This study is a‘School Choices’ project. School leaders make choices about school-wide practices and approaches that are intended to produce positive outcomes for pupils, such as how to organise the school day or communicate with families. However, many school-level practices have limited or no evidence for them, which means leaders must make decisions using other information. The aim of School Choices research is to produce causal evidence about the impact of different school-level approaches and policies on outcomes of interest, with particular attention to impact on pupils from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. School Choices evaluations are divided into two phases: a scoping phase, and an impact evaluation phase. During the scoping phase, the research team will refine their research questions, verify their assumptions, and explore the feasibility of their evaluation designs.
This project is part of a joint funding round with the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF). The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) are partnering to find, fund, and evaluate programmes and practices in England and Wales that could keep children safe from involvement in violence and/or improve academic attainment, by reducing absenteeism.
The aim of this evaluation is to explore whether schools with a behavioural policy that aims to enable an authoritative school climate have better attendance and exclusion outcomes than schools whose behavioural policies do not aim to enable an authoritative school climate.
We know that school absenteeism (missed attendance as well as fixed and permanent exclusion) has the potential to impact on students’ attainment, but also on the likelihood of them becoming involved in violence. Many students with poor attendance and those being excluded from school are the most disadvantaged.
Schools in the UK must have a behavioural policy in place, which defines teachers’ powers and the school’s approach to sanctions, detention, confiscation, and isolation rooms, amongst other characteristics. These policies provide evidence of the extent to which schools strive to enable an authoritative school climate, for instance by taking a restorative and supportive approach versus a punitive approach to behaviour. There is limited research in the UK exploring the content of school behaviour policies and the effect that they have on attendance and exclusions.
This study aims to address this gap by classifying school behavioural policies in relation to whether they are likely to establish an authoritative school climate and exploring how they may be conducive to a school climate that reduces exclusions and improves attendance of secondary school pupils in England.
This project is currently in the scoping phase. The aim of the scoping phase is to assess the feasibility of designing an impact evaluation that can produce causal evidence about the impact of different types of school behaviour policies. The scoping phase will:
- establish the relevance and feasibility of the proposed approach to classifying secondary schools’ behaviour policies in terms of the extent to which they aim to enable an authoritative school climate.
- map out and understand current variation in school behaviour policies, using three sources of evidence: qualitative analysis of schools’ behaviour policies; interviews in schools; and a survey of schools.
- develop and validate a school leadership questionnaire to classify school behaviour policies in terms of whether they are likely to be authoritative school climate enabling.
The scoping phase will be completed in summer 2024. Once the scoping phase is finalised, this web page will be updated.