but in real life, it's just not working the way it's supposed to.
00:02:47
So today, we're going to talk about seven failure points where a perfectly good behaviour policy might not work in a good school. Not to criticise, not to blame, but to help you understand the reasons why this happens, because they're not always obvious unless you've had experience of developing policies in a large number of schools. You wouldn't necessarily know what to look for. And I'll share what you can do differently so your policy becomes something people actually use, trust, and they rely on under pressure. And for me, out of the seven that we're going to look at, seven is the monster in the room. It's the mistake I most often see in our work with schools. But if you want to stress-test your policy in school, all of these are going to be useful.
00:03:28
Before we dive into that, if you're finding this podcast useful, remember to hit subscribe or the follow button in your app so you never miss a future episode. And if you've got just 20 seconds to spare, leave me a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It really helps other school leaders and teachers find this show. And if you know a colleague or you've got a friend who'd find this episode useful, please share it with them. My aim with this podcast is to get as much useful information about SEMH and behaviour based on evidence and effective real-world practice out there to as many people as possible. And that would really help me on that mission.
00:04:08
All right then, let's get into it. First failure point. The behaviour policy is treated as information to absorb, not delivered as a system or a sustained practice that involves a set of skills that's maintained in an ongoing way. Right, so there's a lot there, so I'm going to unpack that.
00:04:25
Let's take the example of a new member of staff. In most schools, when a new member of staff starts, the behaviour policy will be given to them during induction, and then they read it, and then they sign it. And if they're lucky, maybe someone talks them through it for 10 minutes. And then, well, that's it really. But behaviour policies aren't really focused on knowledge. It's not like fire safety or GDPR or how to log into SIMS. Implementing a behaviour policy with kids in a classroom requires both judgment and a skill set. It depends on a set of micro-decisions and responses to emotional outbursts or timing choices or the ability to build relationships. And that combination of skills only makes sense when you see it in action because the way that mix comes together will vary from school to school.
00:05:16
So quick analogy here that might help. You don't learn to swim by reading a manual on doing the front crawl because when you read a set of instructions, that doesn't translate into what swimming is like in the real world, the experience of water flowing around you, the coldness you experience, how that might affect your breath and movement. You only learn by actually getting in the water with someone who knows what they're doing, having the experience or watching someone experience swimming well, and then they coach you through it. And when new staff never see experienced staff in school modelling the policy for them, they never get the opportunity to shadow how it's used with tricky pupils, never watch how a calm adult handles a heated moment. The policy stays like this abstract set of ideas that they just read about once.
00:06:09
And then when the pressure hits, what happens is they don't kind of reach for the policy. They fall back on their instincts, stuff that's kind of worked for them in the past. And those habits, they might be good, they might be bad, but when people are doing that, you get individual practice, and then you don't get consistent practice in every classroom in your school with adults implementing the policy in the same way. And that means the policy might be good, but if it isn't implemented because your staff's induction wasn't concrete enough, it wasn't skills-based, it won't be sustained.
00:06:45
And a quick side note here, what I see is some schools trying to overcome this difficulty by trying to stuff loads of examples and case studies inside the behaviour policy itself. And that leads to the policy being like 50, 60 pages long, and then no one has the time to read it, which creates another issue. Now, stuffing loads of SEMH and behaviour training you've had from the last five years into your behaviour policy isn't the solution. You're solving for the wrong problem, which isn't a poorly written behaviour policy. It's a poor induction.
00:07:18
Now, onto the second failure point, which is your staff don't have a shared understanding of why the policy works, why the policy's asking them to handle behaviour in a certain way. And that's important because staff are much more likely to follow the rules if they understand the principles the policy is based on. When they don't have that, they won't implement it, or they'll, let's be honest, implement it in a half-assed way. So let me explore that for a moment. If you have a needs-based policy, your policy's designed to solve the problem of why you might see challenging behaviour in class, what the reasons for that are, what stress the responses the adults should implement are trying to reduce, what outcomes it's working towards in the long term. And if you don't get all of that, if you don't get the why explained to you, if you've never had the philosophy or the approach kind of explained step by step, then the policy feels arbitrary. And then the rules or expectations for how adults are expected to react will get ignored under pressure.
00:08:26
But when staff understand, they say, "Ah, this approach works because it lowers shame, it restores safety, it reduces escalation, it keeps the students' thinking brain online," then the policy becomes meaningful. It becomes something that they choose to implement because it makes sense, not because it's something that you're being forced to do. When they don't have that understanding, what happens is people use the policy when they're consciously thinking about it. So let's say you're in the room as a leader doing an observation. The person at the front of the room, the teacher observing or the teaching assistant, they're now hyper-conscious of what they should be doing. It's at the forefront of their minds, so they follow the policy. But under day-to-day pressure, when they're not being observed or there's not a reason to be conscious about it, what happens is they fall back on habits. They go back to what they were doing before you walked in the room.
00:09:19
Now, that's not a character flaw. It's not a judgment. That's just how the human brain works under pressure. And that's not on them. It's on us as school leaders because we didn't explain policy. We didn't explain the principles. We didn't carry the argument with them, and we didn't generate buy-in for our approach. Without that shared approach and understanding, our behaviour policy never survives contact with a year-9 meltdown at 10:40 a.m. on a wet Tuesday.
00:09:46
Third failure point. Your staff haven't had the opportunity to explore how to apply the behaviour policy in difficult, complex case studies. When you've got kids with trauma or anxiety or ADHD or autism or attachment needs or whatever, when they're all sat in the same room, you've got a complex system that might require a complex response. But when staff haven't had the opportunity to discuss what works and what doesn't in those complicated cases and what your policy actually means in the moment, well, they're kind of like left alone to interpret what to do in those difficult cases.
00:10:22
That's when people quietly invent their own versions of the behaviour policy, not because they're being rebellious or negligent, but because they genuinely don't know how to implement the policy when life gets complicated. And that means as part of our ongoing work during staff meetings or other sessions, we need to be sharing case studies of incidents where the behaviour policy was applied, all anonymised, obviously, that are complex. And then we ask the team to talk through questions like, in this situation, of the things we did, what worked? What didn't work? Was the way we responded consistent with our school values? And you start really unpicking the response so you can explore how the policy was implemented. Not to shame anyone, but to help people apply responses consistently. Think really deeply about what the policy means in practice.
00:11:13
Now, obviously, if you don't want to use a real case from school, make one up. Say, let's imagine this scenario. Pupil X walks into the dining room and does Y. How do we handle it? What would the outcome be? That's deep thinking about how we respond to complex cases and build consistency with our behaviour policy.
00:11:33
Fourth failure point, accountability for implementing the policy kind of fades away after it's been launched. Now, most policies get launched with a lot of energy, an inset day, maybe a PowerPoint with a few animated bullet points, posters in the staff room, whatever. Everyone's aligned and on the same page on day one. And then, 12 weeks later, people have stopped looking at what's actually happening in classrooms and checking whether it's consistent.
00:11:57
As leaders, that means that then no one is course-correcting as people forget naturally what they're supposed to be doing because they're deluged with information all the time. And then no one notices the drift until one day you turn around and it's the norm. You've got inconsistency across your classrooms. And at that point, it can feel too late to do anything about it. Policies need maintenance. Without that, drift from the adults takes over, and that's human nature.
00:12:24
And by the way, when I use the word accountability here, sometimes people assume I mean it in a kind of like a harsh way, a trying to catch people out way, leaping to capability and performance management plans, that sort of thing. It doesn't have to be like that, and that's not what I'm talking about here. Accountability can be about supportive conversations, keeping people on track, reminding people about good practice in school, what it looks like, what it sounds like, where things have drifted in their classroom. And you can do that in a positive way that helps everyone.
00:12:57
The fifth failure point, and this is kind of linked to the last one, it's when leaders feel uncomfortable challenging adults about how they're implementing the policy in school. And this is one of the hardest ones because leaders might do an observation or they might see an inconsistency, but then they hesitate to call it out or to challenge it because they don't want to damage relationships with that member of staff, or they just feel uncomfortable doing that as an adult. They don't want to be seen as controlling or authoritarian. And let's be honest, sometimes as human beings, we just don't want conflict with the people we work with day in, day out.
00:13:34
So we let those small deviations slide, and over time, those small deviations become our culture. So as a leadership team, we have to find a common way of having those difficult conversations, just as we expect our adults to have a common way of managing behaviour in the classroom. Here, consistency across the leadership team in managing those difficult conversations is as important as the consistency we're looking for in behaviour practice across our classrooms. So some people will be naturally good at having those conversations intuitively. Other people's less so.
00:14:09
But having those conversations, well, that's a skill that can be learned, and a shared approach across our management teams means teachers get the same high-quality support and experience from us. And that means that their development isn't left to some sort of random walk based on who happened to be mentoring them or managing them in school.
00:14:28
Sixth failure point, the policy doesn't match the everyday reality of classrooms. Many policies assume calm adults, rational pupils, but real classrooms involve stress, overload, shame, fear, anger, confusion. And that's for the adults as well as the kids. And if the policy only works when everyone is regulated, it won't work when it's needed during emotionally escalated situations or pupils struggling to manage complex needs. And then because it doesn't work and people see with their own eyes that it doesn't work, what they start to do is bypass the policy, not because they don't care, but because it doesn't feel usable in that moment. And if we want our policies to stick and be consistent from room to room, they have to respond to the current needs and current classrooms. They have to reflect what our teachers and teaching assistants are currently seeing in their classrooms right now. We have to have policies that reflect the world as it is, not as we would choose it to be. And when there's that disconnect, that gap between the two, that's when you get a problem.
00:15:31
Seventh failure point, and this is the biggie. Sometimes the behaviour policy is actually very good, but it's good for another school. Not as, not yet. As leaders, sometimes we know where we want to take our staff. We can see the vision. We've got this picture of the destination in our minds. So the example I'm going to use here that I see often is restorative practice. So let's imagine a school has lots of issues around pupils not being able to self-regulate. They fall out with each other. Then they can't repair relationships. And we as leaders think, "Okay, so the answer here is obviously to move towards a policy of restorative conversations to help them learn those skills and lessons."
00:16:10
Now, that policy isn't just based on a set of rules for how we'll manage kids who are falling out. Baked into that policy decision are assumptions about the level of skill and understanding and commitment across our staff and our parents to implement that policy. So on the staff side, we might be assuming they already have strong basic behaviour management skills so they can move into more relational and restorative work, which requires a greater skill level. They have got the confidence to de-escalate calmly because they've already learned to re-establish calm in the classroom so that restorative conversation can take place. Or they've got the emotional capacity and empathy to hold difficult conversations with kids because they're not firefighting all day. And on the parental side, it might assume that our families already trust the school. They feel listened to. They understand a needs-led approach, and they believe that the school is fair.
00:17:08
Now, this is a bit like building the foundations of a house. Relational practice has to have all of these elements in place first before you move forward with something more complex like restorative conversations. Without all that basic scaffolding, you are going to struggle in the real world to implement that policy. And the problem comes when we copy a policy from a, you can't see, but I'm using air quotes, high-performing or high-reputation school because what we're doing when we're looking at them really is we're seeing the end point of that school's journey. That's what we see from the outside. We're not tracking back and looking at the journey that the school took to get to that destination.
00:17:50
So what we do is, because that's what we want for our kids, we kind of rush ahead to this promised land. We write a behaviour policy that's focused on the end point, and then we fail to take our stakeholders with us because they're just not ready yet. The foundations for that approach aren't in place. So then you get things like restorative conversations rolled out when staff are still struggling with low-level disruption or needs-led language used when parents don't understand it yet or trust the school's judgment about implementing needs-led approaches. Or we expect our adults to use flexibility in class, but because we haven't locked down consistency yet, we haven't established what consistent practice looks like in school. That means people don't know what standard practice looks like in terms of our expectations. So flexibility, when everyone's doing slightly different things, becomes chaos.
00:18:41
And then people say, "Well, we tried a restorative behaviour policy. It didn't work here," or "Parents don't support the approach or staff aren't on board." But what's really happening is that the policy is ahead of where we are in terms of culture and practice in school. The policy is trying to pull the system forward faster than its stakeholders are ready for. So this is where we as leaders need to think developmentally, not aspirationally, not what do we want the school to be like, but what is theright next step now for this school with these staff, with these parents, with these pupils today? And that might mean not giving up on our aspirations, but having an intermediate behaviour policy that moves us sustainably towards our desired end policy that we can implement today and can get staff and parental buy-in and develops the foundations and ultimately gets us to where we want to get to.
00:19:38
So in this case, what happens is a good policy in the wrong school doesn't fail because it's wrong. It fails because it's early. And I've used the example of restorative practice here, but that's just off the top of my head. I could have picked lots of examples around a needs-led approach, how we respond to SEH needs, whatever. It's the principle about moving forward too fast, trying to emulate other schools' destinations, not seeing their journeys. That's important, which is why there's no cookie-cutter solution to behaviour policies in schools. They're all at different points in their development, have different staff and cultures and parents and leadership and kids and histories, which all require a bespoke individual response. And I'll get off my soapbox there.
00:20:21
So what's the alternative? What actually makes behaviour policies work? Well, they work when they become an embedded culture. Remember, your behaviour policy is the bridge, the mechanism you have in school that takes you from your school values to a culture, and a culture is about what people say and do in concrete terms in the real world day after day after day. And we develop that culture, and we embed that behaviour policy when we teach and model and practice and discuss and revisit the principles so staff understand not just what to do, but why it works. When we as leaders treat implementation as an ongoing system, not a one-off piece of work when we launch our policy, when staff are given opportunities to think deeply about what good policy implementation looks like in school, when it's hard, when it's messy, when our policies fit our setting today with the knowledge and skills and relationships and history and kids we have in our classrooms right now, when our leadership team hold people accountable in a positive way for implementing the policy and know how to have constructive conversations to move things forwards with staff when things aren't quite working. And that's done in a consistent way across our management team.
00:21:34
And if you're a school leader and you're making behaviour decisions under pressure, especially around exclusions, I've actually got something that might be helpful that's linked to this episode. It's called the Reducing Exclusions Checklist. It's a free download designed to help leaders slow down, think clearly under stress, and check that every avenue has been explored before a pupil who's had a big incident, say, might be excluded.
00:21:58
Now, it's not intended that every step in the checklist should be followed for every single child, like a set of steps that you move through before you let them go. It's written to help you make good decisions when everyone's looking at you, when things feel urgent and emotional in the moment. It's to help you in a systematic way, make sure nothing relevant to this individual student has been missed out.
00:22:23
You can grab it free from the link in the show notes or by visiting beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. And this is the Easter egg. When you sign up, if you tell us that you're a school leader, I'll then follow up with some videos, including my approach to managing those challenging conversations to use when staff don't follow the behaviour policy. You'll get those if you're a new subscriber to the list. It's completely free. Grab your copy of the Reducing Exclusions Checklist today. It will support your work in implementing policy systematically.
00:23:01
And before I go, one last thing. If you found this episode useful, please subscribe or follow the podcast so you never miss a future episode. And remember, it does make a difference, and that's why I bang on about it. If you've got just 20 seconds, leave me a rating or review on Apple or Spotify. That prompts the algorithm to share this podcast with other professionals who need it. And if you know a colleague who's wrestling with issues around the behaviour policy in their school right now, remember to share this episode with them. Thanks for listening today. Have a great week, and I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
