Inside England’s ultra-disciplined schools

Michaela Community School prides itself on its approach to discipline. At this free school in Wembley, north-west London, children walk the corridors in silence and retrieve books from their bags within an allocated 10 seconds. Teachers hand out demerits to pupils for looking out of the window. When it opened a decade ago, with former home secretary Suella Braverman as its chair of governors, Michaela was an outlier. Now the ultra-disciplined approach – often referred to as championing “high behavioural standards,” “strong leadership” and a “no excuses” mantra – is spreading throughout schools in England. Yet many pupils, parents and teachers feel it comes with heavy costs to children’s mental health, wellbeing and educational outcomes. And they are speaking out.

The ultra-disciplined approach to schooling attempts to answer a real problem. Physical assault, threatening behaviour and verbal abuse towards teachers in England have all increased since the pandemic, according to a 2023 Ofsted survey. Students turn up to school but don’t attend classes, and even primary students are becoming noticeably more defiant. Teachers at Oasis Academy on the Isle of Sheppey went on strike in December last year, demanding action over pupils’ threatening behaviour. “Tens of thousands of teachers [have been] pushed prematurely out of their careers,” due to “soaring apathy and aggression among students,” according to Public First’s Commission on Teacher Retention. The government’s national behaviour survey found that only 39 per cent of children in England feel safe in their classroom every day.

Firm discipline, schools like Michaela argue, helps to tackle bad behaviour and provide the optimum learning environment. Michaela has a Progress 8 score (which measures the academic progress of a child) of 2.37. That’s the best in the country. Other free schools, as well as multi-academy trusts (MATs), have attempted to replicate this academic success with a similar approach. Like free schools, academies are state schools run by charitable trusts rather than by the local council – so they have more flexibility in deciding how they operate. MATs are chains of academies, which are free and taxpayer funded. A number of these groups made headlines recently due to policies described as authoritarian, including South Bank MAT in York, Outwood Grange Academy Trust in the East Midlands and north of England, and Athena Learning Trust, which runs eight schools across Devon and Cornwall.

“They say the aim is [to ensure] disruption-free learning,” says Lucy Jenkins*, whose two teenage sons attend a school within the Athena Learning Trust. “[They say] that most children just ‘get it’ – they only need to be sent to ‘reflection’ a few times and then they know what’s expected,” she says. “Reflection” involves two and a half hours sat in a silent former sports hall where desks have been separated by screens and windows covered up. It’s a popular form of “sanction” (i.e. punishment) across ultra-disciplined schools, albeit under varying labels such as “reset”, “consequence booths” and, paradoxically, “inclusion units”.

But while Jenkins says her sons are both well behaved, sanctions have become “so ridiculous … they don’t stand a chance in hell of getting it right,” with the youngest recently being sent to reflection for wiping glue from his hand onto a table. Not maintaining eye contact with a teacher could also result in sanction, as could fidgeting. That’s one reason why these methods have been said to discriminate against children with special educational needs – children who, regardless of how well-behaved or dedicated they are, says Jenkins, “cannot just sit still, can’t keep quiet from one lesson to the next. Some of them get sent to reflection twice in a day and are left thinking, ‘Why did I bother coming in?’”

Mental health challenges

Thomas Mann, a teacher for 35 years and vice chair of the Campaign for State Education, agrees that this approach to discipline, in which a school will repeatedly sanction a child before “pulling parents in, demonising their child and eventually externally excluding them”, belies a wider issue: that many schools simply do not want to engage with children with behavioural issues and/or special educational needs, “because they generally pull your data down, they’re more intensive as a group and they’re more expensive to educate.”

So, while Michaela Community School is rated outstanding by Ofsted, Mann cautions against only looking at schools’ results on paper, having witnessed first-hand the “trail of kids who failed, to allow success for the others”. For example, parents can be pressured to remove a child from school, in order to avoid the worse fate of a permanent exclusion on their record. “My last job was at a school in Brent and we ended up with an autistic boy with poor behaviours,” Mann says. The boy was previously at Michaela and was told “that it wasn’t his autism but his behaviour [that was the problem]”. This was despite the fact that the boy had an education, health and care plan in place. “If you dealt with the autistic part of his behaviours, you could engage him,” Mann says. “But they didn’t seem prepared to do that.” (When asked about the case, Michaela declined to comment.)

Mann says that during his three and a half decades of teaching, behaviour has changed, rather than declined. After the pandemic, for instance, certain behaviours have had to be relearned – such as lining up properly, or how to interact with classmates. Meanwhile, societal factors such as poverty and knife crime have “impacted how students experience school and authority”. He says the real problem is a decline in school resources to deal with these issues. “It’s easier to have a disciplinarian shouting and screaming and excluding pupils than it is to spend money on people going in and actually remediating poor behaviour to a level where children can re-engage,” says Mann. This approach has long-term consequences. “If you don’t have relationships with the students, particularly the vulnerable ones, you’re never going to crack behaviour.”

But relationships have been stripped back, along with school funding. Record numbers of teachers are leaving the profession (40,000 during 2021–22), meaning classrooms are often run by cover staff. Pupils spend an increasing amount of time studying and less socialising with their peers (break times in English schools have on average reduced by up to an hour over the past 20 years) while human interaction has been deprioritised, if not banned entirely. “Some children at my sons’ school [were] late to [a] lesson because they’d helped a Year 7 child who was crying because they were lost,” says Jenkins. “And they were sent to reflection for it. Obviously those children aren’t going to help next time.”

Robert Matthews*, also an Athena Learning Trust parent, noticed that “tutor time” (one-on-one time with a teacher) was one of the first things to go when the trust took over his daughters’ school in 2022, to be replaced with “morning inspection” where the student body stands in the hall while their pencil cases are checked. As with Jenkins’ sons, Matthews’ daughters weren’t the ones regularly receiving sanctions. “But something schools don’t understand is that it has a massive effect on the ones who like to follow rules because they don’t want to be in trouble.”

At first, both children would come home from school exhausted. The older daughter, then in Year 10, “had a breakdown one night, saying she was finding it hard to cope,” says Matthews, but his younger daugher Ella*, who was then in Year 8, “was more quiet around it.” Shortly afterwards, she was found self-harming at school. “We spoke to doctors and CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) who said they didn’t have any immediate concerns, then one day she came home from school and was violently sick.” Ella had taken a serious overdose, and while it had happened on school grounds, says Matthews, teachers “were completely unaware. I can’t imagine that she wasn’t acting strange, but they hadn’t noticed.”

Ella was “pretty close to needing a liver transplant,” says Matthews, but she recovered, and now goes to a new school where the discipline approach is rooted in common sense. “They do have an ‘isolation room’ but it’s rarely used,” he says, “and they use detentions for people that are actually misbehaving. You can’t argue with that.” Ella now has to travel 13 miles each way to school (there was only one other school in their town, but it is also part of the Athena Learning Trust) but “she’s thriving, she’s back to herself, and happy when she comes home.” Her older sister remains at the Athena Learning school in order not to disrupt her GCSEs. “The school said they were going to speak to her, to make sure she was OK [following Ella’s suicide attempt],” says Matthews, “[but she says] they never did.”

A freedom of information request made by Matthews revealed that between the period September 2022–October 2023, there were 118 instances of self-harm and five suicide attempts on the school grounds. A spokesperson for the Trust said, “We take our responsibility for any students experiencing poor mental health for any reason extremely seriously. We use a range of internal and external services to support our families and schools. We ensure these services are properly vetted [and] that they put the well-being of all our school community at the heart of their strategy … Across our schools, there is positive recognition from Ofsted that student wellbeing is prioritised and supported.”

Controlling behaviour

It can be hard to point to any one factor when it comes to the reasons for suicide. Across the UK, the suicide rate of young people has increased in the years since the pandemic. In 2020-21, women and girls under 24 saw the steepest rise since records began. Yet some would say that this general trend provides an even stronger case for prioritising pupils’ mental health. After two pupils attending schools within the Westcountry Trust – another MAT that has adopted an extreme approach to discipline – took their own lives within a week of one other, Penny Logsdail, director of Summerhouse Services, a humanist organisation that promotes mental wellbeing in young people, was moved to speak out in the regional press, suggesting that “toxic, controlling, harsh, frightening and dystopic environments” may have played a part.

While teachers aren’t mental health professionals and “can’t pick up the slack in the government’s lack of funding across society,” as Mann puts it, the school environment should be conducive to encouraging emotional stability in children, while respecting their basic rights. “People have the right to exercise control over their own bodily functions,” says Logsdail, who has worked in the field of mental health for 25 years as a counsellor, therapist and further education trainer. When school rules dictate that you must sit in a certain position and look in a certain direction, while banning toilet breaks during class, that basic right has been removed, she says.

Jenkins agrees that the need for control is one of the most disturbing aspects of the “high behavioural standards” approach. “We had a letter home saying if children want to take off their jumper they have to ask permission,” she says. On complaining to the school, she was told that they are always allowed, as long as they ask. “But I said, ‘That’s not the issue. The issue is you do not trust a child to decide for themselves whether they are too hot or not.’” Similarly, children in Year 11 were told it was compulsory to attend “sixth period” (an extra hour after school) in order to prepare for their GCSEs. When parents highlighted that this was illegal, the stance changed; it was not compulsory, but if they didn’t attend, they would not be permitted to go to their leavers’ ball.

The school, Jenkins argues, is creating an environment where children “learn that their voice doesn’t matter,” and where ultimately “they hate learning.” Her eldest son, for instance, had an interest in pursuing A-levels up until last year, when he decided to pursue an agricultural course instead. “He’s curious and was always interested in lots of things, but now he’s literally counting the days until the end of school and says, ‘I never ever want to set foot in a classroom again.’ And that’s dangerous.”

It’s also ironic, given that the main argument from supporters of this approach is that it better enables children to achieve academic success. “The evidence is clear,” argues Robert Colvile, editor of the conservative online newspaper CapX, “stricter schools get better results” and have “demonstrable success in helping the disadvantaged”. It’s true that Michaela and a handful of MATs that employ this approach do accept children from disadvantaged backgrounds and do have impressive GSCE results and Progress 8 scores. But does the end justify the means?

What really matters

“I’ve always argued that you’re better off measuring your school on what the kids do a few years after they leave, than you are measuring their GCSE results,” says Mann. “Because the next move [university] is incredibly difficult and there’s a high dropout rate of working-class kids in our country.” In Canada, it was recognised a decade ago that “students need competencies beyond literacy and numeracy”. The “measuring what matters” initiative worked to ensure that health, creativity, citizenship and social-emotional learning were considered as important as grades, in order to “provide students with the skills they need to live happy, healthy, economically secure, civically engaged lives.”

Matthews agrees that while he wants his daughters to do well academically – “and they will as they’re bright kids” – he couldn’t care less about his school’s Progress 8 result. “I care about my daughters’ wellbeing. I want them to be good kids, and free thinkers.”

The scale of the challenges facing the education system in England is vast and centres on a lack of funding. When it comes to academies, the first step must be to introduce democratic control. As these schools operate independently of local authorities, while parents’ complaints may be escalated to CEO level, from there, there is often nowhere else to go. Parents may simply be told to find another school, as there are usually plenty of others on the waiting list. In December, Labour MP Rachael Maskell raised concerns in parliament about the running of South Bank MAT, asking for an urgent debate around holding MAT leaders to account. These are state schools, run with public funding, and while there is a dominant narrative – peddled by supporters such as Colvile – that only those on “the left” are raising concerns, this isn’t true. Maskell’s involvement in South Bank MAT, for instance, was instigated by parent protests and governor resignations, while teachers at St Ivo Academy, part of Astrea MAT, went on strike in November 2023 over “draconian” policies.

The problem of extreme behavioural issues in England is real and should not be downplayed. But this newly popular, ultra-disciplinary approach to education undervalues substance, integrity and care, in favour of speed, performance and status. These schools are not the answer. Our children deserve more.

*Names have been changed to protect children’s identities.

This article is from New Humanist’s autumn 2024 issue. Subscribe now.