Anxiety, ADHD, ‘snowplough parents’: Behind our worsening school discipline crisis

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2023 editon.See all 22 stories.

With her booming voice, no-nonsense attitude and gaze that could wilt cactus, Megan*, a 30-something teacher, oozes authority. The untrained eye might see her as petite, but to students she’s towering. One day, as she walked down a corridor of her boxy, ageing Sydney public high school, she heard a six-foot, year 12 boy curse. “F---, you’re short!” he said in surprise. “It’s so weird. You don’t seem like that in front of the classroom.“

Megan is one of the lucky ones; a teacher born to run a room. Eyes in the back of her head. A look that stings. An instinct for weaponising silence. And yet even Megan, who is using a pseudonym because she would be fired for speaking out, is struggling to manage student behaviour. “When I first got to this school, I was like, ‘This is unbelievable,’ ” she says. “I’m pretty strong, but it’s been so bad that I’ll sit at the front with my laptop and say, ‘Teach yourselves.’ “

There’s the occasional crisis – fights, knives, drugs – but there always has been. The pressing problem is disruption. In a high school such as Megan’s, it might be boys streaming cage fights in class or girls ignoring the teacher to chat among themselves. They swear at each other, harass peers, refuse to participate. “It’s getting worse, yes – a thousand per cent,” Megan says. “If the media really knew what happened inside schools, the places would be shut down.”

Students tell us themselves that Australian schools are among the most disorderly in the world. When 15-year-olds were last surveyed by the OECD in 2018 about noise and disruption in their classrooms alongside peers from 75 other countries, Australia was eight places from the bottom. Local studies also show teachers are struggling with behaviour, and a long-term, annual survey of principals suggests disrespect and aggression are getting worse.

The reasons are myriad. Complications of technology, such as social media fights and bullying spilling over into school; the lingering effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on social development; scant resources to deal with skyrocketing diagnoses of autism, anxiety and ADHD; a “crisis of adult authority”, as one expert described it; and a more diverse social landscape than ever before, in which children bring wildly differing family norms to the classroom.

Sceptics dismiss the behaviour crisis as a moral panic fuelled by reactionaries worried that a spared rod has left children spoilt. But there is a tangible problem at its heart: disorderly classrooms are bad for learning. Some believe this is why Australia’s academic results are falling. If disruption halts a lesson 10 times, even for just a minute on each occasion, that’s “10 minutes of teaching time you lose out of 50”, says Lisa Holt, the principal of Rosebud Secondary College in Victoria, whose students had forgotten “basic manners and courtesy” when they returned from lockdowns.

Lisa Holt, principal of Rosebud Secondary College. “If you’re not the boss of the room, someone else will be.”Credit: Josh Robenstone

Many teachers don’t have Megan’s natural gifts. Controlling a classroom might seem like an educator’s core business, but they were never taught how to do it. Old-fashioned discipline, with its connotations of harsh, corporal punishment, has been replaced by a decades-old creed that behaviour is the language used by young people to communicate their needs and improves when those needs are met. With four million Australian students, each with their own needs, that puts a lot of pressure on teachers.

The backlash against the behaviour-as-language philosophy is gaining momentum across the English-speaking world. Proponents of what’s being called the “neo-strict” movement – rules and routines with the “neo” addition of positive reinforcement – say it misinterprets human nature. Misbehaviour is not a pathology nor a symptom of a more profound problem, says Tom Bennett, the adviser to England’s education department, who has been dubbed Britain’s behaviour tsar. Students, he says, “usually misbehave because they feel like it, and they think they can get away with it”.

Politicians admit there’s a problem. A Senate inquiry considering “the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms” is set to report next month, and a federal government-ordered report this year ruled that universities must include lessons in how to control classrooms in their education degrees. But those are longer-term fixes, and right now, many students are having their one shot at education curtailed by constant interruptions. Schools need to act, but they can’t agree on how: is the answer to toughen up – or try a little more tenderness? After decades in the doghouse, the discipline debate is back.

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It’s late Monday afternoon, and three teachers from different primary schools slump, exhausted, over tea and biscuits in a suburban Sydney kitchen. They’re nervous because they are taking a risk; their employers’ ban on contact with journalists means they could be fired for speaking to Good Weekend. But they’re fed up. Not with the kids, but with what they say is a lack of help with the behavioural issues wearing them down.

Mondays can be difficult in schools. Students might have spent their weekend cooped up in units playing computer games and are full of pent-up energy when they arrive in the classroom. Some hate returning to class because they’re falling behind, and their shame manifests in aggression and defiance. For others, home is far more permissive than school, and they struggle to adjust to different expectations.

As he munches on a biscuit, one of the teachers around the kitchen table, a softly spoken, blond 30-something called Mike* recalls explaining to a puzzled father that it’s not okay for a student to yank down another’s shorts at school, even if it’s a favourite prank at home. “He looked at me like I was an extremist prude,” he says. Another teacher – Mary*, a pretty, studious 30-something who works in an underprivileged area – called one mother to say her primary-aged son had been in a fight; the mother responded with relief that her son wasn’t a wimp. “She’d told her child that if someone is disrespectful, you punch them.”

Dysregulation leads to big arguments over little things. “Disagreeing over the rules in footy ends in physical violence, rather than just working it out,” says Kate*, an empathetic and passionate young woman. “They’ll come into class very unsettled, to the point where oftentimes it’ll be yelling, screaming, swearing at staff.” (Some schools have restricted before-school play for this reason.) When such students arrive in the classroom, the teacher has to help them calm down. “Often they can’t self-regulate and you have to intervene, which takes you away from the rest of the class,” she says. “The others get restless. It snowballs.”

The restlessness, says Mary, manifests as chatter, rolling around on the floor and calling out. One child says, “I’m not doing that,” and their friends follow. They’re more likely to behave for their main teacher, who knows them better, than a casual or once-a-week art teacher. “Generally speaking, they wouldn’t say ‘F--- you’ to a classroom teacher – although some do,” Mary says. “It’s when they have [different] staff, with whom they don’t have as strong a relationship. They might see them twice a week but don’t, for some reason, want to show them any respect.“

Parents used to back schools when it came to discipline. Some still do. But others don’t and will believe their child’s version over the teacher’s, or complain about the unfairness of consequences – something teachers say is more common in wealthier areas where there’s more “snowplough parenting” (trying to remove obstacles facing their children). One principal tells of a mother who offered to sit her daughter’s detention. Another says students use their mobile phones to text Mum or Dad straight after a ticking-off and, within minutes, the parent calls the office. “It undermines school authority,” she says.

“The amount of emails and calls we get saying, ‘Detentions don’t work, I’m not happy my child is in detention.’ It’s one of the only levers we have.”

A 30-something Sydney public high school teacher

At a Sydney primary school recently, some parents described the way a teacher held students back at lunchtime to discuss the vandalised toilets as inflicting “trauma” akin to a prison camp. “The amount of emails and calls we get saying, ‘Oh, detentions don’t work – I’m not happy my child is in detention,’ ” Megan says. “It’s one of the only levers we have.”

At times, there’s a deeper explanation. Mental health is a significant problem; one in 14 Australian children experiences an anxiety disorder. Some carry burdens that would crush adults: domestic violence, Dad in prison, Mum drunk or depressed. School counsellors can only do so much, and there are far too few of them. Waiting lists can be years long.

Kate recalls a girl, who remembered her father as scary and violent, overhearing adults saying he was out of jail. She was terrified but unable to articulate her terror, so expressed it in other ways – incontinence, withdrawal. When the situation became known, her teacher, fresh out of university, was scared, too: what if the father turned up at the school and took her? Without legal orders and probably even with them – she’s not a security guard – she’d have to let the terrified little girl go. “You’re just stuck in that situation,” says Mike, “hoping he doesn’t come and collect.”

Disability plays a big part, too. At least one in 10 Australian school children has a diagnosis. An estimated one in 20 have ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder). In NSW, a 2019 report on disability found the number of students with autism had climbed by 15 per cent annually between 2013-17. Teachers must adapt their lessons to accommodate students’ special needs (many parents don’t think they do this well enough) and monitor behaviour to catch an escalation before it turns into a meltdown, which can be tricky with up to 30 other students in the class.

A meltdown can involve punching, says Kate. “Or throwing chairs. Destroying the classroom. It would be written up in a behaviour plan … ‘If Johnny starts to swear or calls you a f---wit, evacuate the room so it doesn’t escalate.’ ” That means telling all the other children – they could be as young as five – to file out of the classroom while the teacher calls for help. In 2018, more than 600 kindergarten students were suspended from NSW primary schools. About three-quarters of them had a disability. Advocates argued students were being punished for behaviour they couldn’t help. But teachers say it’s a safety issue. “[Small children have] still got force behind them,” says Kate. “You stop thinking when you’re really enraged. They kick. They hit. They attack other children.”

“There are two types of kids. Some come to school to learn; some come to be loved. We are seeing more of the second type.”

Teacher comment in an educators’ Facebook group

Disability is a battleground between parents and schools. One mother, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect her child, has an autistic eight-year-old with pathological demand avoidance, which involves children – mostly with autism – going to extreme lengths to resist anything they perceive as an order. Her son has had multiple suspensions for violence. She fought in vain for a suitable special-needs class, but when told there was nothing available that suited his particular issues, she quit her job to educate him herself, working out ways to teach him that avoid anything he might construe as a demand. “The way he expresses himself is to scream, to spit, to punch,” she says. “All [the system] is interested in is having a compliant child. We should be trying to fit the system to the autistic kid.”

Mike, Kate and Mary sympathise with those parents’ frustrations. They hate seeing children struggle, too. But they also resent the pressure to fill roles for which they were not trained (they feel like ill-prepared social workers) and the implication that they’re not trying hard enough. There are simply too few resources – classroom aides, school counsellors, disability and behavioural support – to provide that level of individualised attention. “I think there are two types of kids,” a teacher recently told an educators’ Facebook group. “Some come to school to learn; some come to be loved. We are seeing more of the second type, and it takes away from our ability to do our jobs effectively.”

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It’s not quite 30 years since NSW public schools outlawed the cane. Victoria’s government system banned it in the mid-1980s, but girls and boys north of the border could get four strikes on the palm of their hand until 1995 (Queensland’s private schools can still use reasonable force). Last year, one school district in Missouri reintroduced spanking as a last resort – and corporal punishment is still legal in 19 US states – but no one in mainstream Australian or British education wants to follow suit. “Things like corporal punishment, the cane, etcetera, are barbaric and ineffective,” says the English behaviour expert, Tom Bennett.

Schools have also moved away from meaningless punishments, such as writing lines or facing a wall. Detentions and suspensions are now billed as opportunities to reflect and regroup. Reward systems are widely used to encourage the good rather than shaming the bad. But the subject of school discipline remains emotive and, until recently, taboo. Poor behaviour was “just accepted as ‘the way things are’,” says Bennett. “Teachers were actively discouraged from speaking about it. Social media has short-circuited all of that.”

Discipline might be back on the table, but the debate is fraught. Educators are divided along ideological lines. The progressive philosophy – that behaviour is communication – is deeply embedded, as it has been taught in university education facilities over decades at the expense of technical classroom skills such as a teacher’s use of voice or physical position to command authority. The opposing side believes behaviour is a choice, and that most students can not only comply with rules, routines and consequences, but need them for an orderly learning environment. This division means there is unlikely to ever be a one-size-fits-all discipline strategy.

London’s Michaela Community School founder Katharine Birbalsingh runs Britain’s “strictest school”.Credit: Alamy

The most famous example of a rules-based approach is London’s Michaela Community School, which has been called Britain’s strictest school. It’s a “free school”, meaning that it is funded by the government but sets its own rules. Demerits are given for failing to concentrate, sloppy written work or running between classes. Pupils get detention for forgetting a pencil case, talking in the corridor or disrupting another student. If a student tuts at a teacher, they must spend a whole day in a session with a behavioural therapist. They can also earn merit points, which build towards badges that demonstrate they are the kind of person who is “exceptional”.

Michaela’s students tend to be disadvantaged. Critics argue that this should prompt a warmer embrace, not colder rules. They also accuse the school of sucking the joy out of education and thwarting individuality. A few years ago, someone changed the school’s Google Maps tag to Michaela Community Prison. Its outspoken headmistress, Katharine Birbalsingh, who founded the school in 2014, has been compared to Roald Dahl’s cruel Trunchbull in Matilda.

But Birbalsingh believes the true cruelty lies in lowering standards for disadvantaged students. “People say [discipline] is mean,” the 50-year-old told The Sydney Morning Herald last year. “I’d say what is mean is keeping a child illiterate and innumerate.” Her school, which epitomises the “neo-strict” movement, has become one of England’s highest-achieving; in the last A-level results, Britain’s equivalent to the HSC and VCE, nearly three-quarters of exams were graded A (80-89 per cent) or A* (90 per cent or above). “Teaching children right from wrong, instilling good habits, holding standards high and leading from the front is not humiliation or submission,” she has posted on social media. “It is doing your duty as an adult.”

This fits with the view held by Tom Bennett – who has been dismissed by progressives as “Tory Tom” – that adult authority has waned over the past 60-odd years. “Many adults seem to want to be their child’s friend rather than parent, and many new teachers feel they do not have the ‘right’ to direct children’s behaviour,” he says.

There’s no school as strict as Michaela in Australia. But there are some watching closely. Michael Roberts is the managing director of Mastery Schools Australia, an independent school with several campuses in Queensland. He has run 10 schools in the past 22 years, and was on the federal government’s Gonski 2.0 inquiry into educational excellence. He’s an admirer of Birbalsingh’s and points out that Michaela’s famous discipline is not the only secret to its success. The school also has high expectations for learning. “They don’t have time to misbehave,” he says. “One of the things we do at my school, and we saw it at Michaela, is teach at pace.”

Gonski 2.0 member and educator Michael Roberts says his students “don’t have time to misbehave”.Credit: Steven Siewert

Roberts’ approach to behaviour is informed by cognitive psychology. “For the most part, we’re a social animal and like to conform to the norm,” he says. “If we can create a norm that’s [amenable] to behaviour, most kids will conform to it. I use the phrase ‘swinging voters’; if you make the norm where there’s a child with extreme behaviour, it’s enticing for the other kids to join in. You can have a very poorly behaved school.”

John Stewart disagrees, deeply, with the Michaela-style approach. The blue-eyed, shaggy-haired, crinkle-smiled 56-year-old educator also has an impressive pedigree; he was educated at Cambridge, taught at some of London and Sydney’s top sandstone private schools, including The King’s School prep campus Tudor House, and ran Bali’s famous Green School, where students learn in bamboo-and-grass classrooms. He is now the conductor – don’t call him principal – of the Living School in Lismore, which is built on the philosophy that with the right guidance, children can shape their own learning.

For him, the neo-strict movement is too black-and-white. “This parameter saying, ‘All kids now need to be really controlled again’ – I understand how it can be appealing,” he says. But schools are social ecosystems, which nurture individuals. “Are you just trying to get them to behave in an approach that you set, rather than see growth come through their character development? It doesn’t take into account the things that influence behaviour; it could be mental health, lack of nutrition, arguments with parents.“

Birbalsingh is at one end of the discipline spectrum, Stewart on the other. Most Australian schools sit between them. They might use the Positive Behaviour for Learning system, which rewards students for adhering to clear expectations, or the Berry Street Education Model, focusing on relationships and student self- regulation. Some draw on neuro- science. “Our brains have evolved to detect who is a member of our group and who is not,” says cognitive scientist Mark Williams, who designed a relationships-based program called Brain Healthy Schools. “If a student is not a member of the teacher’s group, they don’t attend, listen, see, empathise or learn in the same way as a student who is connected.”

Lismore school conductor John Stewart believes students can shape their learning.Credit: Natalie Grono

Sandstone private schools – the high-prestige, high-fee single-sex colleges – sit at the stricter end of the disciplinary spectrum. They issue demerits for not wearing blazers on public transport, eating publicly while in uniform or non-compliant hairstyles. “No haircuts should be done with a cutting comb that is less than a ‘3’ on the sides of the head and a ‘4’ on top of the head,” reads the rule book for Sydney’s Trinity Grammar. At nearby Newington College, harassment of another student results in a one-hour detention, rudeness to staff earns one on Friday, and those who’ve been rude to members of the public get a detention on Saturday, joining boys caught in “high-level fighting” or making sexist remarks.

The perception that private schools have tighter discipline is touted as one reason why wealthier Australian parents – who can afford school choice, and who worry about entrusting their children to a public system that must take all comers and is dealing with increasingly complex needs – are opting for independent schools in record numbers.

When it comes to managing behaviour, however, private schools have a key advantage: they select their students, so can tell trouble-makers to leave. Students who are told they’re “no longer a good fit” usually become the state system’s problem. No one knows how often this happens, or the reasons why, since non-government schools are not required to disclose that information.

“The enlightened adult says, ‘How is what I’m expecting leading to this kind of behaviour?’ ”

John Stewart, conductor of the Living School in Lismore, NSW

It’s far more difficult to expel students from public schools, which have a legal obligation to educate residents of their catchment until age 17; data from 2019 (before COVID lockdowns skewed numbers) show just 164 of almost 800,000 NSW public students were expelled for misbehaviour. There are tight rules to ensure expulsion is a last resort, such as if plans to manage a student’s dangerous conduct have failed. If a student is told to leave a school, the department or principal must help find them a place at another.

Stewart argues that problems with behaviour lie not with students, but with the system. “Society has not allowed children to have access to power,” he says. He proposes “peeling back” the system to interrogate the relationships, structures and curriculum within. “The enlightened adult says, ‘How is what I’m expecting leading to this kind of behaviour?’ If you start focusing on those elements, rather than see the problem as the student, you’ll adopt the programs to meet the individual and grow the individual.” Conformity, he says, “is a salve for some”.

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Lessons are about to begin at the public high school in Rosebud, a blue-collar, white-bread town on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. English teacher Rhiannon Jack’s year 8 class forms two lines, which are straight by teenage standards, next to the lockers outside their classroom. One by one, she greets them by name and sends them inside.

The students sit silently at their desks, awaiting instructions. Latecomers must wait at the door until they are asked to enter. Jack, who doesn’t look much older than her students, takes her position at the front and gives the official signal that learning is about to begin, a short question-and-answer routine known as the cue to start. Each teacher has their own version. “Year 8 …” Jack says. “… is great,” the students reply.

“The more orderly the environment, the more conducive it is to learning.”

Lisa Holt, principal of Rosebud Secondary College, Vic

Since the beginning of this year, every class at Rosebud has followed the same script. Lines at the door. A cue to start. Bite-sized instructions. When routines and expectations are taught plainly and are consistent across all classrooms, or so the thinking goes, students find it easier to comply since it becomes automatic. Their teacher wastes less time quelling disruptive behaviour and can devote more attention to teaching.

It’s no Michaela, but the theory is the same – that students thrive on routine, clarity and consistency. “The more orderly the environment, the more conducive it is to learning,” says Lisa Holt, the school’s plain-speaking, fast-talking, charismatic principal. “One of the things I always say to the staff is that ‘If you’re not the boss of the room, someone else will be.’ And it won’t be the kid you think it should be. [Teachers are] actors; we’re performers. We step in and play a role. You can’t just be Ms Happy-Go-Lucky and everybody thinks you’re just really nice. There’s no room for ‘cool’ teachers.“

Holt wasn’t driven to her new regime by terrible behaviour. But when students returned from COVID lockdowns, they no longer knew what was expected of them. “They’d forgotten social norms,” she says. “We were having trouble getting through the curriculum because of teachers spending their time saying, ‘No, no, no.’ ”

She looked at different behaviour strategies and was tempted by one that focused on student wellbeing. But she wasn’t convinced. For her, a school’s primary purpose is learning, not welfare. “We have to factor in their mental health, we have to think about their wellbeing, but we’re a school,” she says. “And our core business is to educate them, so they can take on life.“

Holt teamed up with Tim McDonald, formerly an associate professor at Edith Cowan University who is leading a behaviour project for the federal government’s Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO). He’s CEO of YMCA WA, which runs a school for disengaged youth. He believes students must be taught how to behave at school, just like they’re taught how to count or to read, particularly in an age when parental standards vary so wildly. “There’s no way I can assume my 30 kids know how to behave,” he says.

Relationships – which many teachers argue are the bedrock of managing behaviour – are important, he says, but not the starting point. Rules and routines come first, “and then the connections happen. You can’t form a relationship if you don’t have trust. Teachers need to be the leader in the class, and the students need to see that.“

At first, not everyone at Rosebud was a fan of the new regime. Some dismissed it as old-fashioned. There were students, particularly senior ones, who felt infantilised and controlled, but most have come around. “Among friends and stuff, there was a fair bit of that going on, but once we got into it, we didn’t really care any more,” says Oscar Male, who is in year 10.

McDonald is also working with nearby Rye Primary School, where he has been coaching teachers in the practical skills they missed out on at university. “How they’re using their proximity in a room,” says principal Lachlan Featherston. “How they’re scanning the room. How they’re using students’ names effectively.” They learn about the power of a pause – to allow thinking time and anticipation of what might come next. They learn to use their presence. “Sometimes if a child is talking, you don’t have to say anything; just the movement of your position is enough.”

Then, of course, there’s the look. Every teacher has one; it might involve raised eyebrows, peering over glasses or the sudden disappearance of a smile. “Nine times out of 10,” says Featherston, “that will work. During my first few years of teaching, the principal said, ‘They have to know your look.’ ” It becomes hardwired: “You find yourself occasionally doing it out in public.” Featherston doesn’t use the look, or any of the teacher tricks beyond having clear values, with his own children. “It’s a different dynamic,” he says. “I want to be a dad at home.”

The opposite tack is taken at Warakirri College. The school – a kind of last-chance saloon for troubled youths – is scattered across four campuses in western Sydney. Its Fairfield campus is in a first-floor, monochrome office building made comfortable with beanbags, couches and a smattering of student art. The only thing that resembles a traditional school is the woman in charge.

Carolyn Blanden, the head of Sydney’s Warakirri College, takes a gentle approach to her troubled students: “We don’t do discipline.”Credit: Joshua Morris

Carolyn Blanden is a petite, poised powerhouse in a red blazer, oozing efficiency and certainty. She has spent a lifetime wrangling kids, first in public schools, then in sandstone private ones. She was a boarding mistress at Sydney’s Knox Grammar before becoming principal of high-fee, high-achieving Meriden College. Now, she is dealing with students aged 15 to 22 who’ve been kicked out of mainstream schools. Some have been to jail. Some have been too crippled by anxiety to go anywhere.

Warakirri’s approach is gentle. If they’re late, they’re welcomed; the alternative could have been not coming at all. “What if Mum has woken up drunk? What if the kid has been a school avoider for years, and they come back for three lessons?” says Blanden. “If you simply say, ‘You were late, here’s a detention,’ there’s a power imbalance.” She lets students smoke outside because some won’t attend if they can’t (it helps that Warakirri is an independent school, funded by government but outside the dominion of the NSW Department of Education). She has locked horns with regulators. “They say, ‘Your discipline policy!’ But we don’t do discipline. I don’t want to say, ‘If you do this, then this will happen to you.’ “

The difference between Warakirri and the mainstream schools that aspire to the same philosophy is resources. High-needs students attract more funding, so the college has one staff member to six-and-a-half students, including two on-site counsellors. There’s extra support for literacy, as Blanden believes illiteracy drives poor behaviour (“instead of looking stupid, it’s best to look naughty”), and the school will let students take assessments verbally. Teachers are trained in therapeutic crisis intervention. It’s a stark contrast to Mike, Mary and Kate’s experience of teacher shortages, a chronic lack of counsellors and struggles to source expertise or in-class support.

Blanden has traversed the gamut of education, from schools where students get detention for failing to wear their blazer in public to one where they’re celebrated for simply turning up. If she ever led another sandstone school, she’d apply lessons from Warakirri. “I now know that a lot of my students in high-fee schools would have been dealing with many more challenges and difficulties than we realised,” says Blanden. “We weren’t always sensitive to them. When a kid is really carrying on and being horrible, and you say, ‘I’m worried about you, can I make you a hot Milo?’, it’s amazing how they calm down. I don’t think we’ve had a bad kid in 10 years. We’ve seen lots of kids who need a hug.”

* Names have been changed.

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