Should pupils' attitudes inform business management?

Released 10/11/2011

COMMENT: Senior educational psychologist, Dr Glen Williams (pictured) looks at how measuring pupils' attitudes can help address undesirable behaviour in the classroom and improve achievement

Educational budgets are being severely stretched, so school business managers are faced with the ever greater challenge of making the most effective use of resources and prioritising the needs of the children. It can be difficult to know where best to apply efforts in what can feel like an uphill struggle to close the attainment gap, improve discipline and attendance - particularly when the latest figures show 450,000 children are now classed as persistently absent - and make sure every child is aspiring to achieve the best they can.

The government has recognised that behaviour is an essential ingredient to learning - one child's poor behaviour disrupts an entire class - and the new Ofsted framework reflects this.

With little room to manoeuvre financially, schools need to find new ways to prevent rather than cure. Some are doing this by going beyond monitoring poor behaviour and truancy and probing the heart of any underlying causes by surveying pupils' attitudes. Currently more than 3,000 primary and secondary schools in the UK are gaining an insight into exactly what is preventing children from fully engaging in their own education via attitudinal surveys.

The results from doing so can be dramatic. One school reported a drop in its short-term exclusion rate from 20 to none in a two year period, after finding and responding to a weakness in how prepared their students were for learning.

Attitudes, in an educational context, aren't subject to day-to-day change. They are complex dimensions incorporating and affecting pupil feelings, thoughts and behaviours, and might include things such as feelings about school, attitudes to teachers and general work ethic. Before a pupil's attendance and behaviour worsens, their attitudes can deteriorate. Knowing this helps identify those at risk, and can result in early intervention. A school can deal with a pupil's deteriorating attitude to attendance before that child has started to actually truant ensuring the problem is resolved early and effectively, with less of a consequent drain on resources.

Once the root causes of current or future behaviours are understood, schools are able to put together worthwhile supportive and preventative programmes. Two pupils may sometimes display very similar disruptive behaviour, while the underlying causes are utterly distinct. Adopting a ‘one-size fits all' approach in this situation is unlikely to deliver the appropriate personalised, and therefore successful, outcome. With the necessary insights, schools are in a much stronger position to review their pastoral and guidance processes and clearly review the key indicators of their efficacy.

Typically, exploring data in these ways allows results to be broken down to show how a school compares nationally, as well as to show strategically how attitudes vary according to year group, gender and ethnicity. Regular reassessing helps schools to baseline and benchmark their work as well as develop an understanding of the systemic contribution of whole school policy to behaviour.

The end result is that available resources are prioritised and deployed where they are most needed, and all learners can be encouraged and supported to achieve to the best of their ability according to their needs. For business managers, that's the best of both worlds.

Dr Glen Williams is a chartered psychologist at W3 Insights and has developed the Pupil Attitudes to Self and School (PASS) attitudinal survey for schools at www.gl-assessment.co.uk/pass

See more news stories like this