Summary
Consistency across classrooms isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s the foundation of your school culture. When pupils see one teacher give a warning, another skip straight to sanctions, and a third ignore the same behaviour completely, the message is clear: the rules don’t really matter. For children with SEMH needs, that unpredictability can even fuel anxiety, dysregulation, and mistrust.
In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, we dig into why consistency is so hard to achieve in schools and why even the best policies fail without it. You’ll learn how the Beckhard-Harris change equation explains resistance to new approaches—and why accountability is the missing ingredient most schools overlook. Plus, we’ll show you how to balance predictability with professional judgement, so staff don’t feel like robots while still pulling in the same direction.
Most importantly, we share practical steps school leaders can use right now: building “useful dissatisfaction," co-creating a clear vision, breaking change into small, achievable first steps, and embedding supportive accountability. If you want to transform behaviour culture, reduce stress for staff, and create safety for pupils, this episode will show you exactly how to make consistency stick.
Important links:
Get our FREE SEND Behaviour Handbook: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/send-handbook
Download other FREE behaviour resources for use in school: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources
Share this podcast with your friends:
Show notes / transcription
What's the number one reason that school behaviour policies fail? It isn't the wording on the page and it isn't that the strategy necessarily itself is bad. The real killer in schools is inconsistency. One teacher responds one way, another teacher responds another way, and before you know it, pupils have learned the rules aren't really rules at all. That unpredictability chips away at your culture, your staff morale, and for kids with SMH needs, it can even fuel their dysregulation and their anxiety. So, how do you actually get every adult pulling in the same direction, using the same approaches, day in and day out, without turning your team into a factory of mindless robots? That's exactly what I'm going to unpack today on School Behaviour Secrets.
How do you get every adult pulling in the same direction, using the same approaches, exactly what I'm going to unpack today on School Behaviour Secrets. Hi there, my name's Simon Corrigan and welcome to School Behaviour Secrets, the podcast where we explore practical ways of improving behaviour and how we can support kids with social, emotional and mental health needs in school. And this week, I've been thinking about, actually, how crazy the whole idea of children is. I mean, they live in your wife for nine months, then they crawl out of your wife, and then they have the cheek, the temerity to eat your food and live in your house, and we just accept that like it's the most normal thing in the world, that it's perfectly okay. Madness. OK, now I've got that off my chest to this week's podcast, and we're going to be looking at consistency in school between adults, why it's important to have all of our staff in school pulling in the same direction, every lesson in every corridor. At every lunchtime.
And it's hard. I mean, confession time, I can't even get my family to agree on what film to watch for Friday movie night. Someone wants sci-fi, someone wants a rom-com, someone wants a thriller. And somehow, because we've reached this stasis point, we give up entirely on the idea of a movie and we end up watching a recording of a competitive baking programme again. I mean, let's be honest, how long can the Great British Bake Off keep going? It's been almost 20 years. There can't be that many types of bread.
And that's just the four of us trying to arrive at a decision and move in the same direction. The truth is, getting consistency in a team of any size is hard. Really hard. But it is super important. So today, I'm going to do a deep dive on consistency, the factors that make it so difficult, why it matters for every pupil and especially for pupils with SMH needs, and how to nail it without turning your school into a robot factory where adults can never use their discretion. What is the perfect balance between consistency and flexibility? So let's start with why consistency matters.
For pupils, it's all about safety and predictability. So imagine you're a pupil walking down the corridor, and you throw a crisp packet on the floor, deliberately, not accidentally, and you get caught in the act. Imagine if on Monday, one teacher says, pick it up please. On Tuesday, you go down the same corridor, you do the same thing, and the adult in the corridor sees you, but this time it's a different adult, and they clearly see what you just did, but they ignore it. On Wednesday, same offence, and a third adult sees what you did, and doles out a detention. Same action, three completely different outcomes. So as a child, what do you learn from that?
You learn that adults are unpredictable, that rules aren't really rules, and if you're clever, you can start shopping around for the adults who let you get away with things. You can start to play the system to your own advantage. You learn that if you're going to do something wrong, it's probably worth rolling the dice, pushing the boundaries, because there's a good chance... you'll get away with the behaviour. This leads to kids contextualising their behaviour, which is where students change their behaviour depending on the adults they're with. Instead of buying into the ethos and values of the school, what they do is they toe the line if certain adults are in sight. So the impact of this is you see the same child behaving in different ways, in different classrooms for different adults, and you get pockets in school where behaviour is good and others where the behaviour is more difficult depending on the adult.
Inconsistency breaks systems, it breaks policies, it breaks perfectly good approaches to behaviour. Now let's take a pupil with SEMH needs, maybe a history of trauma. Their nervous system is already scanning constantly for threat.
They're at DEFCON 1 all the time. Their fight or flight systems, what they want is for the world to be predictable. For them, the unknown is scary and the unknown makes them feel under threat. So if the adults around them respond unpredictably to their actions, what that does is it reinforces the sense that the world isn't safe to their nervous system. And that drives dysregulation and anxiety and worry and frustration and fear. But if every adult responds in broadly the same way, calmly, predictably, consistently, that child's nervous system, their body can relax. They can move from DEFCON 1 maybe down to DEFCON 4. They're not constantly braced for the unexpected, so that leaves energy left over to put into learning and relationships.
And for school leaders, consistency is essential for culture. It's the difference between your values being a poster on the wall and those values actually being lived in corridors and classrooms and playgrounds. And remember, your culture grows out of your behaviour policy. Your behaviour policy governs how people should speak and act in school. If that policy is not being implemented consistently, that's going to undermine your school culture. It's going to corrode it. It's going to undercut it.
In fact, it leaves your school culture to chance how different adults feel on the day. And that's dangerous. To quote Peter Drucker, one of my favourite quotes is actually, culture each strategy for breakfast. And in school, that relies on consistency. Consistency about how your behaviour policy is implemented. So if consistency is so important, why is it so hard? Well, let's be honest, because we are all human beings.
Under pressure, all of us revert to habit, learned behaviours. If I've been using a certain response for the last 10 years to pupil behaviour, that response is going to automatically come back out of my mouth when I'm stressed, even if the school has introduced a new behaviour framework in the last couple of months. When we feel under pressure, automatic behaviours take over. And that's human nature. So we have to consciously override those automatic behaviours. And that requires vigilance and effort. And then you've got differences in belief.
Some staff might genuinely believe that the old school tough love zero tolerance approach works best. And no matter how many posters you stick up in the staff room, they're going to default back to punishments. And there is a balance to be struck here, by the way, when we think about boundaries. Any social group does rely on agreements about which behaviours are and aren't acceptable. Sometimes what we tolerate speaks louder than what we promote, especially at the group level. So there is some complexity here, some tension between how we might want to adapt our policies for pupils with specific needs and our general expectations for how the group should behave. But more on that later.
Because I want to highlight another cause, which is sometimes the vision for what we are wanting our staff to do just isn't clear enough. So as a leader, I might say, we want a consistent approach to behaviour. But if I don't spell out exactly what that looks like, what language to use, what steps to follow, then of course… every adult is going to fill in the blanks differently. They're going to fill in that vacuum of information so you get people using their own judgement for what they thought I meant, coming up with different results and before you know it, hey presto, inconsistency has crept in relatively quickly. Now there's a famous change equation that helps us understand this. It goes like this.
Don't worry, I'll explain it in a moment. It goes D multiplied by V multiplied by F needs to be greater than R. It's called the Beckhard-Harris change equation, though Gleicher actually came up with the original idea back in the 1960s. And full credit by the way, I'd never come across this until a couple of weeks ago when I heard it raised by Patrick Lincione in the Business Podcast at the Table. And I thought to myself, as soon as I heard it, this 100% applies to schools. So let me talk you through quickly what this equation means and if you're a leader in school, how to apply it to your individual setting. Essentially that equation means dissatisfaction times vision times first steps has to be greater than resistance or nothing changes.
Nothing sticks and then you don't get consistency. So what does that actually mean in practice? Let me take this apart piece by piece. So we start with dissatisfaction. This is the fuel. If everyone is comfortable with how things are, why would they bother changing? Dissatisfaction means staff have to feel in their bones that the current situation isn't working for some reason.
It's the the ouch that makes us move on. So if I put a piece of grit in your shoe, a really small piece, although it's annoying, it's probably manageable and you'll keep on walking. If I put a sharp stone in your shoe, eventually the pain will force you to stop and do something about it. In schools, dissatisfaction is noticing how much learning time we're losing to low level disruption or how unpredictable responses are eroding trust with kids and parents. If we don't make that visible to staff, if we don't highlight it for them, the motivation to change just won't be there. So that's dissatisfaction. V stands for a vision.
This is the direction of travel. We've highlighted the problem, but now we need to highlight where we're moving people to. So imagine driving your car with the sat-nav turned off. You know, you want to get to somewhere nicer, but you don't know where you're heading or what that's going to look like when you arrive. That's what change without vision feels like. Vision means painting a clear, concrete picture of the destination. What does consistency actually look like and sound like in our corridors, in our classrooms, in our lunch hall?
What are we going to see and hear that are different? And when we do this, we're not couching this as a fuzzy statement like, we all value respect, but something that you could put on a film, on a camera and recognize straight away. Like, every adult greets pupils at the door at the start of each lesson. Or, we all use the same three-step sequence for low-level behaviour. Without vision, even if people are dissatisfied, they're just left frustrated with no idea of where they're meant to be going. If people don't know the destination, they won't start that journey with you. Which brings me to clear first steps.
This is the on-ramp.If they don't know the first step or the first step is too big, people freeze or they put their head in the sand and just do nothing. Imagine signing up for a gym and the trainer says, look, to get fit on day one, I want you to run a marathon. And then what happens?
Well, you never go back. But if the trainer says on day one, I just want you to walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes, well, that feels doable. You know exactly what you have to do to achieve that first step, to create that momentum. And in schools, first steps need to be clear and small and achievable. Like, this week, everyone greets pupils at the door with eye contact and a smile. That simple first step makes change feel manageable. It creates that momentum and you stack up enough of those small wins and suddenly the culture shifts.
We all have to change. It's the resistance to take time, to invest in a new approach. So when you multiply the first three factors together, dissatisfaction, vision and clear first steps, the number you get has to be larger than the natural resistance people bring to any change. Those values have to overcome the resistance. But if any part on the left hand side of the equation is missing, the whole equation collapses because on the left hand side of the equation, what we've got is multiplication, not addition. It's dissatisfaction times vision times first steps. It's not dissatisfaction, add vision, add first steps.
So in multiplication, remember, if any of those values, dissatisfaction, vision, clear first steps are zero. If they're missing, that means the multiplication, the total drops to zero because anything times zero is zero. If there's no dissatisfaction, staff carry on as normal. If there's no vision, people might privately agree that something needs to change, but nothing happens because they don't know what direction to go in. If there are no clear first steps, then the whole thing feels overwhelming and your program of change stalls before it even begins.
That's why this equation is so powerful. It forces us to check, do we have all three essential pieces in place before we begin? But here's where I think the formula needs an upgrade for schools because in our context, there's a missing ingredient here, accountability. Without accountability, even the best initiatives fizzle out. And I don't mean accountability in a gotcha or clipboarding sense. I mean supportive accountability. Leaders checking in with staff, coaching, giving feedback, celebrating progress. That's what stops us drifting back to old habits and creating consistency across the team.
So how do we actually make this work in practice to create consistency in schools? Well, here are some steps to follow. First, build useful dissatisfaction with what's happened in the past and right now with your team. People don't change because school leaders tell them to do it. Change when the pain, to your member of staff, of staying the same is clear. Show the cost of inconsistency, but without blame. Maybe bring two behaviour logs from the same child, all anonymised, but point out how they got completely different responses for exactly the same behaviour.
Or tell the story of the student who dropped the crisp packet. Or how teachers coming out at different times, i.e. some on time and some late, to collect kids from the yard after lunch, speaks volumes to the students who are waiting for them. Ask the staff what message do you think that taught these pupils? How does it make life difficult for you as a teacher, for all of us as a team, when we lack consistency? Secondly, co-create a crisp vision. So here, don't produce a 40-page behaviour policy that no one reads.
Paint a clear, short picture of what you want your adults to do. Maybe three or four clear expectations, visible stuff. Stuff that can be seen and heard or monitored. For example, all adults greet pupils at the door. We all use the same three-step sequence for low-level behaviour. We all follow the calm emotion coaching script when a child starts to become heightened. Stuff that's simple, visible and easy to see.
Thirdly, make the first steps small and concrete. If you try to change 50 things in a week, you will fail. Start small. Maybe the first week is just every adult greets pupils at the door with their name, gives them friendly eye contact – where that's appropriate – and a simple statement like, morning Jaden, your starter's on the board. That's it. We nail that and then we move on. Fourth, we have to practice the policy.
Consistency dies when we just tell people what to do, without giving them a chance to rehearse it and get it right. Now, I'm not talking about hours of role play, because personally I hate role play, but I'm talking about quick two-minute drills and reminders. Get staff every lesson, practising the greeting, the reminder sequence, the calm script, whatever you choose. Make it feel normal, safe and most importantly, fast. Quick wins. Fifthly, add accountability. Not in a scary way, do short learning walks.
Two-minute minute minutes max, just to notice and give same-day feedback. Peer observations work too. A quick glow and grow moment. One thing you nailed, one thing to tweak. The point is, if we as school leaders don't check, the initiative will die.
It will slide. You'll find nothing sticks in the long term and our policy tanks. And finally, make it adaptive, not rigid. So here's where the balance comes in. Consistency doesn't mean treating every pupil identically. If you've got a child with SEMH or SEND needs, who has, say, a regulation plan. Following that plan IS consistency.
It's consistency delivered in a way that the pupil can actually use and respond to. If it enables them to reach high expectations, the same high expectations we have for all the other pupils, that adaptation is a good thing. But it's done in a planned way. We can't have everyone on the team going maverick. How we adapt the rules needs to be planned and consistent throughout our staff. Let me give you a quick practical example. A school I worked at, we had a pupil who regularly became overwhelmed in lessons.
Instead of every teacher dealing with it differently, everyone agreed on a single plan. The same two or three phrases they'd use, the same exit routine, the same quiet space, the same return routine. That plan was written with the child and the family, so it had their investment. It was printed on one page. It actually didn't even take one page. And every adult had a copy of it, including the lunchtime staff. The student knew exactly what would happen when they needed support every single time.
That predictability was what allowed him to feel safe enough to regulate and re-engage with learning. The staff had a framework, not a straight jacket that they could implement. It worked. They had an element of professional judgment. That was the power of consistency and frameworks across a team of staff. By the way, before we go any further, if you're finding this episode useful, hit subscribe so you never miss a future episode. And if you could, please leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, because then it prompts the algorithm to share the podcast with more teachers and school leaders who really need this kind of support.
And don't forget, you can also download our free SEND Behaviour Handbook. It's got quick, clear facts on conditions like ADHD, autism and trauma, plus a behaviour analysis grid that links classroom behaviours to possible underlying needs. It's very, very useful. Print out a copy, share it in the staff room. I'll put a link in the show notes, or you can head directly to beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/send-handbook to get your copy. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/send-handbook. It's completely free.
All right, then back to consistency and the tricky bit resistance. So as a school leader, you've got to expect it. It's normal. Plan for it. Some staff will say, we've tried this before and it didn't work. And the answer points out the difference. Last time you had a pohandbook
This time you're practicing, checking and coaching strategies. Some people might say, I don't have the time to do this. And in that case, choose first steps that save time, like door g
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
