How are we reading behaviour?

Many of us come to teaching fluent in the behaviourist toolkit and almost nothing else. We can explain a reward chart and a consequence ladder, and we reach for them instinctively, because that is the grammar of behaviour most of us absorbed from our own schooling and our early training. Behavioural approaches can offer valuable insights into learning and classroom practice. The concern is not their use, but what happens when any single interpretive lens becomes so dominant that other explanations, experiences and possibilities are overlooked. The other readings in this resource are not decoration. They are the difference between asking “how do I stop this?” and asking “what is this, and for whom is it a problem?”

That difference has a destination. In England, the most commonly recorded reason for both suspension and permanent exclusion is “persistent disruptive behaviour” - a catch-all category that describes the teacher's experience of a child rather than anything about the child's needs, history, or environment. It is precisely the category that every other reading in this resource would interrogate. In 2023/24 schools issued roughly 955,000 suspensions and 10,900 permanent exclusions, and the numbers have climbed sharply since the pandemic.

Behaviour management is not a neutral technology. It is the first valve in a pipeline, and the pipeline is not equally open to everyone.

Who falls through it is not random - it is the pattern set out in Who is most affected: poverty, race, SEND, care experience and place, compounding hardest at their intersections. The same behaviour, read through a deficit lens, is far more likely to end in exclusion when the child is poor, racialised, or already carrying an unmet need. And exclusion is rarely the end of the line: it is strongly associated with later involvement in the youth justice system, and what a school reads as defiance can be the visible edge of exploitation. The behaviour decision and the safeguarding decision are often the same decision.

The primary-to-secondary transition is the part that primary teachers most need to hear. Permanent exclusion peaks in the early-to-middle years of secondary school - but those children are very rarely strangers to the system. They were noticed in primary: the early suspensions, the internal “time-out” logs, the special-needs categorisation, the quiet hardening of a reputation that travels with a child across a transition. End-of-primary attainment and primary suspension are among the visible early markers of a trajectory that the data only fully registers years later. By the time the permanent exclusion letter is written, the child has often been being read in a particular way since they were six or seven.

This is why the lenses are not an academic luxury. A teacher working only from the behaviourist toolkit can manage the behaviour and still, in perfect good faith, be the first author of an exclusion narrative. A teacher who can also reach for attachment, sensory difference, the double empathy problem, cultural capital, the child's own account, or the simple question whose norms am I enforcing, and at whose cost? has more places to stand before the consequence ladder becomes the only move left. The aim is not to abandon structure or excuse harm. It is to make sure that the moment a child is first categorised - on the carpet, in Year 2 - is a moment of curiosity rather than the quiet opening of a door that, for some children, never closes again.