Andrew Thraves looks at how attitudinal surveys can help senior leaders understand the causes of challenging behaviour and provide evidence of improvement when inspectors come calling.

Root causes

Whether it’s a handful of young people who regularly play up in class or an endemic problem with bullying, disruptive behaviour can have a huge impact on pupils’ wellbeing and overall achievement in school. 

Persistent disruptive behaviour remains the most common reason for removing a young person from lessons, accounting for more than 30 per cent of permanent exclusions. In addition, the international economic think tank the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently reported that the UK also suffers from some of the worst truancy rates in the world, so tackling unsatisfactory pupil conduct has become a major focus for school leaders.

The call for action is not just coming from within, either. Growing parental concerns sparked the introduction of Ofsted’s unannounced behaviour inspections in February 2014. And from this September, changes to the inspection framework will see an increased emphasis on how well school leaders tackle the issue.

To address the problem, senior leaders not only need to understand the true causes of disruptive behaviour in their school but also be able to evidence the progress they have made in dealing with them.

‘Whole pupil’

According to Suzanne O’Farrell, ASCL Inspections Specialist: “Schools are expected to demonstrate the positive impact they are having on behaviour over time in an inspection. Understanding pupils’ attitudes and how they change could help teachers to make a real difference in reducing behavioural incidents.”

Using attitudinal surveys is one way to track the attitudes of pupils – how they feel about school and themselves – that often lies behind incidences of challenging behaviour in the first place.

When combined with progress and cognitive assessments, attitudinal surveys can provide a picture of the ‘whole pupil’. Factors for underachievement can be identified, and interventions can target the real issues triggering the problem behaviour.

The surveys can then be used to show the resulting impact of any interventions on attitudes to learning, together with further evidence in terms of attainment, attendance and behaviour.

St Helens Council

Understanding attitudes has been a priority for St Helens Council, where pupil surveys have helped to assess areas linked to key educational goals (such as attitudes to attendance) to reduce truancy and deal with some of the most difficult behavioural issues. 

“As an area struggling with severe deprivation, unemployment and high levels of teenage pregnancy, we’re keenly aware of how important it is that we encourage children to value their education,” says Helen Ashton, Cross Phase Behaviour Specialist at St Helens Council. 

“Our aim is to work with local schools, supporting both them and their pupils to ensure this happens. To do this effectively, we need to understand any emotional obstacles the children might have. The Pupil Attitudes to Self and School (PASS) attitudinal survey has helped us gain an insight into what these might be.”

Helen has undertaken a project using the attitudinal surveys, which involved investigating any correlation between young people’s scores from the survey and impulsive risk-taking behaviour.

“With teenage pregnancy and drug or alcohol misuse prevalent across the borough, it made sense to see if we could identify any trends,” Helen says.

When it came to teenage pregnancy, the girls frequently scored poorly in attitude to attendance. This was reflected in their actual attendance: more than half went to school less than one day a week by Year 11. But by looking at the survey results, the council discovered that a significant number of girls dipped in their attitude towards coming to school as early as Year 8 and never recovered.

“Our pastoral leaders were doing some fantastic work with the children but they were not in a position to look at it from a s strategic level. Using the attitudinal survey meant we immediately gained an insight into individual children’s requirements, while learning more about how to strategically inform improvement over their entire time in education.”

Newark cluster

The Newark cluster of schools in Nottinghamshire is also using PASS to monitor the progression of 8,000 pupils’ emotional and social development. 

The role of Jane Starbuck, the Newark town Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCo), is to develop provision for SEN and ensure that the needs of vulnerable or challenging pupils are met. One thing she has often come up against is how hard it is to demonstrate the headway young people have made when it comes to emotional and social development.

“School leaders know Ofsted looks at the impact of specific initiatives, such as the Pupil Premium, and attitudinal surveys help evidence these,” she says. “Previously it has been nigh on impossible to show any impact when it comes to emotional development.”

In some schools, the results of the survey pinpointed what they knew or suspected but for others it has brought to the fore things they hadn’t expected to come up.

Jane says: “Over the cluster, we’ve been surprised by the low scores in perceived learning capability and in finding out that self-worth as a learner is so low and so widespread. Self-confidence has a clear effect on ensuring children make the progress they are capable of so it’s certainly giving us all food for thought.”

Regional differences

Attitudes shift over time and this can affect how well behaviour is managed. Our own research has shown a significant national increase in pupils’ aspirations over the last five years. While this is good news, the trend has been accompanied by a decrease in pupils’ self-regard as a learner, an issue that often leads to behavioural problems. By understanding this trend, schools could perhaps consider using Pupil Premium funding to pay for confidence-building programmes that could have a wide-ranging impact across a school. 

There are also regional differences in pupil attitudes. Pupils in the North of England tend to have the warmest relationships with their teachers, while those in the South-East are more likely to have better study skills. Schools could consider trends like this and use each cohort’s strengths to shape their interventions around behaviour – focusing on building on the positive elements of young people’s conduct as a starting point. 

Gathering evidence for Ofsted

“Incidence of low level disruption in some schools is still too high and Ofsted wants to address this. With pupil behaviour under the spotlight, attitudinal data and stakeholder surveys could help provide the clear and compelling evidence inspectors need,” says Suzanne O’Farrell.

Inspectors want to see that a school is actively identifying and tackling the issues behind disruptive behaviour with something more than a one-size-fits-all approach. The results of an attitudinal survey can help demonstrate the impact of specific interventions over time, such as a campaign to tackle homophobia or improve the aspirations of children receiving Pupil Premium funding, which is exactly the kind of detail that is required to both tackle the issue and satisfy the requirements of the inspectors.

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Andrew Thraves is Director of Education at GL Assessment.

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The national picture – how successful are schools at tackling challenging behaviour?

Results from Kirkland Rowell Surveys, involving more than 850,000 pupils, 422,000 parents as well as staff in 1,097 schools across the UK, highlights some discrepancies in opinions on how successfully schools manage behaviour.

When asked about how their schools performed on discipline, nationally, nearly 74 per cent of pupils and 70 per cent of parents indicated that they were satisfied. These figures were compared to just 57 per cent of staff . Interestingly, staff remained the least satisfied regardless of whether the school was situated in a leafy suburb or a more deprived area (see Fig 1).

This difference in views highlights the importance of regularly gathering and sharing the opinions of stakeholders to get a true picture of how the whole community feels about behavioural issues, as teachers may benefit from seeing the wider picture.

Fig 1: Responses to stakeholder surveys – by stakeholder, percentage who said behaviour was managed successfully in their school.

	Pupils	Parents	Staff
National average	74%	70%	57%
Least deprived areas	78%	71%	60%
Most deprived areas	69%	70%	53%

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Useful links

www.gl-assessment.co.uk/pass

www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/framework-forschool-inspection

www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/school-inspectionhandbook

www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/inspectingsafeguardingmaintained-schoolsand-academiesbriefing-for-section-5-inspections

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Find out more about this topic on an ASCL PD course:

Cracking the Behaviour Challenge: a Strategic Approach to Success – for more information or to book a place, see online at www.ascl.org.uk/crackingthebehaviour

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