Supporting young people from a foundation of trusting relationships and addressing the underlying reasons behind observable behaviours.
Behaviour remains a key area of priority across education; good behaviour is recognised as important in the creation of safe and supportive school communities. Much of the rhetoric surrounding behaviour in schools has been focused on maintaining high expectations and consistency in the teaching of what ‘good’ behaviour looks like (DfE, Behaviour in schools, 2024) and this has been emphasised through the launch of ‘Behaviour Hubs’ in 2020.
Despite these initiatives, there have been growing and urgent concerns related to the rapidly rising number of permanent exclusions across the UK. In the 2022–2023 academic year, the Department for Education (DfE) released figures showing that permanent exclusions rose by 44%, and suspensions increased by 37%, marking the highest recorded annual figures at that time. In the 2023–2024 academic year, these numbers climbed further, with 10,900 permanent exclusions (a 16% increase from 2022–2023) and approximately 955,000 suspensions (a 21% increase compared to 2022–2023).
The picture around attendance is similarly concerning. The Department for Education (2023) reported that persistent absence affected nearly a quarter of young people (24.2%) in 2022–2023, compared with 10.9% before the pandemic. For some groups of young people, such as those with SEND, care-experienced young people, or those experiencing mental health difficulties, the rates are significantly higher.
Families consistently report feeling stuck between impossible choices:
It is not only young people who are struggling. Teacher stress and burnout are at record levels. The Teacher Wellbeing Index 2024 (Education Support) reported that 57% of staff felt disruption in lessons had increased, 63% reported more incidents of ‘challenging behaviour’, and 82% of those said it negatively impacted their mental health. The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT, 2023) similarly found that behaviour was the second most significant cause of stress for teachers. Research by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER, 2022) also identified behaviour management and pastoral care as the top priority areas where teachers wanted additional support.
These figures suggest that the current systems designed to manage behaviour and attendance are struggling to meet the needs of young people and families. They also highlight an urgent need to look again at how we understand these issues, and whether existing approaches are helping or harming.
Attendance is often presented as a matter of choice: young people either attend school or they do not. This framing has driven policies that focus primarily on compliance, reinforced by national rhetoric of “cracking down” on absence, “clamping down” on fines, and “raising expectations” of families.
In practice, this has meant that families whose young people struggle with attendance frequently encounter penalties, threats of prosecution, or intense monitoring. Absence letters are often the first response, followed by fines and, in some cases, legal proceedings. The underlying assumption is that greater pressure will result in improved attendance.
Many of these approaches are rooted in early-20th-century behaviourism, which focused on shaping observable behaviour through external rewards and punishments while discounting internal experiences (such as anxiety, trauma, or sensory needs) as “subjective.” In schools, this shows up as points and stickers, “golden time,” certificates and trips for the “best behaved,” and high attendance alongside detentions, isolation, loss of privileges, or exclusion when expectations are not met. Behaviourism assumes that attendance and behaviour are matters of choice, to be influenced by incentives or deterrents, rather than signals of unmet need.
Yet both research and lived experience suggest otherwise. Punitive measures may produce short-term increases in attendance for some, but they do little to address the underlying causes of absence (YoungMinds, 2023). The Impact Ed Report (2024) found that awareness of sanctions and consequences isn’t strongly linked to improved attendance. For young people whose difficulties are linked to anxiety, sensory overwhelm, bullying, unmet special educational needs (SEND), or trauma, sanctions often intensify distress and mistrust.
Rewards and incentives are also problematic. Evidence shows that attendance awards are largely ineffective in sustaining change, and retrospective rewards can actually decrease subsequent attendance; once incentives are removed, attendance often drops further (Robinson et al., 2021). For young people already experiencing barriers, rewarding attendance can unintentionally reinforce the expectation that they must tolerate unsafe or overwhelming environments, increasing vulnerability.
Young people’s voices highlight the gap between policy assumptions and lived reality. One young person told us:
For these young people, absence is not about refusal or lack of motivation, but about barriers that have not been understood or addressed.
Families describe feeling alienated and fearful of asking for help, which erodes the trust essential for collaborative problem-solving. Staff, meanwhile, are pressured to “drive up” attendance figures without being equipped to address complex underlying issues.
Young people’s voices highlight the gap between policy assumptions and lived reality. One young person told us:
The consequences of these approaches are clear. A 2021 survey of 239 parents by Square Peg and Not Fine in School found that:
When internal experiences are not fully explored, unmet needs can manifest as disruption or disengagement—leading either to exclusion or non-attendance. In this sense, rising exclusions and persistent absence can be understood as two sides of the same coin.
Promisingly, the national picture is beginning to shift. In August 2024, the Department for Education updated its Working Together to Improve School Attendance guidance. The introduction of the “Support First” framework prioritises early intervention, respectful partnerships with families, and co-produced problem-solving before fines or prosecution are considered.
There are signs this is having an impact. By early 2025, overall school absence had fallen slightly—from 7.2% in 2022/23 to 6.9% in 2023/24—with persistent absence dropping from 23.9% to 21.9%. While still high, these figures suggest progress is possible when the focus shifts from sanction to support.
As one young person put it:
Despite the above challenges, behaviourist approaches continue to dominate in schools and wider education systems. This persistence can be understood through three overlapping reasons:
Rewards and sanctions can produce quick, visible changes. Techniques like positive reinforcement, token economies, and behaviour contracts are widely used and can look successful in the short term, which is appealing when schools must evidence “impact” (O’Leary & Becker, 1967; Reinke et al., 2008). But this success can be deceptive:
Lived experience echoes this picture:
“There have been countless times I needed space and time; I was forced back into classes panicking. This made attending school much harder over time as it didn’t feel safe.”
“Staff just don’t understand my anxiety I am trying my best.”
What can look like “success” in the short term can be hiding real harm. A calm classroom might give the impression that everything is working, but in reality many young people are just pushing their struggles out of sight. Some mask their distress until it builds up into anxiety, burnout or school refusal. Others get caught in cycles of sanctions until they stop engaging altogether. And some families, seeing that school isn’t meeting their young person’s needs, make the difficult decision to remove them. This is part of why we’re now seeing rising absence and more stress related behaviour in schools, but also rising numbers of young people being electively home educated.
Behaviourist approaches have been studied for more than a century and continue to feel “evidence-based.” Classic studies found that rewarding young people for desirable behaviour increased the likelihood of repetition (O’Leary & Becker, 1967; Reinke et al., 2008). These findings are often cited to justify widespread use of positive reinforcement, token economies, and sanctions in schools.
However, these studies almost exclusively measured short-term compliance, not long-term wellbeing or sustained engagement and other research highlights significant limitations. External rewards may reduce intrinsic motivation, leaving young people motivated to comply in order to obtain a sticker, certificate, or privilege rather than for feelings of competence or satisfaction (Deci, 1971). In addition, it has been noted that compliance based approaches encourage individuals to override or mask their bodily signals, making them harder to recognise in the longer term, having implications on self-regulation (Mahler, 2021). When rewards are withdrawn, behaviour often worsens (Robinson et al., 2021). Similarly, sanctions may produce visible order but exacerbate distress, alienation, and disengagement, particularly for young people with unmet needs (McEwan, 2000; Owens et al., 2012; Roeser, Eccles & Sameroff, 2000; Hancock et al., 2019; Taylor et al., 2019).
When these deeper needs remain unmet, it results in long-term difficulties such as masking, trauma, hypervigilance, and burnout (Hull, Mandy & Petrides, 2021; Evans, 2024).
“I just did what they wanted so I didn’t get in trouble. But inside I was panicking all the time. No one noticed.”
Behaviourism is indeed supported by research, but primarily research that values what is immediately measurable over safety, trust, belonging, and sustainable learning.
Behaviourist ideas are deeply woven into everyday life. Workplaces use bonuses and warnings; the criminal justice system relies on fines, community service, and imprisonment; traditional parenting often draws on sticker charts, “time out,” or the “naughty step.”.
This way of working has become so normalised that it often goes unquestioned. Schools, charged with “shaping” young people into successful adults, have long regarded behaviourism as the gold standard. But neuroscience and psychology now offer richer insights into how young people develop, learn and regulate. These advances invite us to move beyond surface compliance and towards approaches that prioritise safety, trust, and the meeting of unmet needs.
Research, alongside our direct work with young people and families, has shown three key messages that we believe are essential to understand if behaviour and attendance are to improve:
In contrast to the beliefs upheld by behaviourism, Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2017) highlights that all human beings have an innate motivation to learn, develop and grow. The role of educators is not to construct this drive through rewards and punishments, but to enable and harness the drive that is already there.
This motivation depends on having three basic psychological needs met:
A significant body of SDT research shows that when these needs are thwarted, particularly in highly authoritarian or competitive settings , young people are more likely to become “self-focused, defensive, amotivated, aggressive, and antisocial” (Deci & Ryan, 2017). This helps explain why behaviourist approaches can increase difficulties rather than reduce them.
Adopting the mindset that young people are already doing their best shifts the approach towards curiosity and inclusion:
This matters because for some young people, school may be the only place where they can experience unconditional acceptance. Conditional rewards for “good behaviour” risk leaving those who are struggling, but still trying, feeling defeated or “not good enough.”
Zero-tolerance behaviour policies further reduce autonomy, relatedness and competence. This raises stress, lowers wellbeing, and ultimately makes both behaviour and attendance harder to sustain.
“One of the teachers and I had an issue where she didn’t understand how I was communicating, which caused me a lot of distress. Afterwards we were able to talk and she actually listened to me and took what I said and adapted her behaviour – because of this she ended up being one of my favourite teachers at that school.”
Focusing only on what we can see (the behaviour) misses what’s driving it. Internal experiences (stress, sensory overwhelm, anxiety, trauma, unmet needs) shape how much a young person can cope, connect and learn on any given day. The idea of the ‘window of tolerance’ described by Daniel Siegal (The Developing Mind, 1999), represents one way in which we can do this.
We all have a zone where we can think clearly, regulate emotions and manage challenges. Inside that window of tolerance, we can meet expectations and adapt when things go wrong. When demands become too great, we’re pushed outside that window and the survival system takes over. At that point, reasoning, planning and problem-solving go offline so the brain can prioritise safety. It’s not “won’t”, it’s “can’t right now.”
Common things that can push children outside their window include:
When a young person is outside their window of tolerance, we tend to see two broad patterns:
Young people who experience internalised stress responses are much easier for us to deal with as adults, but internalising distress can be detrimental to young people’s wellbeing. This is when a young person’s brain detects a threat, creating a feeling of unsafety, but their brain judges that the fight/flight response will not work or has not been successful in removing the danger previously, leaving compliance as the only option. Internalised stress responses can look very confusing to educators, as a young person may seem “fine”, even if they are really struggling. Some common things you may see are:
Punishments and rewards don’t reduce this stress; they often intensify it—especially in the context of wider pressures (cost of living, staff burnout, parent burnout, lower population wellbeing). What helps is understanding the signal and reducing the load.
Jeff was given detention for walking out of the classroom at school. His teacher said he has to stay in class until the lesson ends no matter what. After his detention, Jeff didn’t walk out of the classroom again. But one day, the class was very loud and he had a HUGE meltdown, where he trashed the entire classroom. Jeff was then excluded from the school for his bad behaviour.
What could have helped was:
As a result of this, Jeff had intense feelings of confusion/ upset. He was punished for trying to meet his needs, and was excluded after not being allowed to do this. In the longer term, Jeff struggled to trust any adults. They started to rebuild trust with adults through the Spectrum Gaming community, but it took over a year to gain the confidence to attend a different school.
Jeff now has a one page profile in his school that ensures he is able to do what is needed to meet his own needs, and is feeling much better in a school that is more understanding of him.
Public behaviour management systems (e.g., behaviour charts, traffic lights, card systems) can make anxiety and shame spike—particularly for neurodivergent pupils, those with trauma histories, or anyone who already fears “getting it wrong.” That spike narrows the window of tolerance further, making attendance, engagement and behaviour harder.
When adults stay curious—listening for the message underneath the behaviour—and adjust demands, routines or environments accordingly, young people feel safer and more able to meet expectations. Trust grows and difficulties reduce over time when we change the conditions, rather than just focusing on the behaviour.
Research shows that when we are under stress, the brain assumes we are under threat and redirects resources into survival. This helps us in real danger, but it comes at a cost—our ability to pay attention, remember information, plan, or solve problems is reduced (Thomas, Mareschal & Tolmie, 2020; McEwan, 2000; Owens et al., 2012). For young people experiencing chronic stress from poverty, unmet sensory needs, bullying, or difficulties at home, these cognitive processes can be impaired day after day and this is linked to higher absence and lower engagement (Bowers & Urick, 2021).
This is why school environments that focus on trust and safety are important. When relationships with teachers are supportive, young people are more likely to feel seen, cared about, and motivated (Weis, Kuczera & Tüscher, 2021). This safety is the foundation for curiosity, risk-taking, exploration, and therefore deep learning.
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety in workplaces applies equally well in schools: without safety, people don’t take risks or try new things (Edmondson, 1999). Naomi Fisher’s Safe to Learn Pyramid illustrates the same point—acceptance, trust and belonging must come before exploration and academic progress.
Repeated experiences of emotional attunement and co-regulation with supportive adults are how young people develop self-regulation in the first place (Sameroff, 2010; Vygotsky, 1978). For this reason, young people need adults who show unconditional support, patience, encouragement, and warmth—not just once, but over and over again.
Behaviourist approaches may deliver short-term compliance, but they often fail to build skills or enable intrinsic motivation. Worse, they can erode trust and perpetuate cycles of alienation.
Jeremy attended a special school and was regularly attending with the support of a TA. Jeremy said she was kind and took time to understand him and his interests. She stopped working at the school after a year and Jeremy had a new TA. When Jeremy was struggling, she focused on his behaviour, trying to persuade him to go into lessons and rewarding him if he made it. Jeremy started to find it more and more difficult to attend his lessons, until he spent every day at school sitting in the corridor, struggling to interact with anyone until hometime.
The exception to this was his Design Technology lessons. His Design Technology teacher believed that strong relationships are a foundation for learning, so he spent time with Jeremy and when they saw each other in school they talked about shared interests. For 2 months, Design Technology lessons are the only lessons Jeremy attended and he really enjoyed them.
Because Jeremy was not accessing most of his lessons there was an emergency annual review and Jeremy now has an Education Otherwise Than At School package. He would prefer to be in a school where he felt safe and comfortable, but there wasn’t any identified in the local area which had the approach he needs.
Ultimately, it is only from a foundation of safety and belonging that young people can take the risks learning requires. When they feel supported, they are more able to try, fail, try again, and thrive. When they feel unsafe or shamed, the opposite happens: attendance falls, anxiety rises, and behaviour escalates.
As one young person put it:
A growing body of evidence highlights the importance of a paradigm shift towards more relational approaches, centred on curiosity, trust, and authentic connection. Relational practice recognises that every behaviour is a form of communication—an expression of needs, emotions, or experiences. When teachers respond with empathy and curiosity, they create conditions for young people to feel safe, seen, and supported. This leads to better behaviour and better learning.
A relational approach is not permissiveness, rather it seeks to address the root causes of observable behaviour through adopting and maintaining a curious mindset. The questions we ask change as a result:
“How do we stop that behaviour?”
→ Apply punishment
“How do we get X to comply?”
→ Offer reward
“How do I encourage good choices?”
→ Apply reward/punishment
“What need is being met through this behaviour?”
→ Identify and meet need
“What danger is being avoided?”
→ Provide safety
“What skills are missing?”
→ Teach/support
Research shows that when these questions guide practice, outcomes improve: challenging behaviour reduces, academic achievement rises, and young people show greater social responsibility and engagement (Wentzel, 2012; Hamre & Pianta, 2006; Roorda et al., 2017).
Young people consistently tell us that what makes the difference is not stickers, charts, or sanctions, but staff who genuinely care:
These examples reflect what research confirms: when young people feel understood and trusted, they are more motivated, more resilient, and more engaged in learning (Roorda et al., 2011; Wang & Eccles, 2012).
Central to relational practice is attunement—tuning in to young people’s emotional states, perspectives, and needs. This doesn’t always mean dramatic interventions. Sometimes it’s a reassuring smile, a calm presence, or a validating nod. These small moments of connection build the trust that underpins change.
Trust, in fact, is the most compelling argument for relational approaches. It is the currency of relationships—the foundation on which engagement and achievement are built (Bryk & Schneider, 2002). When young people feel trusted and respected, they are more likely to take risks in learning and to persevere. When trust is lacking, they are more likely to withdraw, disengage, or act out.
Relational approaches also require systemic support. Teachers cannot consistently offer attunement and presence if they themselves are operating outside of their own “window of tolerance.” Education Support (2022) highlights that improving staff wellbeing requires linking policy decisions, workplace culture, and individual mental health. Relational practice must therefore extend to staff too: teachers need time, space, and support systems that help them feel valued, safe, and resourced.
As one headteacher put it:
And as one young person summed it up:
To truly move forward, schools need to reframe behaviour and attendance as signals to understand, not problems to fix.
“Relational approaches mean letting children do whatever they want.”
“Rewards and punishments are the only proven way to change behaviour.”
“Some children just don’t want to do well.”
“Relational practice is too ‘soft’ and won’t prepare young people for the real world.”
“Teachers don’t have time for relational approaches.”
“Throughout my training and in the early stages of my career there was a strong focus on using behavioural approaches when working with children, particularly autistic children. During these early years I recall setting up reward systems with families. I would find that they would come into our next session saying that the reward charts weren’t working. Sometimes they would tell me that the reward chart was making the child upset and they seemed to become anxious at the sight of it . I would discuss this with psychologists who had been in the field longer than me and would go back to my training materials . I would ask myself and others questions about why the behavioural approaches that I had been taught weren’t working, I wondered if I was doing something wrong? Maybe I wasn’t making my rewards rewarding enough? Maybe I wasn’t supporting parents to give rewards quickly enough? It’s only now that I can see that maybe I was asking myself the wrong questions.
“Having since learnt what I have about the harmful impact of compliance based approaches it can be hard to think about the lives that I impacted negatively by using these reward systems. I’ve found that guilt and shame can be present and powerful. I try to be kind to myself by reminding myself that I was doing the best that I could with the knowledge I had and the systems that I was working within at the time. Knowing that I am constantly trying to learn and improve my practice helps me be compassionate to myself when thinking back on my past practice feels hard to hold. I seek comfort in the knowledge that being able to reflect, sit with and not back away from these challenging feelings will ultimately make me a better practitioner.”
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