Teachers should be given powers to sanction parents who fail to engage in efforts to halt the “rising epidemic of disruptive and dangerous behaviour” in schools, a think tank has suggested.
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change says resolving the “burgeoning crisis of behaviour and safety” in English schools should be a top priority for ministers.
In a report published today, the former primer minister’s think tank urges government to treat the lack of parental engagement as a safeguarding issue and to give schools the power to escalate concerns to other agencies or even sanction parents.
“Teachers are powerless and unsupported to tackle a rising epidemic of disruptive and dangerous behaviour,” said Alexander Iosad, TBI’s director of government innovation.
“We must shift the balance of authority back in favour of teachers and give them the support they need.”
Here’s your handy Schools Week speed read of the key policy recommendations…
1. Teachers should be able to compel parents to engage
The report calls for a major “re-set” of the parent-teacher relationship, to shift the “balance of power in teachers’ favour”.
Teachers should have right to “compel” parents to engage with them when a student’s behaviour becomes “severely disruptive”, TBI suggests.
But only when it is “reasonable and proportionate” to do so.
If parents “fail to attend disciplinary meetings or engage with an action plan, schools should be able to escalate concerns to other relevant agencies on safeguarding grounds”, it adds.
Government should also consider whether any legal powers – similar to those used to address repeated absence without a good reason – should apply when parents “refuse to cooperate repeatedly and without substantive grounds”, it adds.
It comes as TBI analysis of data from Edurio and Opinium reveals less than half of teachers find support for dealing with student behaviour easy to access.
Four in 10 teachers now report pupil misbehaviour is disrupting all or most of their lessons, a recent government survey found.
2. Stronger multi-agency role for schools
The report notes that many of the “root causes” of challenging behaviour lie outside the school gates.
But school lack the powers to initiate, convene or lead multi-agency meetings and they are “not treated as fully fledged statutory safeguarding partners”, it notes.
The TBI therefore calls for schools to be be given a “stronger role in driving multi-agency working, with a statutory partner role in safeguarding”.
School should able to initiate and convene multi-agency meetings with safeguarding partners and agencies, co-ordinate responses and help make appropriate decisions, it adds.
A school’s designated safeguarding lead would oversee the powers at school level.
But teachers involved in cases “should have a right to be informed of next steps and attend any subsequent meetings to contribute”.
3. Set up ‘national behaviour challenge’
Ministers should set up a programme, sponsored by the Department for Education and reporting into Labour’s “opportunities mission board”, focused on tackling behaviour.
The “national behaviour challenge” should be set an overarching objective of boosting wellbeing, raising attendance and cutting classroom disruption by half by the end of this parliament, with “safeguards against the gaming of those objectives”.
The report says the first step should be to collect “much richer and more up-to-date data” than is currently available, and to start sharing this so schools, academy trusts, local authorities and other relevant agencies can begin to make use of it.
Regular surveys of pupils and staff should be conducted in each school, with data collected on the environment, including on safety and low-level disruption, it states.
Data should also be gathered on a wider set of indicators of staff and pupil wellbeing and happiness at school, the report adds.
4. Data tools to create ‘present-time picture’ of behaviour
TBI also calls on government to put in place data-collection tools and practices to provide an an “accurate present-time picture” of behaviour and wellbeing in schools.
This could inform a “revamped peer-led support system” in which schools are “benchmarked more precisely”.
It would also mean “contextually suitable decisions can be made about pairing them with others successfully tackling similar challenges – for example, via the newly announced Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams”, TBI suggested.
5. Digital learning IDs
TBI has also called for government to introduce a “national data infrastructure” centred on a digital learner ID, built and maintained by an independent designated data body.
The national behaviour challenge should act as the first user of this infrastructure, it says.
It says regular surveys could be collected in each school via prompts in a digital learner ID app.
TBI adds that “aggregate, anonymised present-time data could then be used to spot performance trends across a broad range of important metrics”.
This could include survey findings from teachers, learners and parents and the data could feed into Ofsted’s incoming national report card system, it suggests.
