Will Mandatory Stand-downs Make Schools Safer? The Seduction of Simple Answers

by Rebecca Thomas

Paul Henry echoes what Tom Bennett has championed for years

It is easy to understand that the status quo believes if children misbehave we should punish them. They share the idea that if behaviour gets worse we should increase the consequences, and if that doesn't work, remove them.

Stand them down.

Suspend them.

Give teachers more power.

The problem is that education has spent the last fifty years discovering that children are far more complex than our common sense ever imagined. We've learned about trauma and attachment; autism, ADHD and executive functioning. We've learned that behaviour is often the language of an overwhelmed nervous system long before it becomes a choice. We've learned that exclusion can compound the very adversity that drives behaviour in the first place.

And yet… every decade, another politician arrives promising to solve behaviour by making adults tougher. Another public figure tells us schools have become too soft, while behaviour models promise that stricter consequences will restore order.

This week it arrived wrapped in two words: "Little shits." Those two words have dominated the headlines. Paul Henry simply gave a microphone to an idea that has been floated for years. An idea that says behaviour is primarily a discipline problem. That children learn best through clear consequences. That classrooms become calmer when sanctions become stronger.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about Tom Bennett's visit to Aotearoa. At the time I warned that we needed to look beyond the polished language of "order" and "respect" and ask a much harder question. Where has this philosophy already been tried, and what happened?

Ironically, just weeks ago, Tom Bennett was appointed Northern Ireland's new 'Behaviour Tsar'. His message has remained strikingly consistent.

In fact this week, ACT said:

"How can we expect teachers to administer world-class education if we are not providing them with world-class support? Around half of teachers face disruption in every lesson. Forty-seven per cent say they lose 40 to 50 minutes or more a day dealing with it."

Notice the shift from a world-class education to world-class support.

At the same time, Bennett said that children can lose up to one hour per day through low-level disruption, and that behaviour was about teaching children "really robust habits of doing things even when they're hard."

Ironically, I first read Bennett's comments eight weeks ago on the BBC News website, the very organisation where Paul Henry once began his broadcasting career.

Ironically, I have never seen the evidence that supports this 'hour a day' quote from either men.

ACT go on to state: “When the school system allows a disruptive few to wreck a whole class, it fails every child who plays by the rules.”

Too many people believe teachers face unruliness and chaos because they do not understand how to respond to it. I get that it sounds entirely reasonable. In fact, that's precisely why these ideas continue to gain traction. They appeal to our instinct that difficult behaviour requires stronger consequences. They offer certainty in a profession that often feels anything but certain. They promise order in classrooms that can sometimes feel chaotic.

Simple answers are incredibly attractive when the problem is complex.

But this is where we have to ask the question that rarely makes the headline. What does the evidence actually tell us?

When I wrote about Tom Bennett last year, I pointed to what had happened in England. The Education Endowment Foundation concluded there was no robust evidence that zero-tolerance approaches improved educational outcomes. Isolation rooms, despite becoming common practice in some schools, had never been robustly evaluated. Meanwhile, suspension rates in England climbed to record levels, with autistic learners, disabled students and other vulnerable groups disproportionately represented.

Children need consistency and predictability. They need adults who are calm, confident and unwavering. As teachers, we know that. But boundaries are only one part of behaviour. The deeper question is what happens after the boundary is reached. Do we simply remove the child? Or do we ask why they reached that point in the first place?

That is the difference between managing behaviour and understanding behaviour. One focuses on control; the other focuses on growth. As a teacher working in a school that says "yes", I have learned that the children who challenge us most are often the very children who have learned not to trust adults. For those children, another mandatory stand-down may create temporary order. But will it create lasting change? Will it improve emotional regulation? Will it increase attendance? Will it reduce future exclusions? Will it make schools genuinely safer?

Those are the questions I hope New Zealand asks before deciding that the oldest answer is automatically the best one.