Understanding how school policies and practices shape school climate – School Choices – Scoping Phase Survey

This study is a School Choices project. School Choices projects aim 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. This project is currently in an extended scoping phase, the research team are refining their research questions, verifying their assumptions, and exploring the feasibility of their evaluation designs. 

The approach being considered for this project is enabling a particular school climate as a way of improving attendance and exclusions outcomes. According to Pellerin’s framework (2005), school climates can be classified in terms of the extent to which they aim to enable an authoritative, authoritarian, permissive or indifferent school climate. We are particularly interested in comparing pupil outcomes in schools that are authoritative school climate enabling (ASCE) relative to schools that aim to enable other types of climates. 

Originally, the focus of this project was to explore whether a school’s behaviour policy could enable a particular school climate (and in turn impact pupil outcomes). Based on learnings from the initial scoping phase of this project, this focus was expanded to include the wider set of school practices and procedures that are associated with school climates (e.g., behaviour management, student support, academic expectations, pupil engagement). 

As part of the extended scoping phase, The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), in collaboration with educational psychologists from University College London and the University of Birmingham, are further exploring the relationship between this wider set of school practices and their potential to foster a particular school climate. They are currently seeking perspectives from senior leaders to better understand how these practices are implemented and the mechanisms through which they work.

How can you register your interest?

Access the survey here.

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 behaviour 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 a particular 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 initially aimed to address this gap by classifying school behaviour policies in relation to the school climate they are likely to establish and exploring how that school climate may be conducive to reducing exclusions and improving attendance of secondary school pupils in England. Following an initial phase of research that found written behaviour policies on their own may not foster this change, we now expand this aim to include the wider set of practices occurring within schools. 

This project is part of a joint funding round with the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF). The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and the 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.

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 ASCE practices. The initial scoping phase focused on analysing school behaviour policies as a proxy for understanding schools’ approaches to behaviour management. The extended scoping phase will:

• establish the relevance and feasibility of using Pellerin’s framework (2005) to classify secondary schools’ intended practices and their implementation in terms of the extent to which they aim to enable an authoritative school climate.
• develop and validate two questionnaires to classify schools’ practices as ASCE or non-ASCE), one for school leaders to classify intended practices and another for school staff to classify their implementation.
• map out and understand variation in intended practices and their implementation, using data from survey responses.

Initial scoping phase findings

The initial scoping phase provided some valuable insights into the relationship between school behaviour policies and their potential to foster an authoritative school climate. The findings revealed that while school behaviour policies varied in content and could be grouped as ASCE and non-ASCE according to Pellerin’s framework, significant challenges emerged in using them as a reliable proxy for actual school practices. These include:

• high scores across all questions, reducing variability in responses and thus the usefulness of the measure.
• a lack of agreement between questionnaire responses and researcher ratings of policy content, suggesting that senior leaders may have interpreted the questionnaire based on their knowledge of actual practices rather than the written policy content.
• variation in perceptions of policy implementation among different staff members, highlighting the complexity of translating written policies into consistent practices across schools.

These findings underscore the need for an extended phase to provide a stronger foundation for an impact evaluation of ASCE practices and their role in reducing absenteeism and exclusions in secondary schools. Specifically, the extended scoping phase will focus on:

• expanding beyond written behaviour policies in the classification of school practices.
• developing a more reliable and valid measure of ASCE practices.
• capturing multiple perspectives within schools to triangulate data and reduce bias in measuring school practices.
• exploring the relationship between leadership intent and staff implementation to better understand how these influence school climate and outcomes