The Government is asking teachers and school leaders for views on improved behaviour, including stopping the use of mobile phones in the school day.
The Government has today (29 June) launched a call for evidence asking teachers, parents and other staff for their views and policies on managing good behaviour, ahead of planned updates to Government guidance later this year on behaviour, discipline, suspensions and permanent exclusions.
The six-week consultation seeks views on how schools maintain calm classrooms, the use of removal rooms and creating mobile phone-free school days, among other measures.
This next step follows the department’s £10 million behaviour hubs programme which partners heads and leaders from England’s highest performing multi-academy trusts with schools struggling with poor behaviour and discipline.
Maria said, “Ofsted’s recent review into the prevalence of peer-on-peer sexual harassment and violence in schools and colleges revealed the scale of peer on peer sexual abuse which is normalised in school, and it is girls who are victims in the overwhelming majority of cases, including 8 out of 10 girls reporting pressure from their peers to send nude images of themselves, images that amount to child abuse in law, and too often the Police see harvested for adult use on specialist child abuse websites.
Ofsted’s review reveals in startling terms how much more sexual harassment and violence is now manifesting itself online as well as face to face. Online sexual abuse has become the ugly evolution of unwanted sexual touching in the school corridors. Women and girls don’t just experience abuse offline but are also accustomed to it online, as a toxic continuum of violence and harassment. Ofsted found nearly 90% of girls, and nearly 50% of boys have received sexually explicit digital pictures or videos of things they did not want to see. Like the rise in unsolicited explicit pictures, self-generated indecent images of children has sky-rocketed too. These images are often generated amongst groups of children (consensually or otherwise) and are often non-consensually shared – this is an abuse that’s increased 87% in 2020. As a result, swathes of sexual images of children are now falling into the hands of child sex offenders.
I therefore welcome the Government’s consultation on managing good behaviour, including on the use of mobile phones in the school day and urge all local teachers, parents and other staff to contribute to ensure that all school age children can learn in a safe and calm environment, where they are free from the disruption caused to teachers and pupils by poor behaviour in schools.”
The call for evidence asks for information about schools’ behaviour strategies and practices, including questions on practices or interventions that have been effective in addressing low level disruptive behaviour. It will also gather responses from schools about how and when they might decide to transfer a pupil to another school in their best interest, known as managed moves. The survey asks how schools’ behaviour policies and approaches have changed in response to the pandemic and what successful practices they intend to maintain.
Consultation deadline closes 10 Aug 2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/behaviour-management-strategies-in-school-units-and-managed-moves-call-for-evidence