8 Habits That Build School Culture, 8 That Wreck It

There is an independent review of behaviour in English schools. Yeah. And on two facing pages, it does something, um, almost no education document does. It gives you two lists of eight. Eight and eight. Right. Eight things the most successful schools it visited had in common. And you know, eight things that most often stop the others. Everybody publishes the first list. Almost nobody reads the second. And well, the second one is the useful one. Right. We are going to spend most of today dissecting that second eight.

because that list is where the actual survival of the school happens. This is the education commute. And this is the final episode in our 10-part run through the national leadership qualifications. Yeah. We're taking it a cycle at a time, reading the public documents underneath them, rather than the course itself. Yeah. We've done 10 episodes, so five on the headship route, two on the special educational needs coordinator route, and three on the leading behaviour and culture route. This is the culture one. Right, and to set the table for how we are looking at this, I am sitting in the chair of somebody who has worked in three different schools and can feel the difference between them in like about four minutes, but could not systematically tell you what causes it.

And I am sitting in the chair of the leader who has been asked to write the culture down, which is, I mean, it's a very strange sentence when you say it out loud. It is. That is exactly the problem the review set out to solve. Let's look at the mechanics of this document. It visited schools, it landed on two lists. Name the review. It's Creating a Culture by Tom Bennett. It is an independent review of behaviour in schools published in March 2017. The central claim sits right in the subtitle for its first section.

School culture is, quote, the way we do things around here. Which sounds suspiciously like a motivational poster in a staff room until you read the next sentence. Exactly. That next line fundamentally changes the premise. This is the sentence the entire review turns on, culture is required deliberate creation. Which completely shatters the myth that a school's culture is just something that emerges organically over time. It is not an emergence. It is not a tone set by a charismatic head teacher. It is a system designed on purpose by someone whose job that is.

Let's look at the destination first. I'm going to read the first list, the features common to the schools it visited. Number one, committed, highly visible school leaders with ambitious goals supported by a strong leadership team. Number two, effectively communicated, realistic, detailed expectations understood clearly by all members of the school. And three, highly consistent working practices throughout the school. Okay, that makes sense. Number four, a clear understanding of what the school culture is. And I'll read this one exactly. This is how we do things around here.

These are the values we hold. Yeah. Number five, high levels of staff and parental commitment to the school vision and strategies. Number six, high levels of support between leadership and staff, for example, staff training. Number seven is attention to detail and thoroughness in the execution of school policies and strategies. And finally, number eight, high expectations of all students and staff and a belief that all students matter equally. When you hear that list, it is incredibly easy to just nod along. I mean, every single item on there is universally agreeable.

Absolutely. No leader is ever going to actively argue for invisible leadership or, you know, low expectations. But the danger of that first list is that it describes the end state. Yeah. It tells you what a functioning system looks like when all the gears are turning smoothly, but it offers absolutely zero instruction on how to fix a gear when it breaks. And everybody nods along to the first list. That is precisely why the second list earns its place. The second list is the diagnostic tool. Right. These are the eight things that actively impede a good culture.

Number one, lack of clarity of vision or poor communication of that vision to staff or students. Number two, a lack of sufficient in-school classroom management skills. Number three, poorly calibrated or low expectations. Number four, inadequate orientation for new staff or students. Wow. Yeah. Number five, staff overburdened by workload and therefore unable to direct behaviour effectively. Number six, unsuitably skilled staff in charge of pivotal behaviour roles. Great. Number seven, remote, unavailable, or overoccupied leadership. And number eight, inconsistency between staff and departments. We really need to unpack the causality in that list because it is doing something radical.

Let's look closely at the workload point. Read that specific item again. Staff overburdened by workload and therefore unable to direct behaviour effectively. Notice the mechanism there. Workload is being explicitly categorised as a behaviour problem. Yeah, workload is on the list of things that impede a good culture in an independent review of behaviour commissioned by the Department for Education. It's massive. Which means if a school responds to a dip in behaviour by adding three more initiatives to everybody's week or introducing a complex new reporting system, they are treating the symptom with the exact cause of the disease.

The psychology behind that is critical. Managing behaviour in a classroom requires immense cognitive bandwidth. You are constantly making micro-decisions, regulating your own emotions, and monitoring the room. It's exhausting. It is. If your staff are exhausted by excessive marking or administrative duties, their cognitive battery is flat by Tuesday afternoon. They stop correcting the low-level disruption because they physically and mentally lack the energy to engage in the conflict. You cannot direct behaviour effectively when you are running on empty. And then you look at another item on the list, inadequate orientation for new staff or students.

That is the one that catches people off guard, but it is actually the cheapest and most immediate thing on the list to fix. It is the cheapest to fix, and yet failing to do it is the fastest way to manufacture the final item on the list, which is inconsistency. Think about the logistics. When a new teacher arrives, they bring the habits and norms of their previous school. If your induction only covers how to log into the computers and where the fire exits are, you have not taught them how things are done here.

You have left them to guess. Yeah. When a student tests the boundary, that new teacher will react based on a guess. Suddenly, students realise that the rules are different depending on which adult is in the room. You have actively injected inconsistency into the building just by failing to explain the routines on day one. And the final piece of that diagnostic list is remote, unavailable or overoccupied leadership. It is a deliberately harsh sentence. Very harsh. It serves as the direct mirror image of the very first feature we read in the successful list.

Committed, highly visible school leaders. Visibility is doing a massive amount of heavy lifting in both lists. Completely. A leader who tries to manage behaviour exclusively from behind a desk via email creates a vacuum in the corridors and that vacuum is instantly filled by chaos. So we have the diagnosis, but two lists are just a diagnosis, not a method. What does the review actually tell a leader to do to fix it? It gives you three specific things, and it is crucial to understand that there are stages rather than options you can pick and choose from.

First is design. You must design the school culture you want to see. Its exact words are, a key role of leadership is to design a detailed vision of what the culture should look like for that school, focusing on social and academic conduct. Expectations must be as high as possible for all. Social and academic conduct. It pairs them together intentionally. You cannot separate how a student behaves from how a student learns. The social infrastructure is what allows the academic progress to happen. Exactly. The second stage is build.

You build that culture in practice with as much detail and clarity as possible. Here the review gets specific in a way that most writing on culture completely avoids. It states that staff and students need to know exactly how to achieve it and what the culture looks like in practice. Its own examples of where this matters most are for behaviour on buses to corridor and canteen conduct. Buses, corridors, canteen. Which happens to be the exact same list of locations where the behaviour framework told us consistency dies.

Unstructured time and transition spaces are the ultimate stress tests of your design. The same places in a different document. And this brings us to the sentence I would hand to anybody who ever claims that culture is too vague or abstract to actively work on. Listen to the mechanics of this rule. Any behaviour that should be performed identically, most or all of the time, should be made into a routine, for example, which corridor aside to walk down, how to queue for lunch. That is a highly practical test you can apply immediately.

It is a test you can apply on a Monday morning. The logic is bulletproof. If it should look the same every single time, then it is a routine. And if it is a routine, it must be taught systematically, rather than just expected magically. You do not just hope students know how to cue, you teach the cue. Which leads to the third stage. You have designed it, you have built it into routines. What is stage three? Maintain. Maintain that culture constantly. This is where the review is at its most honest about the reality of schools.

School systems require maintenance. This is often where good cultures break down. It is reasonably straightforward to identify what a good culture might look like, but the difficulty lies in embedding and maintaining it. The list of maintenance tasks it provides is deeply unglamorous. Stuff like staff training, effective use of consequences, data monitoring, staff and student surveys, and maintaining standards. The work is not the launch assembly in September. The work is the daily upkeep in November. It is an ongoing process of monitoring and correcting rather than a single charismatic event.

It is the implementation episode we discussed previously, manifesting in real life. Now how does this connect to the framework for the qualification? The school culture section of the qualification framework is actually shorter than you might expect and it focuses heavily on the teachers themselves rather than just the systems. There are four statements in there that are crucial to this logic. Teacher expectations can affect pupil outcomes. setting goals that challenge and stretch pupils is essential. Setting clear expectations can help communicate shared values that improve classroom and school culture.

Teachers are key role models who can influence the attitudes, values, and behaviours of their pupils. And then there is one statement that I argue captures the entire concept of culture in a single sentence. A culture of mutual trust and respect between colleagues supports effective relationships. Notice the specific phrasing there. It says between colleagues, not between staff and pupils. Between colleagues. The framework establishes the adults' culture as a fundamental precondition of the pupils' culture. If the adults do not trust each other, if they do not support each other in the corridors, the entire system collapses.

It is the least sentimental, most structural truth either document offers. Which brings us to the difficult question. I know you have been saving this pushback. I have. Let's look back at that second list, the eight things that impede a good culture. lack of vision, poor expectations, inadequate orientation, crushing workload, poor staffing decisions, invisible leadership, and massive inconsistency. Every single item on that list is a leadership problem. The entire review is addressed to leaders. So if you are a classroom teacher working in a building where the culture is already broken and you have absolutely no levers to pull regarding workload or orientation, what does this document offer you?

Nothing. And I am going to say that, plainly, rather than dress it up or offer false hope, it is a review for leaders. It does not provide survival guide for a classroom teacher stuck in a school with a broken culture. The only strictly honest thing I can add is that the review's own diagnostic criteria prove that the systemic failure is not your fault, knowing that is worth something for your peace of mind, but it's not a strategy for your classroom. I appreciate that clarity. A clear diagnosis of reality is far more respectful than a paragraph of empty encouragement.

Before we move to application, there is one major caveat I want on the record. And it has to do with the nature of the evidence itself, rather than the argument. The list of features we read earlier comes from schools, the review actively visited, but the review itself explicitly states that the successful strategies were often interpreted in different ways and that leaders should also interpret these themes in ways that suit the idiosyncrasies of their school context, demographic, resources, and staff. Okay. This means the list is a collection of themes observed during visits.

It is not the result of a controlled trial. It tells you what these good schools happen to have in common. It does not definitively prove that those specific things caused the good culture. It is a critical distinction to make. We are looking at correlations and common themes, not hard causal findings, and it is vital we treat the text that way. This show is only worth listening to if we accurately state what kind of evidence we are looking at. Let's take the theory and apply it to three distinct rooms.

Let's see what the rule if it should look the same every time. Make it a routine. Actually looks like in practice. Let's start with a primary setting. In a primary setting, the highest point of friction is often the end of the day. You have young children dealing with coats, book bags, and lining up. If it's just managed daily by whoever happens to be on duty, you get chaos. Yeah, of course. If you apply the test, you realise the end of the day should look identical every single time.

Therefore, it is a routine. It must be explicitly taught as a sequence and heavily rehearsed in the first week, reducing the cognitive load on both the teacher and the children. How does that translate to a secondary setting? In secondary, the logistical challenge scales up massively. You're looking at the corridor at the change of lesson. The review's own example is determining which side of the corridor to walk down. Right. But the leadership half of that equation is crucial. Somebody actually has to teach the students that rule, and leadership must be physically visible in the corridor enforcing it.

If they are not, they immediately trigger the remote, unavailable, or overoccupied leadership item on the list of things that impede culture. And in a specialist setting. In a specialist setting, the daily routines are often already the strongest, most highly engineered part of the day. Because of that, the item on the second list that bites the hardest is inadequate orientation for new staff. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. In these settings, a very high number of adults, you know, support staff, specialists, therapists, they move through a single pupils week.

Each adult who has not been meticulously taught the specific routines for that specific pupil represents a break in the consistency. Right. Orientation in this context isn't just about reading policies, it is about teaching the exact routines required to support individual pupils safely. So bringing it all back to where we started, the two lists. The exact same two lists. But now you know the underlying mechanics. You know the second list is the truly useful one. You know that workload is officially on it as a barrier to behaviour.

You know that staff orientation is on it. And you know that culture, in the review's own words, requires deliberate creation and then constant unglamorous maintenance. Because maintenance is exactly where good cultures break down. I want to give you a staff Froom seed to test this. Okay. At break, ask whoever is nearest the kettle to finish the sentence. Around here, we always. You get two different answers. That is the inconsistency item from the list, and you've just accurately reviewed it in 20 seconds. And for the walk-in tomorrow, I have two questions to consider.

First, if a governor walked in and asked what your school's culture is, is there a written answer that describes actual conduct in specific places, the corridor, the canteen, the bus, or is there just a list of vague values words? Good question. The review explicitly asks leaders to design a detailed vision of what the culture should look like with as much detail and clarity as possible. And the second question, which is cheaper and ultimately better, what exactly does a new member of staff get told in their first week about how things are done here?

Inadequate orientation for new staff or students is on the list of things that actively impede a good culture, and it remains the easiest of the eight to fix. Okay. We have four things to take off the drive today. Point one, cultures require deliberate creation. Culture is intentionally designed. It is built in practice with extreme detail, and then it is constantly maintained. Those are three distinct stages, and the maintenance stage is where good cultures fall apart. Point two, the second list is the useful one. The challenges are lack of vision and its communication, poor classroom management skills, poor calibration of expectations, inadequate orientation of new staff and students, excessive of workload, unsuitable staff and pivotal behaviour roles, leadership visibility, and inconsistency between staff and departments.

Point three, workload is explicitly on that list. Staff who are overburdened are quote, and therefore unable to direct behaviour effectively. Adding more tasks to everybody's week is fundamentally not a behaviour strategy. Point four, the routine test. Any behaviour that should be performed identically, most or all of the time, should be made to a routine. And remember, the framework's own condition for success, a culture of mutual trust and respect between colleagues, supports effective relationships. You have to build the adult culture first. Everything we have discussed is linked in the show notes.

The review and the framework are both free to open and read. And that concludes the run. Ten cycles, ten episodes, all of it built entirely from public documents you can read yourself. Read them, we're the trailer. Safe trip in, see you at the gates.