A Tuesday in October, last lesson of the day. A child who has been quietly difficult all term holds the door for a colleague carrying a stack of exercise books. One person sees it. She means to mention it, then teaches two more lessons, answers eleven emails and goes home.
Nothing went wrong that day. Something just went unnoticed.
Most schools already have values. Respect, kindness, integrity – on the lanyards, above the hall doors, in the first slide of every September INSET. The question for leaders is rarely whether your school has values. It is whether a Year 8 could name them, whether two teachers in two different corridors would recognise the same behaviour when they saw it, and whether anyone could tell you, in March, who had been noticed and who had not.
That gap – between the values a school holds and the language it actually uses – is where most behaviour policies quietly come undone.
The consistency problem is the real problem
The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report Improving Behaviour in Schools makes six recommendations. The last of them is the shortest: consistency is key. It is also the one schools find hardest. The same report notes that only a quarter of secondary teachers, and around half of primary teachers, agreed that their school’s behaviour policy was applied consistently by all staff.[1]
That is not a story about weak teachers. It is a story about a policy written in language too abstract to act on at eleven o’clock on a wet Thursday. “Uphold the school’s values” is a sentence you can agree with and still not know what to do with.
The Department for Education’s advice for headteachers puts it plainly: “A school’s culture and values are manifested through the behaviour of all its members.”[2] Manifested. Not published. The distance between those two words is the work.
And the cost of that distance is measurable. In the government’s National Behaviour Survey, teachers reported losing around six minutes of every half hour of lesson time to misbehaviour – which, totalled across a year, runs to weeks of learning.[3] Very little of that is dramatic. Most of it is the low-level, repetitive, energy-draining sort that a clearer shared language would head off before it started.
Teach the behaviour you want, don’t only manage the one you don’t
The EEF’s second recommendation is the one we find leaders return to: teach learning behaviours alongside managing misbehaviour.[1] Learning behaviours are the habits that make learning possible – attention, persistence, working with others, coming back to a hard question after getting it wrong twice.
They can be taught. But only if they can be named.
A useful test, before you adopt any value into a school framework, is to run it past three questions:
Is it framed positively? “Don’t shout out” describes an absence. “Waits for a gap” describes something a child can practise, and something a teacher can catch them doing.
Can you see it? If two adults watching the same lesson would disagree about whether it happened, it isn’t ready. Vague virtues generate vague praise, and children learn very quickly that vague praise means nothing.
Does it have a next step? Confidence, curiosity, resilience – these are dispositions, not actions. They still work, but only if you decide in advance what the observable version looks like at Year 7 and what it looks like at Year 11.
Eight values, and what they look like on a Wednesday
These are the values we build around at Ten Points. The list matters less than the specificity underneath it – if your school has six values, or five, use those. What matters is that every adult in the building could give you the same example.
Respect – waiting for someone to finish before disagreeing with them.
Kindness – shifting up a seat so the child who arrives late isn’t left standing at the door.
Collaboration – the group member who quietly makes sure the quiet one has a job.
Fairness – owning up so that somebody else doesn’t carry it.
Integrity – admitting they didn’t do the reading, rather than performing having done it.
Responsibility – chasing the work they missed while they were off, without being asked.
Grit – the third attempt at a question after two wrong answers.
Curiosity – the question asked after the bell has gone.
None of those are exceptional. That is the point. They happen dozens of times a day in every school in the country, and the overwhelming majority of them go unrecorded, which means unremembered, which means – to the child – unnoticed.
An honest note about rewards
We should be careful here, because the evidence is careful. The EEF found that clear reward systems can improve behaviour, but as part of a broader classroom management strategy rather than on their own. It also cautions that universal behaviour systems are unlikely to meet the needs of every child in your school.[1]
We agree, and we would rather say so. A points system is not a behaviour policy. It is a way of making a behaviour policy visible, consistent and rememberable. The children who need targeted, relational, sometimes specialist support will still need it. What a shared language does is make sure those children are identified sooner, and that the rest of the school’s good work stops evaporating at the end of each lesson.
There is one further caution worth naming. Studying 151 classrooms, Caldarella and colleagues found a steady, linear relationship between a teacher’s ratio of praise to reprimand and the proportion of time children spent on task – no magic threshold to hit, no tipping point.[4] More recognition helped, at every level. But recognition that lands on the same confident children every week isn’t recognition, it’s a habit. Any system worth running should be able to show you who hasn’t been seen this term.
What implementation actually takes
Most values frameworks fail in the same three places, and none of them are the launch.
Too many values. Eight is near the ceiling. Twelve is a laminated poster nobody reads. If staff can’t recall the list without looking, children certainly can’t.
No worked examples. A half-hour of INSET spent agreeing what “responsibility” looks like in a science practical, in a corridor and in a form room does more for consistency than a year of reminders. Do it by department, then share across.
Launch and forget. Values frameworks need a review rhythm, not a launch event. A useful pattern: half-termly, look at distribution rather than volume. Which values are being recognised, by whom, and for whom? Which year group has gone quiet? Which member of staff has recorded almost nothing – and is that a workload problem or a belief problem?
Expect this to bed in over a year rather than a term. The schools that get the most from it are usually the ones that resisted the urge to relaunch it in January.
What leaders get back
Done properly, a values framework stops being a behaviour intervention and starts being an instrument. Inspection now treats attendance and behaviour as a single evaluation area, and the DfE’s advice is explicit that leaders should analyse behaviour data at school level, group level and individual level.[2] That is difficult to do from incident logs alone, because incident logs only ever record the bad days.
A record of recognition tells you something incident data can’t. It tells you where your culture is warm and where it has cooled. It shows you the child whose points quietly stopped in the second week of term – often several weeks before anything else in the system would have flagged them.
That is the part we care most about. Not the totals. The child who stopped being noticed.
Where to start
If you are weighing this up for your school, the first step is smaller than a rollout. Ask three colleagues in three different departments to describe what “respect” looks like in their room. If you get three different answers, you have found your starting point, and it costs nothing to look.
When you want to see how Ten Points handles the rest – the recognising, the recording, the picture it builds over a term – book a call. The first conversation is a short one.
