I never wanted to be a teacher. Which is probably a strange place to start for someone who never really left school and is now the CEO of a multi academy trust. It’s taken me 28 years to admit publicly that I came into teaching to change the world.
I’ve been a headteacher, a behaviour consultant, an executive head, and now I lead a 9-school trust. I’ve worked in six different local authorities, always in schools serving high levels of deprivation and disadvantage.
I came into teaching through the sink or swim method. No coaching. No mentoring. We were just thrown into a classroom with a register and a timetable, and the hope you’d figure it out quickly enough. Some of us did. Some of us didn’t. The thing is, I always had time for the children. They are the future, after all.
My mum, who was a primary school teacher, said two things which I’ve never forgotten. She said that you can either put up with what you don’t like, or you can get inside it and try and change it. She also said that once you close your classroom door, your classroom is your kingdom.
So, I got inside it. And, if I’m honest, I didn’t find teaching that difficult. I liked the children, and they seemed to know that. And I was pretty good at shouting.
In my defence, we weren’t really taught behaviour or classroom management. I had a loud voice, a bit of presence, and looked like I’d had a hard paper round. That, combined with humour, sarcasm and the more than occasional bark, seemed to do the trick.
The ‘naughty’ kids behaved for me. The ‘good’ kids enjoyed my lessons. At the time, I thought that was what good teaching looked like.
I progressed relatively quickly and found myself as a curriculum deputy in a genuinely tough inner-city school. The school had nailed behaviour but not achievement. This wasn’t through nuance or subtlety, but through clarity, consistency and consequence. We had an isolation room kitted out with booths; We had an on-call system; and we had our own off-site provision (before such things were common). We didn’t call it zero tolerance. But that’s not far from what it was.
And it worked. Behaviour was “outstanding”. The school wasn’t. That didn’t make sense to me at the time. Five years later, we went from Requires Improvement to Outstanding, skipping Good entirely. And with that Ofsted badge, the calls started coming in.
The irony, that no one had shown any interest in us quite literally the day before, wasn’t lost on me.
I got my own headship. And I thought I had the answer. I brought in a tried and tested behaviour system. I delivered assemblies to year groups. I told myself I was offering a reset. In reality, I was laying down the law. I shouted. I threatened. I was proud of it.
We had patrols every twenty minutes. Two chances, then removal. Removed pupils didn’t sit in isolation booths, they sat in a separate room staffed by pastoral leads or SLT. And they stayed there until their parents came in. After all, it’s the parents’ responsibility, isn’t it? If their child can’t behave, that’s on them.
We brought parents in. We sat their children next to them. We talked about choices, consequences, standards. Looking back, we shamed them. Quietly. Systematically. In ways that felt professional at the time. And at the time, I thought that was the right thing to do.
Behaviour improved. The school improved. In the short term at least. But it had no impact on the 10% of pupils causing 90% of the problems. I didn’t permanently exclude them. I created an on-site provision. A different curriculum. A different and very separate space.
I knew these children were different. Keeping them separate felt like the right thing to do. It often does. I believed that it was for the good of the child. I also used that fateful line, the one we lean on the most: we have to protect the other children, don’t we?
Five years ago, I left mainstream education to run a failing pupil referral unit. If I’m honest, by that point I had lost faith in the system. I really didn’t like schools. Or maybe it wasn’t the schools, maybe it was the system we’d built around them. But more than that, something else had started to sit uncomfortably.
Many of the children I had worked with, who in some cases I had suspended or permanently excluded, were now serving long prison sentences. And something didn’t feel right.
Remember, I came into teaching to change the world. I could control a classroom. I could transform a school. But I wasn’t changing anything for the children who needed it the most.
I had this idea that if we showed these children love – fed them, washed their clothes, gave them a truly alternative curriculum- we might just be able to change things. My first morning told me how far away that thinking was from reality. I had 130 secondary-aged children. They had all been permanently excluded. No one wanted them or knew what to do with them. There was very little learning happening. Staff were unprepared for what they were dealing with. The children were causing £80,000 worth of damage a year inside the building. Only months earlier, I had been the person saying: “They’d be better off in a PRU.” I was wrong.
Now I stood on the other side of the mirror and there was no way back into mainstream school leadership for me. In many ways, I had orchestrated my own career suicide.
The system hadn’t failed these children. It had worked exactly as it had been designed to. But the system itself was wrong.
So, I spoke to other PRU heads and Special school leaders. I fell down what I now call a trauma and attachment rabbit hole. What I’ve learnt in the last five years has changed my life. It has changed how I behave in my relationships. How I parent my children. How I led that PRU. And how I now lead a multi academy trust.
I learnt very quickly that a significant proportion of the children who had been permanently excluded shouldn’t have been. That’s not a criticism of individual schools. It’s contextual. It’s the consequence of inconsistent understanding of behaviour.
Of red lines. Of systems that prioritise compliance over understanding. And I’ll be honest, this is the uncomfortable bit. It is easy to take over a school and permanently exclude the so-called naughty children. But that leaves a bigger question.
Where do they go?
And more importantly, do we not have a shared responsibility to understand and support all the children in our local areas? Are they not all entitled to an education?
This is not about making excuses for poor behaviour. I learnt very quickly that the adults needed training and support far more than the children did. Our education system is still, in many ways, built on an outdated Victorian factory model that simply doesn’t fit the complexity of the changing world our children are growing up in.
We are dealing with a mental health crisis. A SEND crisis. Levels of poverty I have never known. And a prison system that is already full. Blame and shame are not the answer.
Doing the same things over and over and expecting different results isn’t working. Simply continuing the approach we have taken in the past will leave us with an education system that fails too many.
Apparently, Schools have changed. We describe ourselves as research-informed and evidence-informed. There is a vast and growing body of research around neuroscience, ACEs, trauma and attachment. Ignorance is not an excuse and yet, in many cases, we are still not applying our learning in any meaningful way.
What has changed for me? Not a programme. Not a policy. Not a new system. But a different way of seeing. We now talk about this as Relational Inclusion, and it is supported by a set of principles that now guide how I lead, how I respond, and how I make decisions when it matters most:
- We believe that if a child could do better, they would
- Relationships are at the heart of everything we do
- We accept all emotions but not all behaviours
- We identify and address the cause not the symptoms
- We foster a culture of compassion and repair
We built systems that worked for schools. I’m no longer sure they worked for children. And that, for me, has had to be the starting point for doing things differently.
Anthony’s new book is out now! Co-written with Alan Braven.
Seeing Children Differently: 52 Weeks of Curiosity, Empathy and Relational Inclusion
Available to order now on Amazon https://amzn.to/4x8eRea
