Our pupils and staff deserve disruption-free learning. But, like all schools, we know this does not happen every day. Sometimes behaviour gets in the way of learning.
To improve this, we look at behaviour from lots of angles. This includes listening to pupils, staff and families, and observing what happens in classrooms and around the school each day. We also run regular surveys for staff, pupils and parents using questions from the Department for Education’s National Behaviour Survey, which allows us to see how we compare to other schools nationally.
We have just completed our latest staff survey and, overall, the results are encouraging and show that things are moving in the right direction, while also highlighting some clear areas for further improvement as we continue our journey from good to great.
Mobile phones are much less of a disruption
Nationally, 21% of secondary school teachers say that at least some of their lessons in the past week were disrupted by mobile phones. Across our five secondary schools, the figure is just 4%, a significant reduction from 11% when we last ran the survey in the spring term and 14% at the same time last year.
In our schools, 74% of teachers say mobiles have never been a problem in the past week, up from 58% in the spring and 48% last autumn. Nationally, this figure is 42%.
These results are very encouraging; both compared with the national picture and over time. These results reflect the collective efforts of our staff in schools and the support from our pupils and families.
Interruptions to teaching and learning
One of the most important questions that we ask our teachers is ‘in how many lessons did pupil misbehaviour stop or interrupt teaching or learning?’ Nationally, 34% of teachers say this happens in all or most lessons. Over the past year, we have asked teachers this question three times and seen a steady improvement with this figure declining from 21% to 18% to 13% in the most recent survey.
Again, the overall picture is strong, showing clear progress. However, we have more work to do to create the classrooms that our pupils and staff need and deserve.
Talking in secondary schools
One of the strengths of the DfE’s National Behaviour Surveys is that they ask about some specific behaviours that can disrupt learning like shouting out, talking when not supposed to and answering back.
Again, these items look pleasing against both the national patterns with CET schools performing around 20% compared than the national average. We have also seen strong improvement over time, with 18% increase compared with the results from the same point last year.
Together, these findings show that our schools are becoming calmer, more focused places to learn and that our continued efforts are making a real difference.