07/09/2025
A different party in power, a few name changes necessary, but pretty much the same story sadly.
Now that Michael Gove is looking to put his mark on school attendance in much the same way he did for the curriculum when education secretary, I’m driven to share my thoughts about the intersection between the school curriculum, attendance policies, and behaviour management systems.
It’s long been apparent to many that the school curriculum is not fit for purpose, at either primary or secondary level. Whilst parents form WhatsApp groups to support each other in their attempts to understand their Year 2 child’s homework on fronted adverbials, teachers and teenagers alike are failing to see the relevance of much of the content of GCSE courses in terms of the skills they are likely to need in their lives beyond school.
Gove’s impact on the curriculum removed flexibility and interest and replaced it with rigidity, repetition and irrelevance. When this happened, teachers, unsurprisingly, found it more difficult than ever to engage students, and yet were under pressure to “deliver” greater content in a shorter space of time. As a teacher I’ve seen many pupils lose any intrinsic motivation they may once have had and find themselves unable to learn the huge amount of content required for success in exams. How do you help students learn ever more, less relevant material with less time to do it in?
In my opinion, you can’t. But you can create the illusion of learning if students are sat quietly listening to the teacher; if students enter the room in silence, sit in rows in predetermined seating plans, track the teacher with their eyes, and are removed if they call out or deviate from expectations. Cue the arrival of “behaviour tzar” Tom Bennett and a stream of others like him. We see an increase in popularity of behaviour strategies such as ‘whole body listening’, and SLANT (Sit up, Listen, Answer & Ask questions, Nod your head, Track the speaker), as well as blanket behaviour management policies applied across schools which previously had their own unique approaches and cultures. These include systems of rigid rewards and consequences with little scope for flexibility which erode intrinsic motivation further. A “no excuses” culture has been cultivated in many schools with significant numbers of students permanently excluded or internally isolated. In this way teachers can “get through” reams of content, and many students do learn this way. Schools can obtain good exam results through adopting these behaviour policies and by focusing teaching on exam technique. Students are told exactly what they need to do, and how to do it to achieve great results. One thing is certain, students and teachers are working extremely hard.
So, what’s the problem? Well, for many teachers and students alike this is, of course, simultaneously exhausting and mind numbingly boring and uninspiring. So what? Suck it up! Life’s not all fun and games! But for some children, it is physically impossible to learn this way and they simply can’t comply with these demands. They can’t ignore sensory needs, overcome attention differences, or deny their greater need for autonomy (that intrinsic motivation I talked about). What happens to these young people? Well, I’m afraid these children are the canaries in the mine. They are those most sensitive to toxic environments, and they simply cannot survive in mainstream schools as they are described above. If they continue to be exposed to this environment, their mental health will suffer. And so many are either excluded through their inability to adhere to the behaviour management systems, or they can no longer attend through mental ill health or burnout.
The curriculum is flawed. Schools can’t get children to engage with it, so they have no choice but to use behaviour management to punish and reward instead (extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation). When that fails, and children are too ill to attend, authorities shirk their responsibility to support families. Instead they hide behind draconian attendance policies, fine parents or threaten them with prosecution. If Michael Gove has his way, authorities will soon remove benefits from these families.
To summarise, I’ve borrowed a flawed and outdated descriptor of Autistic experience (as many of those canaries in the mine are Autistic) – The “Triad of Impairment” – that supposedly describes all the things that are “wrong” with Autistic people, and I modified it to outline all that’s wrong with the education system instead. Here’s my version: this is the Education System’s Triad of Impairment: Curriculum, Behaviour Management, and Attendance Policies.
