When the Adults Change: A Case Study

In April 2017, I was asked to take over a school in Oxford that had failed its Ofsted inspection and been placed in Special Measures. New Marston - I’m naming it because people who know me, also know this is a true story. When I arrived for my first visit, it was utterly chaotic from the outset. The deputy head had recently left, the headteacher was off sick, and the school was heavily reliant on supply staff. With so little consistency, behaviour was appalling. I saw pupils running out of lessons and into the outdoor fields, climbing and jumping across tables during lessons, and displaying openly disrespectful attitudes. When I challenged them, the response was often, “What? Who are you? You can’t tell ME what to do”. It was not a welcoming environment.

There were, however, some real gold nuggets amongst both the staff and the children. But overall, the atmosphere was disrespectful and chaotic. Many of the adults were seriously demoralised and disengaged, while pupils were clearly taking advantage of the instability. It felt as though the children were running the school.

I had already led two schools before this, but this experience was on an entirely different scale. In time, the previous Leadership Team left, I appointed a Deputy Head, the Inclusion Lead returned from a sabbatical and immediately we introduced a system of rewards and sanctions (wait for the ‘reveal’ later), just to stabilise things a little. By the time the next academic year rolled around in September of 2017, I had fully left my post as Executive Head to focus on New Marston.

We started the September INSET talking about culture change and implementing, properly implementing, school values. As you can imagine, this fired up some members of staff, while others continued whispering around corners, about me, and how I thought I could fix a broken ship and how naïve I must be. And arrogant.

By October, someone recommended When the Adults Change Everything Changes, a book recently published and written by Paul Dix. The 3 of us in the Leadership team read it within a few days and felt we had nothing to lose by trying something new. So we bought a copy for every member of staff. We asked teachers to read a chapter before each staff meeting, so that we could discuss it together. My wonderful Inclusion Lead, Rachel, decided to lead Support Staff training simultaneously, so that as a school, were understood what we were doing and could work on being consistent together.

First, it was Meet and Greet. Teachers and pupils loved this, so this quickly became established. Then it was Ready, Respectful, Safe - at the core of our language and our re-written Behaviour Policy. I won’t go into everything we did, but we pretty much followed the book. (The caveat here is that we were 3 already experienced leaders, other teams with a similar mission may need a little more support with training).

Recognition Boards went down a storm, pupils and teachers loved them, and we did ‘Fantastic walking’ (seriously, try it – it stops display boards from being gradually eroded and moth-eaten) and it really does give the students a sense of pride.

Being in Special Measures meant that over the course of the previous year, the more aspirant families in our community had transferred their children to neighbouring schools and so we had plenty of spaces for the IYFAP to send us all of the children who had been struggling in their schools, like a kind of fun card swap, so whilst our pupil behaviour was improving, we were, to some extent, swimming against the tide. Here the wonderful Rachel stepped in again and found secret and cost-free ways of training us all up to be neurodiverse experts, so we developed the skills we needed.

By the end of that academic year, we had literally witnessed a behavioural nirvana take over the school. Pupils were polite, adults were happy, wellbeing was high, and the remaining parents were astonished. Despite our cohort becoming trickier, the adults had literally changed. AND. THEY. LOVED IT. We had ex-teachers begging to come back because of all the wonderful stories they were hearing.

September 2018 and we told the pupils that there would be no more house points, no rewards, just the odd phone call home for exceptional effort, kindness and citizenship. They really didn’t mind, after all, they were thriving off the positive noticing, the specified praise, the feeling of enormous wellbeing, as pop bands might say. We told them that good behaviour was the expectation, and they basked in the trust placed in them to meet this expectation.

Now, for context, we weren’t in an affluent area, we had a very mixed cohort with high numbers of FSM, SEND, EAL and an Inclusion base, the sum of which became a beautifully balanced school. We taught all our pupils sign language, as we also had a Hearing Base. The care pupils had for each other was off the scale.

Visitors to the school were astonished, and it was the favourite school of our peripatetic staff. More importantly, perhaps, our children and our adults loved coming to school. New habits, new ways of working, of relationship-building and relational practice permeated everything. The pupils were the same, they hadn’t changed. But the adults had.