I want to tell you about the last time Australian schools made a genuinely courageous decision about student behaviour – because it wasn’t recent, and because I think we’re overdue for another one.
From the moment the first Australian colony established its first school, teachers were legally permitted to hit children. The strap, the cane, the ruler across the knuckles – normal, expected and defended vigorously by those who’d been caned themselves and turned out just fine.
Individual schools stepped up earlier, but Australia began banning corporal punishment in schools from the early 1990s, a process that took until 2015 to complete across all states and sectors. Think about that for a sec. We started the conversation in the 1990s and some schools were still permitted to hit children as recently as a decade ago.
It wasn’t an easy shift, either. Teachers who’d used the strap for twenty years didn’t suddenly agree to put the belt back on their waists. Parents who’d survived the same treatment weren’t immediately convinced their children needed protecting from it. There were genuine debates about whether removing physical punishment would mean the end of discipline – that behaviour would collapse and that kids would run riot.
We made the shift anyway, because the evidence was clear and because it was the right thing to do. The more interesting question is what we replaced it with.
It was suspension, mostly. Remove the child, call it a natural consequence and send them home. We were quite proud of this for a while, until the evidence piled up that removing struggling children from the one place that might reach them wasn’t actually helping anyone. So, we reined that in too, and reached instead for what I think of as the Era Of Misguided Respect Teaching.
The respectful relationships programs, the values curriculums, the pastoral care lessons where students designed posters about what respect means to them, the whole-school assemblies about being kind, the codes of conduct with “Respect” at the top, printed on lanyards and laminated on classroom walls across the country.
Walk into almost any Australian school today and ask what their school values are – somewhere near the top, usually first, you’ll find Respect. It is Australia’s statistically most commonly espoused school value. And yet, every Australian teacher knows that respect is a massive problem in their school. We made the posters, we ran the programs, we laminated the lanyards, and what the kids got better at – genuinely, measurably better at – was making posters.
My honest read of the last thirty years is this: every shift we’ve made in behaviour management since we ended corporal punishment has shared a common feature – it asked more of children and less of the culture they inhabit. Hit them, then suspend them, then teach them about respect. In every iteration, the child is the variable we’re trying to fix, while the school culture is taken as given.
New data from AITSL tells us that 47% of Australian teachers are now considering leaving the profession, and student behaviour is one of the primary reasons – not workload in the abstract, but the specific, daily, grinding experience of managing behaviour in classrooms that weren’t built to help them do it well.
The kids in our schools right now are more diverse, more complex, more anxious and more disconnected than any cohort in living memory, and they didn’t arrive this way to make our lives difficult. They arrived this way because the world they’re growing up in is genuinely hard – and because the structures we’ve offered them have been insufficient.
What they need isn’t another program. It’s a culture that sees them clearly, holds them firmly and genuinely believes in their capacity for human growth.
I think we’re standing within arm’s reach of that, if we’re willing to be brave enough to grasp it.
We made a courageous call once – uncomfortable and contested and taking us the better part of three decades to fully implement – but it was right. I think it’s time to make another one, and it’s precisely why I wrote The Truth About Student Behaviour, which might be the most important and practical thing I’ve put my name to.
You can find it at realschools.com.au/books/student-behaviour
Keep fighting that good fight,
PS: If you need a little ‘End of Term 3 pep up’, have a listen to my latest Real Schools of Thought conversation with Baden Powell College Principal Vicky Minton. It’s a timely reminder that teaching is still a bloody great career – and changing kids’ lives is still a pretty extraordinary way to spend yours. Listen here.
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