This is the Departments response to Parentsoutloud comments on the Alan Steers report on behaviour and discipline. Unfortunately it totally misses the points we commented on ( Steers Report on Behaviour story ).If this is the official response it makes you wonder why we need to spend our precious money in the education budget to employ Steers and his team.

Dear Mrs Morrissey
Thank you for your email of 6 April, addressed to the Rt Hon Jim Knight MP, regarding behaviour. As you can appreciate the Minister receives a great deal of correspondence and is unable to personally reply to every letter and email he receives. Therefore, on this occasion, I have been asked to reply on his behalf.
I note your concerns about behaviour and discipline. I would like to assure you that the Government is concerned about the behaviour of pupils as we want schools to be disciplined and purposeful places of learning. We believe that teachers, parents and pupils themselves all have a role to play in ensuring schools are disciplined places. Every school is required by law to have a behaviour policy which shapes the school ethos and makes a statement about how the school values and includes all people in it. Successive Governments have acted to ensure that the implementation of a school’s discipline policy resides with the school itself, believing that important decisions for schools must be taken at a local level by those with the best interests of the school and its community at heart. It is for this reason that governing bodies are ultimately responsible for disciplinary issues at their school. As such it is at the head teacher’s discretion how discipline is enforced. We would recommend that the head teacher consults with various stakeholders from the school in formulating the policy. There is evidence that, if schools adopt a systematic, rigorous and positive approach to managing pupils’ behaviour they can achieve high standards even in the most challenging areas. But, to be successful such an approach has to be strongly led by senior managers and consistently applied by all staff. We have always made it clear that, where a pupil has behaved badly enough to justify exclusion, we fully support a head teacher’s decision to exclude. We do recognise that dealing with incidents of inappropriate pupil behaviour can be a challenge for school staff. Indeed, it is a tribute to the professionalism and dedication of school staff, that as evidence from Ofsted shows, standards of behaviour are good in the great majority of schools, but we do recognise that poor behaviour remains a problem. That is why the Government is implementing a comprehensive national programme to strengthen schools’ capacity to manage pupils’ behaviour. The programme includes:
giving schools access to high-quality behaviour management training materials and advice from expert behaviour management consultants;
providing schools with high-quality training and curriculum materials to help develop pupils’ social and emotional skills;
providing extra funding for schools facing the greatest behaviour challenges;
giving schools practical guidance on dealing with bullying;
reinforcing the legal basis of school discipline by giving school staff statutory power to discipline pupils for misbehaviour on and off school premises;
reaffirming the statutory power of school staff to use reasonable force to control or restrain pupils;
reinforcing parental responsibility by enabling schools and local authorities to make parenting contracts and seek court-imposed parenting orders relating to children’s behaviour;
helping schools form partnerships with other schools to strengthen behaviour management;
encouraging schools to become involved in Safer Schools Partnerships, which place police officers on school premises; and
giving head teachers a statutory right to search pupils for weapons.
I can therefore assure you that securing high standards of education and behaviour is a key priority for the Government and that we are giving schools our full support in this area