Tag Archives: teaching

Class matters more than ethnicity

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The end of the summer term is a curious time to announce an inquiry into White working-class kids in schools. The inquiry seems to be funded by private finance, but with government backing. Members revealed for white working-class kids inquiry

Two former Secretaries of State will be on the board, along with a DfE official, as well as many others representing the great and the good in schooling, but not perhaps either the churches or representatives of the under-fives lobby.

As SchoolsWeek pointed out in their news item, this is not the first such inquiry into the achievements or lack of them, of this group in society.  Indeed, the House of Commons Select Committee has had two goes at the issue, in 2014 and 2020. HC No

As well as the Select Committee’s reports, and the evidence submitted to the Committee, The inquiry might also like to read the DfE’s Report on outcomes by ethnicity Outcomes by ethnicity in schools in England – GOV.UK published before the pandemic.

I am sure the inquiry will focus on what works, and no doubt discuss issues about what is being measured and over-reliance on Free School Meals data. They will also need to discuss the issues around definitions, as society has become much both more complex, and more polarised. The measurement of children – I prefer the term to kids – of mixed heritage has added many more sub-categories to the original list.

However, I cannot help thinking that the focus of the inquiry is wrong. All the evidence suggests that of the three factors of race, gender and class, it is the third one that really matters. Yes, they are often inter-related, but looking at socio-economic data it is often schools in deprived areas, regardless of the ethnicity of their pupils that fare less well in school performance table.

Is this due to the funding arrangements. Some areas, notably London, are better funded than other parts of England. Is it down to teacher deployment and the market system. Do the best teacher seek to work in the most challenging schools or those with the best outcomes. How much does support from home matter. Can poor teaching be overcome with support and tutoring from home. All these were issues considered by the Select Committee. Then there are issues such as school attendance and what happens at the Foundation State if pupils miss vital building blocks in language and mathematics. Does the class teacher system help or hinder these children?

In terms of funding, what effect has the Pupil Premium had on outcomes, and is there any evidence that where academies can pool the funds of all schools and move resources between schools whereas local authorities cannot do so that this arrangement can boost outcomes in traditionally under-performing schools?

I guess one measure is the percentage of pupils on Free School Meals across the country that pass the tests for selective schools. Will the inquiry suggest a fully comprehensive secondary school system? If not, how will it address this injustice.

I am disappointed that it has taken this Labour government a year to start the process of addressing this issue. What were they doing in opposition? After all, the Liberal Democrats pushed the Pupil Premium right for the start of the coalition in 2010, as it had been in their manifesto.  How much does this government really care about those children that don’t achieve their full potential for whatever reason.

Schooling and the relentless march of technology

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Teachers will not have been happy to read of employers paying workers the same money for a four day week where they used to earn for working for five days. I assume that productivity or output or company profits remained the same, so the company could afford to be this generous while not upsetting its shareholders.

Unhappy teachers might reflect on two things. As technology improves, so workers can produce the same output in less time: think handwriting letters, then dictating them to someone that then typed them and then word processing them. Of course, rewarding those workers that benefit could come at a cost to productivity and growth for all. Why not continue the five day week and produce more?  

My parent’s generation worked a five and a half day week, with Saturday working being commonplace. Teachers have not benefitted from these changes, partly because their job has largely been unaffected by significant changes in technology that improve productivity. Now this may be because teaching is a public sector good and there is no profit element to spur on change for the benefit of both owners and workers.

As we can see from the imposition of VAT on private schools, the reaction of many was to increase fees, not to improve productivity, even by adding one pupil per class to their already small classes – special schools excepted – and absorb the cost.

However, it is the second implication of technological change and its effect on teachers and society that worries me just as much. Here’s another example. Driverless vehicles will become mainstream. Sure, there will be accidents, as there were when railways and aeroplanes were being developed. And these days society knows more about preventing those sorts of accidents happening to the same degree – think of the space race and the ratio of deaths to achievements. But, what of the many drivers that will join the ranks of porters, stenographers, bank tellers, coal miners and many others whose jobs have disappeared. Will technology create another set of new jobs for those with skills to do the jobs of today?

What are the implications for schools and their role in society? This should be the key question at the Festival of Education? What steps are politicians and the think tanks that provide them with research doing to consider the role of schooling in the second half of this century. After all, those that start school at age five this coming September will likely not retire on a state pension until 2090 or possibly even later.

Primary schooling with the acquisition of vocabulary and the social skills of living together in communities will become even more important than it has been seen by politicians in the past. Secondary education and subject skills might even become less important.  The recently announced government inquiry into White working-class kids might want to think about this issue during their deliberations. Solutions for the problems of the past won’t help the kids facing an uncertain future.

Falling rolls

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The projections for pupil numbers up to 2030 were issued by the DfE this week.

At the same time the Office for National Statistics (ONS) looked at the likely size of + the school population  aged 5-15 National population projections – Office for National Statistics both have implications for the demand for teachers in England. This data can help determine how many teachers will be needed to staff schools and the attractiveness of teaching as a career.

The DfE concluded the following for the remainder of this decade;

State-funded nursery & primary schools

  • The overall pupil population in these school types is projected to be 4,205,000 in 2030. This is 300,000 (6.7%) lower than the actual population in 2025 (4,505,000).
  • The revised projection for 2028 of 4,319,000 pupils represents a 5.4% fall from 2024; this is 38,000 lower than the previous forecast, as last year’s projection showed a 4.5% fall over the same period.
  • The nursery & primary population is therefore still projected to drop and is doing so at a faster rate than previously projected.

State-funded secondary schools

  • The secondary school population is projected to be 3,135,000 in 2030. This is 97,000 lower than the actual school population reported in the 2025 school census of 3,232,000.
  • The revised projection for 2028 of 3,208,000 secondary pupils represents a 0.8% fall from 2024, and is 55,000 (1.7%) lower than last year’s projections which reverses the previously projected 0.9% increase over the same period. 
  • The pattern of change in the secondary school population seems to indicate that it plateaued between 2024 and 2025, will remain at a similar level until 2026, and is then projected to start declining slowly. This suggested plateau is earlier than the peak in 2026 projected last year but will be subject to change if pupil numbers bounce back, fluctuate, or continue to plateau in future years.
  • The actual number of secondary school pupils in 2025 fell slightly as more pupils moved out of the secondary phase than moved in. Changing historical birth rates and trends in net migration are likely driving factors. National pupil projections, Reporting year 2025 – Explore education statistics – GOV.UK 

According to the ONS projections, there are expected to be fewer children in the UK by the middle of both 2032 and 2047, compared with the middle of 2022. The ONS have based this on a view that the assumed fertility rates in the 2020s and 2030s will be even lower than those around 2001, when UK fertility reached a record low.

By mid-2032, the number of children (those aged from 0 to 15 years) is projected by the ONS to have decreased by 797,000 (a fall of 6.4%), from 12.4 million to 11.6 million. By mid-2047, the number of children is projected to remain around the mid-2032 levels. Of course, if the birth rate changes, these numbers could be either too high or an underestimate. Either way planners are no expecting the need for more teachers due to changes in the birth rate.

However, these numbers are just assumptions, and don’t take into account other changes in the numbers in the 0-15 age groups resulting from any net balance once both emigration and immigration have been taken into account.

Other factors, such as the departure rate from teaching, due either to the popularity of teaching or the availability of alternative employment opportunities, as well as the age-profile of the profession and the number of teachers retiring can affect the demand for teachers. Policy changes concerning how children are taught can also affect the demand for teachers. How will AI and attitudes to issues such as home schooling are two imponderables that might affect the demand for teachers.

These days, as well as the traditional modelling, the DfE has access to up to the minute data on vacancy rates for teachers, and how posts are filled. This new data, allied to more traditional methods of estimating the demand for teachers, should help to ensure teacher unemployment can be kept to a minimum. After all, there is little point in spending money training teachers only for them to be both burdened with debt and unable to find a teaching post.

Where should Teach First recruit its trainees?

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There have been some interesting discussions recently on the LinkedIn platform about Teach First, and its possible extension beyond its original scope of recruiting from the Russell Group of universities after SchoolsWeek revealed this condition might be altered when the contract is re-tendered for the scheme. Teach First: Labour plans recruitment scheme revamp

Two points are worth making about the discussion. Firstly, the universities within the Russell Group have not remined the same since Teach First was established more than twenty years ago. Secondly, when faced with challenges in filling its target for recruiting teachers, Teach First does seem to have already extended its reach beyond the Russell group. In it 2024 annual report to the Charity Commission it said that:

‘Increasing the proportion of trainees from Russell Group universities compared to the previous year and sustaining the proportion of trainees with a first-class degree despite a decline in the number of firsts awarded.’ (Page 10, 2024 accounts with Charity Commission)

However, it didn’t provide any details of the number of non-Russell Group trainees recruited, and in which subjects. This is an important issue because of the schools where Teach First place their trainees. Historically, schools within the M25 with high percentages of disadvantaged pupils were the main focus of the programme, although in recent years it has spread more widely across the country while keeping its core mission.  

An analysis of, for instance, the percentage of new physics teachers recruited through Teach First and the schools they were placed in, and subsequently went on to work in, would be interesting, especially if compared with the distribution of new teachers of physics across all schools with similar levels of deprivation in the parts of the country not covered by Teach First.

Another interesting issue with regard to Teach First is the cost of recruiting their teachers. I saw a comment that surprised me about ‘needing to interview applicants because of AI generated applications’. I thought that all qualified applicants would have been interviewed as a matter of course.

This caused me to look at the cost of recruitment to the Teach First programme. Their accounts with the Charity Commission suggest that in 2023 the charity spent just over £7 million on recruitment and then £6,587,000 in 2024. Now, in 2023, it recruited 1,417 trainees, including to the pilot SCITT programme. In 2024, with the development of the SCITT programme, some 1,419 trainees were recruited. If the financial data is correct, then that would mean more than £4,000 to recruit a trainee in 2023, falling to £3,800 in 2024.  I wonder whether other ITT courses spend anything like this amount on recruitment?

Of course, some of the expenditure is offset by donations to the charity, and during a period when recruiting new entrants to teaching is a challenge, recruitment costs would be expected to be high. Although when recruitment to teaching is buoyant, as it may well be over the next few years, the overall cost may be higher because there are more applicants to process, especially if Teach First is opened up to a wider range of graduates seeking to become a teacher and interviews more applicants. How much should we spend on recruiting trainees teachers and how good are we at obtaining value for money on recruitment overall, including the national TV advertising campaigns?

Do better funded schools exclude fewer pupils?

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The DfE published the annual data for exclusions and suspensions from schools during the 2023/24 school-year this week. Suspensions and permanent exclusions in England: 2023 to 2024 – GOV.UK Sadly, there are more pupils being excluded than in recent years, and my post from July 2018 Bad news on exclusions | John Howson reflects much , at least at the national level, of what is contained in the latest report on 2023/24. Boys on free school meals, and with SEND, and from a minority group are at highest risk of being excluded, especially when they are in Year 9, and, as ever, the reasons is most likely to have been ‘persistent disruptive behaviour’.

With the worsening recruitment crisis in schools, allied to a challenging financial environment, an increase in exclusions and suspensions was to be expected. What the data doesn’t tell us is whether schools with high exclusion rates are linked to specific academy trusts, and also to high levels of teacher turnover.

I wrote a blog about policies for reducing exclusions in May Reducing exclusions from schools | John Howson and I would hope that if the staffing situation does settle down, so might the number of pupils being banished from school.

As ever, I am struck by the funding issue. London, the best funded part of England has some of the lowest rates for exclusion and suspensions. There are 17 London boroughs in the list of the 25 local authorities with the lowest rate of suspensions in 2023/24, and 19 in the similar list for secondary exclusions. In the list of ten local authorities with the highest rates of exclusion are five authorities in the North East. I think that there may be something in this data that needs further exploration, especially as I would expect teacher recruitment to be easier in the North East than in London.

Interestingly, in view of the debate about mobile phones in schools, the number of suspensions for ‘inappropriate use of social media or online technology’ only increased from 11,419 to 11,614, an insignificant change between 2022/23 and 2023/24 especially compared with the increase in exclusions for ‘persistent disruptive behaviour’ from 446,676 to 569,921 over the same period. Of course, much comes down t how a decision on which box to tick when the exclusion is being reported and the latter category may hide suspensions that actually belong in one of the other categories. This is the risk when there are too many choices for a school to make.

The increase of around 25,000 in assaults leading to suspensions must be very worrying, although I wonder whether most are ‘common assault’ rather than ‘assault leading to actually bodily harm’ or ’GBH’ to use the criminal code levels of violence against another.

Some numbers are so small it is a wonder that they are still collected. Were only 69 pupils – up from 50 the previous year- permanently excluded for theft. Perhaps schools have nothing worth nicking these days.

I hope that next year, we might read of at least a levelling out of the rates of exclusions and suspensions and perhaps a return to a downward trend, especially if there is a relationship between funding and how schools can cope with disruptive pupils.  

What Lib Dems want for SEND pupils and their families

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I was delighted to see the Liberal Democrats weighing in on the SEND debate by writing to the Prime minister and setting out five key principles behind any reform of the SEND system. This is what their letter to the Prime minister said:

Our five principles and priorities for SEND reform are as follows:

  1. Putting children and families first Children’s rights to SEND assessment and support must be maintained and the voices of children and young people with SEND and of their families and carers must be at the centre of the reform process.
  2. Boosting specialist capacity and improving mainstream provision Capacity in state special provision must be increased, alongside improvements to inclusive mainstream provision, with investment in both new school buildings and staff training.
  3. Supporting local government Local authorities must be supported better to fund SEND services, including through:
    1. The extension of the profit cap in children’s social care to private SEND provision, where many of the same private equity backed companies are active, and
    2. National government funding to support any child whose assessed needs exceed a specific cost.
  4. Early identification and shorter waiting lists Early identification and intervention must be improved, with waiting times for diagnosis, support and therapies cut.
  5. Fair funding The SEND funding system must properly incentivise schools both to accept SEND pupils and to train their staff in best practice for integrated teaching and pastoral care. Our five principles for SEND reform – Liberal Democrats

These principles come from a motion debated at last year’s Party conference and represent a check list against which specific policies can be measured, such as increasing the supply of educational psychologists to deal with both the annual reviews and initial assessments of EHCPs.

If there is anything missing from the list, it is the role of the NHS, and specifically around mental health and education. This is the area of need where the system has really broken down. Many of the other issues are cost related due to inflation and more young people living longer as well as increased demands from an age range of support than can now reach up to the age of 25. The issue of mental health has swamped the system and the NHS must play a part in helping define what is needed.

With the main opposition at Westminster disinterested in the issues of education that are facing most families, the Lib Dems should be leading from the front. This letter should have been sent at least a week ago.

As my earlier posts of today have shown, the Lib Dems next education campaign can be around securing enough teachers for schools in our more deprived areas. Such a campaign can take on both labour councils and Reform voters to show there is a radical alternative in the Liberal democrats.

Education may not feature very high in polling about issue in elections, but on a day-to-day basis it isn’t far away from the conversations in many households. From mobile phone to AI, funding for school meals to citizenship, Liberal Democrats should be calling the government to account.  

Will the 6,500 new teachers be heading for schools in disadvantaged areas?

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Increasing teacher numbers in disadvantaged areas and core subjects. I was very happy when I read this heading in today’s Public Account’s Committee report on ‘Increasing Teacher Numbers’. Increasing teacher numbers: Secondary and further education (HC 825)

However, when I turned to paragraphs 25-29, this section just seemed like an afterthought. How depressing was it to read that

‘Schools and further education colleges are responsible for deciding the staff they need and recruiting their own workforces. Local authorities employ teachers in maintained schools.’ Para 25

There is nothing factually incorrect in the statement, but although local authorities are the de jure employers of teachers in maintained schools, ever since the devolution of budgets in the 1990s, local authorities have had little to do with the hiring policies for teachers in these schools, and nothing to do with the academy sector.

The Committee did acknowledge that

‘Those schools with higher proportions of disadvantaged pupils tend to have higher turnover rates and less experienced teachers. This impacts the government’s mission of breaking down the barriers to opportunity and means disadvantaged children are at risk of being locked out from particular careers.’

Teachers in schools with higher proportions of disadvantaged pupils are also less experienced

‘In 2023–24, 34% of teachers in the most disadvantaged schools had up to five years’ experience (20% in the least disadvantaged schools).’

They cited the examples of computer science and physics

‘In the most disadvantaged areas, 31% of schools do not offer Computer Science A-level, compared to 11% of schools in the least disadvantaged areas, due to a lack of trained teachers. For Physics A-level, this is 9% compared to 1%.’

This will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog. Here is the link to a post from the 21st July 2023, almost two years ago.

Free School Meals and teacher vacancies | John Howson

Thos who know my background will know that I started teaching in a school in a disadvantaged part of Tottenham in 1971, and this issue has been one that has concerned me throughout my career in education. I was, therefore, disappointed to read that

‘We asked the Department when we could expect there to be less variation between schools in the most and least disadvantaged areas, but it did not commit to a timeframe. Instead, it noted that its retention initiatives providing financial incentives were targeting schools and colleges with the highest proportion of disadvantaged students.’

This seems to me to be as close to a non-answer as one can expect. Indeed, looking in detail at the oral evidence session, this is an area where answers from the senior civil servants in my opinion suggested little hope, and not as much concern for the values implied in the questions that I would have liked to have heard. In reality, past experience tells me that it is falling rolls and fewer job opportunities that will propel teachers towards schools where they would otherwise not take a teaching post. Iti s the economy, not the DfE that will improve the life chances of children in those schools with a high proportion of disadvantaged children. This is at the same time as the lives of their parents may be worsened by unemployment and welfare cuts. It’s a funny old world.

6,500 extra teachers; myth or realistic aim?

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Hurrah for the Public Accounts Committee at Westminster (PAC). Today the Committee published a report into the government’s plans – or lack of them – to meet their target of 6,500 extra teachers – and lecturers. Increasing teacher numbers: Secondary and further education (HC 825)

The Committee is as sceptical as this bog has been about how the government intends to meet this target that was to be paid for by the addition of VAT on private school fees from January 2025.

One recommendation that the PAC doesn’t make is the creation of a Chief Professional Adviser on Teacher Supply. I held such a post between 1996 and 1997, but was never relaced when I left the then Teacher Training Agency. Such a designated post would draw together the work of civil servants who may change roles almost as frequently as ministers- What odds would one give on the present Secretary of State surviving a cabinet reshuffle before the party conference season? A central role with professional oversight might help the government achieve its aim.

Anyway, the PAC Recommendations included

  1. The Department should set out how it plans to deliver the pledge for 6,500 additional teachers to provide assurance that this will f ill the most critical teacher gaps. This should set out: • how the pledge will be split across schools and colleges; • the baseline and milestones so Parliament can track progress; and • how it will stay focused on teacher retention alongside recruitment.
  2. The Department should develop a whole-system strategy to help frame how it will recruit and retain school and college teachers. This should be based on a fuller evidence base, establish the preferred balance between recruitment and retention initiatives; set appropriate targets for those joining teaching through different routes; and include value for money analysis of different initiatives.
  3. The Department should work with schools and colleges to understand the reasons behind variations [in recruitment and retention], particularly within deprived areas and core subjects, setting this out in published information to help identify and share good practice and ideas on what works best.
  4. The Department should work to better understand why teachers leave and then better support schools and colleges in addressing these factors. This includes looking at changes to contractual and working conditions, such as flexible working, and at how teacher workload can be reduced. It should also collect data on the effectiveness of the newly-announced behaviour hubs, rolling them out further if they prove to be successful.
  5. The Department should assess the effectiveness and relative value-for-money of pay against other recruitment and retention initiatives, to make an explicit decision on whether it needs to do more to ensure teachers are paid the right amount.

The final recommendation will not be welcomed in HM Treasury if it means finding more cash for teachers’ pay, especially coming the day after resident hospital doctors threatened strike action over pay benchmarking. In paragraph 22 the Committee stated that

‘However, teacher pay has lagged behind others – in 2024, those working in the education sector were paid around 10% less in real terms than in 2010, with the wider public sector being paid on average 2.6% less than in 2010.’

Will a return to the 2010 benchmark now be the goal of the teacher professional associations?

In the next blog, I will discuss the committee’s idea for dealing with the thorny issue of providing teachers for deprived areas.

Reform of Home to School Transport needed

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This week the Local Government Association published an important report into home to school transport  The future of Home to School Transport: Report | Local Government Association This is an area of responsibility that always concerned me when I was a county councillor, as the rules of the governing eligibility were set in the 1944 Education Act, in a very different era to that of today.

As the LGA report noted:

“Effective home to school transport plays a vital role in our education system. Fundamentally, it is the safety-net that ensures no child or young person misses out on their entitlement to education because they cannot otherwise get to school. However, current home to transport duties were designed for a different age, societally, educationally and economically. For local government, continuing to fulfil the current statutory responsibilities for home to school transport is becoming increasingly financially unsustainable, posing a real threat of bankruptcy for some, and necessitating cuts to other vital aspects of children’s services provision in many more.”

Much of the report deals with SEND transport, as that costs local authorities the most money, the issue of whether the NHS should bear part of the cost. Sensibly the report concluded that this was a national issue:

“We would recommend that, in the context of budgetary pressures across public services and with health being under no less pressure than local government, this is not an issue that can be left to local negotiation to resolve. The Department for Education and the Department for Health and Social Care should clarify an equitable split of responsibilities, including financial responsibilities, for transport for children with the most common health needs that require substantial and additional support, and set that out in statutory guidance both for local authorities and ICBs.”

With the review of the NHS currently underway, this seems like a timely recommendation.

Surprisingly, the report seems in places to assume that parents must send their child to a state school, rather that state schools being the default position if a parent doesn’t make any other arrangement for their child’s education.  Fortunately, this assumption doesn’t affect their arguments.

I think their conclusions are sensible in both being clearer, with less change of challenge than at present, but the authors appear to have missed the opportunity to discuss how to deal with the issue of selective schools and distance. Making such schools ineligible for home to school transport as they are regarded as a parental choice is as discriminatory as any other criteria. It is a pity this wasn’t addressed more fully.

Nevertheless, I think I can agree with their conclusions for a system that:

“In summary, we are advocating that in future children and young people should be eligible for assistance with home to school travel from the start of reception to the end of year 13, based on a simple binary distance criterion: if they live more than 3 miles away (by the most direct road route) from their nearest suitable school then they would be eligible for transport assistance; if they live less than three miles away then they would not be eligible for transport assistance. This formulation of eligibility would get rid of the current link between eligibility and the ability to walk to school for both children and young people with SEND and those accessing mainstream home to school transport.”

Are teachers losing control of classrooms?

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A recurrent theme running through the recent DfE’s ‘Working lives of teachers and leaders: wave 3 Summary report November 2024’ Working lives of teachers and leaders: wave 3 – GOV.UK is that teachers seem less happy about pupil behaviour than in the previous reports.

In this report, 44% of leavers from teaching cited pupil behaviour as a reason, up from 32% in the previous study and a statically significant change compared to the 2024 study. Not yet at the level of ‘high workload’, cited by 84% this year, up from 80% last year and the top reason in both years.

Nor is it yet at the 47% level of those citing government initiatives/policy changes, although it is worth noting that eight per cent fewer leavers cited this reason this year compared with last year.

Other pressures and stress are still also at the top of leavers reasons for quitting, but dissatisfaction with pay, never near the top of the list of reasons fell by five per centage points to 34%. No doubt both the government and the professional associations will be looking closely at that figure as will be those advising the School Teachers Review Body. Conditions of service seem more of a concern than pay at this point in time.

The point about pupil behaviour is reinforced in the table showing the views about discipline deteriorating among both teachers and school leaders completing the survey. In the 2022 survey 18% of teachers and 5% of leaders said that pupil behaviour was either ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’.  By the 2024 survey the reporting levels were 27% and 8%,

It would be interesting to know more about his change. Is it across all teachers and leaders; worse in the secondary sector than primary schools and what, if any, role has increased absence rates played in deteriorating views of pupil behaviour?

Perhaps more worrying was the findings that although

“around eight-in-ten (79%) leaders with teaching responsibilities reported that they felt always or mostly supported to deal with disruptive behaviour (consistent with the 80% in 2023 but lower than the 85% in 2022).”

But those bearing the brunt of classroom teaching, teachers with teaching responsibilities were less positive,

 “with 49% reporting feeling always or mostly supported with dealing with disruptive behaviour (lower than the 52% in 2023 and 58% in 2022).”

Not surprisingly, there have been declines in those teachers and school leaders viewing classroom behaviour as very good over the same period.

Is this change a consequence of the deteriorating staffing situation in secondary schools in recent year, or is it a reflection of the debate about mobile phone use in the classroom? It would be interesting to know more about the types of school and ages of the teachers reporting the deterioration in pupil behaviour to see how widespread the decline is among teachers.

At these levels this is certainly a flashing amber light, but not yet a full-blown crisis, but all concerned will need to understand the reasons why classroom behaviour is deteriorating.