Have We Been Designing Behaviour Frameworks Around Different Theories of Change?

Most schools share remarkably similar aspirations for their students. What if the greatest differences between behaviour frameworks aren't found in their values, but in their assumptions about how capability and accountability develop?

One of the unexpected gifts of writing a book is discovering that it doesn't bring your thinking to an end. If anything, it sharpens your observations, prompts deeper analysis and leaves you with the slightly irritating feeling that there are ideas you wish you could quietly add to a chapter already in print.

I'm a practitioner at heart. While theory matters, I've always been most interested in what happens when theory meets the realities of classrooms, playgrounds and staffrooms. I want ideas that genuinely help educators navigate the increasingly complex work of supporting young people.

Looking back on The Relational School, I can now see a question sitting quietly beneath many of its chapters, even though I never explored it as directly as I would today.

What do we actually believe helps young people become more capable and accountable?

Over recent months I've found myself looking at behaviour frameworks through this lens. Every school I visit, every leadership conversation and every professional learning session seems to reinforce the importance of that question. It has also left me wondering whether much of our professional conversation about behaviour begins one step too late.

We spend considerable time discussing practice. We debate the place of rewards and consequences, introduce restorative practice, strengthen Positive Behaviour Support, explore trauma-informed education, invest in Collaborative and Proactive Solutions and revise behaviour policies in the hope of creating greater consistency. These conversations matter. Schools should continue to invest in improving practice.

What interests me, however, is the conversation that comes before all of those decisions.

Before deciding what belongs in a behaviour framework, perhaps we first need to examine the assumptions that will inevitably shape it.

For many decades, the dominant assumptions underpinning behaviour frameworks have been relatively consistent. Young people are understood to make choices, accountability develops through clear expectations and consistent adult responses, and consequences help students learn to make better choices in the future. Those assumptions didn't emerge from a lack of care. They grew from values that almost every educator would recognise: protecting learning, maintaining safe classrooms, fostering responsibility and preparing young people for life beyond school.

The values are rarely where schools differ.

What differs are the assumptions we hold about how those values are most likely to be achieved.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me because assumptions never remain abstract ideas. They quietly shape the architecture of our behaviour frameworks. If we believe accountability develops primarily through externally directed responses and adult-determined consequences, it makes perfect sense that our systems become organised around establishing what happened, determining responsibility, documenting incidents, following escalation pathways and applying responses that are consistent and procedurally fair. These processes play an important organisational role and schools need them.

The question is whether these organisational processes are also the way young people become increasingly capable and accountable, or whether they primarily serve the needs of the organisation itself.

It was while working alongside schools implementing restorative practice, Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, trauma-informed education and other relationship-centred approaches that another pattern began to emerge. These approaches seemed to direct adult attention somewhere different. Rather than beginning with the incident itself, they encouraged educators to understand what had led to it. Curiosity became as important as certainty. Student voice became central rather than peripheral. Conversations were less concerned with determining what a student deserved and more interested in understanding what would help them respond differently next time. Professional judgement became increasingly important because the conversation itself helped shape what accountability, repair and support might look like.

It was during these conversations that my own thinking shifted.

Perhaps we're asking one behaviour framework to carry two different explanations for how behaviour changes.

I don't think most schools have consciously chosen to hold these different assumptions side by side. They have emerged gradually as new research, new practices and new initiatives have been added to existing frameworks over time. Each addition has been made with good intentions. What has often been missing is the opportunity to step back and ask whether they are all expressing the same underlying explanation for how young people become increasingly capable and accountable.

This might help explain why implementation can feel so difficult.

Schools invest considerable time and resources building staff capability in relational practices, yet those same educators often return to systems that continue to privilege different assumptions about behaviour change. It is hardly surprising that many teachers experience this as tension rather than clarity. The issue may not be a lack of commitment to relational practice at all. It may be that we have underestimated the importance of ensuring our systems and our professional learning are grounded in the same assumptions about how capability and accountability develop.

This isn't an argument for abandoning consequences. It is, however, an invitation for schools to be much clearer about what they mean by that term. Nor is it a suggestion that schools have somehow got behaviour "wrong". Rather, it is an invitation to examine something that often remains invisible. Every behaviour framework reflects assumptions about how young people become increasingly capable and accountable. Making those assumptions explicit is not about convincing every school to think alike. It is about giving leadership teams the opportunity to ask whether their practices, professional learning and organisational systems are all working towards the same understanding of how change occurs.

Perhaps the next time a leadership team sits down to review its behaviour framework, the first conversation shouldn't be about behaviour levels, flowcharts or consequences.
It might simply begin with one question.

What do we believe actually helps young people become more capable and accountable?

Because our answer to that question will quietly shape everything that follows.