Award Holders: Dr. R. Hewitt, Dr. D. Epstein, Prof. D. Leonard, C. ... bullying' and there was no available UK research on all types of school related violence. Our.
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Award no: L133251041 Award Holders: Dr. R. Hewitt, Dr. D. Epstein, Prof. D. Leonard, C. Watkins Title: The violence-resilient school : a comparative study of schools and their environments Full Report of Research Activities and Results
FINAL REPORT The Violence-resilient School: A Comparative Study of Schools and their Environments (L133251041) Background In the context of a perceived increase in violence to the person within and around schools evident in the media and other domains reflecting public concern, this research set out to examine the levels of violence in six London secondary schools. (These schools will be referred to as schools A, B, C, D, F and G — for our own mnemonic purposes- throughout this report.) By relating these to levels of criminal violence in the neighbourhoods of each school it was hoped to identify the most and the least ‘violence-resilient’ schools, i.e. those where there was a low level of school-related violence in localities with high levels of violence and vice versa. At the time of our application for funds, the existing research mainly addressed inter-pupil bullying’ and there was no available UK research on all types of school related violence. Our concern was to identify the incidence of physical violence between and within all categories of persons within and related to the school. Furthermore, we were especially interested in the role the school played in both the management and manufacture of violence. Finally, within these broad terms, we were interested in the social capital of the school - the density and nature of its internal and external social relationships - and its relationship to the establishment of violence resilience. A primary motivation for our articulation of this set of concerns was the gap in the UK research literature with respect to inter-school differences in levels of violence and the informal practitioner accounts suggesting that some schools were more effective than others in ‘keeping violence at bay’. The research process brought us a deeper understanding both of the questions we were asking our data and of the difficulty of locating and defining violence —especially when our empirical resources were primarily written and oral reports and exclusion records. One significant early hurdle, therefore, was the apparent paradox of seeking to make a contribution to school management practice vis-à-vis violence, whilst a sceptical standpoint often seemed to be required by the nature of the data we were gathering. What we concluded with represented a pragmatic compromise. We took there to be a reality beyond the reports with which we were dealing, whilst attempting to ‘read’ those reports as socially constructed accounts. Our use of our key theoretical terms — particularly ‘violence-resilience’ and ‘social capital’ also reflected this same pragmatism. In what follows our use of these terms is strategically limited to their working definitions for the purposes of this research and these are articulated below. Objectives Our original five aims and objectives were maintained, and our understanding of the relationships between the five became more complex. Objective 1.— to identify and characterise ‘violence resilient schools’ — was a definitional process involving critically examining each school and identifying those aspects we believed (on the basis of both the ‘hard evidence’ of records and of our interpretation of school management practices) led some schools to be more violence-resilient than others. Thus part of our objective no. 3 - ‘to explore the effects of school culture and management on the prevention of school-based
violence’- was also implicated in the way we came to treat objective no. 1. Objective 2 — exploring the relationship between social capital and violence resilience remained unchanged, although we were certainly soon disabused of any simple notions of how either might be identified and matched with the other, beyond our ‘top two’ exemplary schools — schools C and D. These are discussed below. Objective 3. — ‘to explore the effects of gender, race and class, as well as school culture and management, on the prevention of violence’ — essentially became expanded in several directions but remained constant. Objective 4 — the development of recommendations based on the research - is a slower process, dependent on our subsequent deliberations, feed-back from our early dissemination work, etc.. It nevertheless remains a most important objective. Objective 5 — the analysis of accounts of violent incidents is a part of what we are doing in our pursuit of a number of themes for writing up into journal articles and presentations. However, we have decided to leave it out of the ‘summary of aims and objectives’ on the report form. Methods A number of suitable schools were approached directly by letter and asked to participate in the project. We had several refusals but the majority agreed. Schools that believed themselves to be doing well with respect to violence were more willing to participate than those that believed otherwise. Nevertheless we did manage to include schools in both categories — thanks to the commitment (and courage) of certain headteachers - and in some cases schools’ beliefs about themselves did not ultimately chime with our conclusions. We included six schools in the project. These were located in different parts of London. To protect our informants we will not be giving any further details regarding the location of these. Four of the schools were co-educational. Two were single sex schools — one for boys, the other for girls. Our initial plan was to start the data-gathering (following interviews with each of the head teachers) with the collection of exclusion data from school records covering a two-year period from September 1996 to July 1998, then to proceed to interviews with staff and pupils and observational work. In the event the gathering and recording of accurate data from the schools’ records proved a very much more time-consuming exercise than we had envisaged. The volume and nature of the records — varied in kind, sometimes disorganised or inaccurately tabulated by the schools and in need of correction by reference to copies of original ‘letters home to parents’ and by other means — created considerable problems. The work took some three months longer than we had allowed and this led to inevitable sacrifices later — most notably in the area of observational work. We were thus unable to observe at relevant meetings or to observe any violent or violencerelated incidents. (Perhaps this idea had been in any case somewhat ‘optimistic’.) We were also unable to study individual cases and profiles of perpetrators and victims with reference to time and location of incident. There are several additional reasons why this was impractical. The research instruments we developed to accomplish our tasks were as follows: 1. 18 tables for the analysis of data on permanent and fixed-term exclusions in each school, and for the comparative, cross-school analysis of that data.
2. A schedule for the conduct of structured interviews with members of school staff. This was based on extrapolations from our first three ‘aims and objectives’. 3. A number of general principles for the conduct of open, unstructured interviews with pupils. 4. A template for the analysis of staff and organisational discourses elicited in interviews , including the linkage between problems and solutions relating to violence.
Data on violent crime in the neighbourhoods of each school were collected largely with the help of local authority Community Safety Teams. Additional material was also provided by Metropolitan Police Performance Information Bureau. This data was very difficult to access and became available only gradually. Indeed, the most detailed figures were available only for the period after April 1998, due to the changes to the Home Office Counting Rules on that date. While there is not an exact fit with the period covered by our exclusion data, it does provide a very clear picture of violent crime in the areas in question. We were also helped, however, by the fact that our project coincided with the first Police/local authority Crime Audit. This provided us with some very useful profiles of the areas we were interested in. Exclusion data was analysed for totals of fixed-term and permanent exclusions and, within this, for those that were violence-related and involving physical violence to any degree, and those that were violence-related and without a physical component.2 This included threatening behaviour and other forms of behaviour that implied or might create a context for physical violence. The figures for each school were then analysed for distribution across year groups, genders and ethnic groups. The high or low incidence of violence-related fixed-term exclusions — both ‘physical’ and ‘other’ - could not be taken as an objective reflection of the levels of violence in each school. This was not only because disciplinary practices varied between (and within) schools and the inadequacy of bureaucratic record to the description of an event, but because the decision to exclude is also a matter of school policy. By counting only exclusions of three days or more we attempted to mitigate the effects of policies that sought to minimise serious violence by excluding for very short periods pupils involved in even the most minor incidents. This approach did render the tables for each school more comparable, although those schools that had the reverse tendency — to avoid exclusion - were not fully captured by this approach. As researchers we were not in a position to impose any definition on the records. The degree to which schools recorded ‘violent incidents’ - including what we have called ‘violencerelated incidents’ - varied between schools to some degree, and sometimes between teachers within schools. They also appeared to vary within schools over time-showing the effects of policy on outcomes in the record of violence within the school. Furthermore, the descriptions given to actions varied internally across the set of texts that comprise the record — the first notes of an incident by a teacher, the record-form filled out, the note in the student’s file, the letter home to the parent or guardian, the school statistics produced for local authority audit purposes, etc.. The figures we collected are, however, detailed and, interpreted in the light of what we know of school policies, philosophies and coherence through our interviews with staff and students, do tell a story of variation from one to another that is illuminating.
We produced final ‘tables of patterns of violence resilience’ across the six schools. These included totalled figures for violence-related exclusions of three days or above, also expressed in terms of rates per thousand pupils of each sex on roll for each school. The same table also provided what data were available on levels of violent crime in the neighbourhoods of each school. These neighbourhood crime data are not yet all exactly comparable and we are continuing to perfect some of the figures with additional statistics from the P.I.B.. The table also provides a summary of salient features of policy and practice as drawn from the interview data, together with a ranking (High/Medium/Low) for violence-resilience. All aspects of this table are in need of considerable explication through commentaries to be interpretable and useful for the purposes of thinking about and developing recommendations for policy and practice. Results In broad terms it is possible at this stage to make the following generalisations: (1) Success or failure in the containment and management of violence is the product of school practices. What schools consciously do with regard to violence undoubtedly affects the establishment or non-establishment of violenceresilience. (2) Relationships within schools — between staff and between staff and students — contribute significantly to violence resilience. (3) The quality and extent of communications within schools — including, especially, staff-student communication over violent incidents — affects violence-resilience. (4) Schools with a range of policies and practices for dealing with violence and its potential emergence cope better with the problem. (5) A school’s engagement with and relationship to the neighbourhood of the school and its communities of interest also contribute positively. (6) While racism and sexism were addressed by schools to some extent, homophobic behaviour was barely addressed at all. The combination of aggressive masculine identities, and homophobic bullying impacts to varying degrees on the management of violence. Numbers 2-6 above are greatly affected by the over-arching issue of connectedness. Under this heading we would include staff coherence and relations of pupils to schools and schools to their neighbourhoods. Each of these expressions of connectedness will be discussed individually below. The other over-arching feature we found was the significance of gender. While rates per 1000 of fixed-term exclusions of three days and above for violence-related incidents in the four mixed schools ranged from 94 to 34 (taking only 1996-7 as an example), the all-boys school had a rate of 153 and the all-girls school had a rate of 28 per 1000. In the mixed schools, relative numbers of boys and girls in the schools’ total population obviously influence the comparability of gender differences in violence-related exclusions — although this varied by only 6% across the four schools. However, within those four schools, girls’ exclusions for violence-related incidents were between 12% and 30% of the rates for boys in the same schools. While this is not ‘news’, its very familiarity frames both the silences in teachers’
accounts of the nature of school violence, and all extrapolations of gender evident in students’ behaviour — particularly with regard to homophobic name-calling and other enactment and policing of gendered identities. Results elaborated (1) Success or failure in the containment and management of violence is the product of school practices Controlling for all that we knew about each school’s recording practices, those with the highest numbers of violent and violence-related incidents did not at all reflect what we knew of their neighbourhoods in terms of levels of violent crime. Indeed the two schools that exhibited the lowest incidence — and were pro-active on a number of fronts in that regard — were situated in areas with extremely high levels of recorded violent crime. It is this last aspect — a contextual aspect that distinguishes the concerns of this research from all previous studies of school violence in the UK — that gives additional meaning to our notion of ‘violence resilience’. (This is not to say that violence resilience is only a measure of the extent to which schools can avoid reflecting the troubles immediately beyond their gates. Internal social fragmentations of many kinds also contribute to the emergence of violence.) What is significant about these findings is that they show that how schools conduct themselves have real and clear outcomes with regard to violence. (2) Relationships within schools contribute to violence resilience Within our sample there were some stark differences in the degree to which the staff cohered around policies and practices and the extent to which schools managed, through inevitable change, to maintain a coherent approach to the issue of violence. High staff turnover, low staff morale and divisions between school management teams and the body of the staff were a feature of the schools we rated as lowest in violence-resilience. Low to average levels of staff turnover, together with an across-the-school commitment to proactive and preventive practice, were a pronounced feature of those schools we rated highest in violence-resilience. Our most violence-resilient schools (C and D) were marked by the coherence of school policy and philosophy. This was derived from clear and reflective leadership that was endorsed and supported by staff throughout the school in their commitment to the pupils and to the school’s social contribution to the community. This was achieved in one case (D) by an unusually stable staff— with some very long-serving and still dynamically engaged members of the SMT — plus a continual replenishment of new staff, often originally trained with placements in the school, who were also committed to the philosophy and practices of the school. In the case of school C, with more normal levels of staff stability, a similar process of induction into the school’s unified approach was also a feature. The success of that was in both cases predicated on a common sense of purpose, good levels of collegiality between staff, and an absence of division between staff and senior management. This level of commonality of purpose and commitment was also shared by school F - the boys school which struggled valiantly against (a) the problems of being an all male school with a predominantly band 3 intake, and (b) being located in an area that, while not with the highest levels of neighbourhood violent crime, certainly did have very elevated figures.3 This kind of commonality of purpose was not shared by any of the other three schools - though some were better than others - and extremes of division and lack of social cohesion were very pronounced in some cases.
3. Communications Related to the quality of connectedness between staff and between staff and pupils was the attention given to processes of communication within schools. Schools where reflection on practices were routine and established — with working-parties examining issues of broad significance within the school, or staff meetings dedicated to exploring specific problems, etc. - were also those where relations across the staff body were good. Schools A, C, D and F were all effective in this regard. Schools C and D were also exemplary in paying the most attention to talking to pupils about incidents, listening to pupils’ accounts, mediating and ensuring good communications between pupils, staff and parents/guardians — and having a strong philosophy of respect for pupils’ accounts. This continual explication of incidents and attention to the detail of incidents was extremely time-consuming for senior staff in both C and D. There was substantial pay-off, however, in the way this activity greatly limited the potential for small incidents to develop. Such limitation activities were an important ingredient in schools that were situated in difficult and violent neighbourhoods. The letters home to parents and guardians issued by School C were also exemplary in their attention to detail and fairness. These did much to help both parents/guardians and pupils to understand the basis for school exclusion decisions and contributed to the sense of intelligible and shared values throughout the school.
(4) Range of practices All of the schools in our sample utilised some specialised interventions to address the issue of violence. These included anti-bullying counselling, aggression management, behaviour groups, mentoring schemes, exclusion prevention schemes, etc.. All schools also talked about the need for disciplinary responses by the school to violent incidents. However, additionally schools could be divided into those where a range of solutions were applied to identified and specific problems of violence; those that advanced a variety of solution strategies but without clear or developed sense of how these were geared to specific problems, and those schools that had a limited set of responses. Our staff interview data identified different kinds of accounts that were given of schools’ practices — whether these stressed pro-activity, swift and firm reactions, work in the curriculum, etc.. In our analysis of the interview data we identified broader discourses within which such accounts were embedded. Some, for example, discussed the problems through a strong managerial discourse that characterised both problems and solutions through a language which emphasised the lines of responsibility and reporting, the use of exclusions, the management of school spaces throughout the day, the school roll and catchment area, etc.. Others displayed a clear moral/social discourse in which problems were accounted for by the proximity of dangerous housing estates that were said to be the source of numerous disturbances to the equilibrium of the school. Another emphasised a preventive approach to incidents and patterns, seeing itself as a proactive member of the community and offering a special contribution to pupils learning about how to handle events. In contrast to the latter, there were discourses that were recognisable for their bases in therapeutic thinking. These gave special emphasis to a presumed need to look beyond the ‘surface’ behaviour of pupils and address the foundations of conflict through early intervention strategies involving counselling or mediation work. While variations in the kinds of discourses employed occurred within schools, schools also tended to reflect a certain characteristic discursive style in the exploration of problems and solutions in the area of school violence. The reflection of
these discursive resources in the schools’ developments of practices has been an important focus of interest in this research. (5) Transparency and consistency of school rules. This finding was related to the issue of internal school cohesiveness and the across-the-staff commitment to measures for addressing violence. We found that where schools went out of their way to emphasise the even-handedness of school rules relating to violence, to make sure that all pupils and their parents understood the school’s policies and had the opportunity to discuss them, then a belief in the school’s fairness contributed positively to pupils’ relatedness to the school and to patterns of behaviour. Whether schools emphasised specific rules or embedded their expectations of behaviour within more general codes of conduct, consistency that was reflective of a broader sense of commitment to and respect for the pupils by the staft was a feature of violence-resilience. (6) Relationship to the neighbourhood of the school Schools that worked hardest at their relationship with their local communities were all those with very small middle-class intakes (C,D,F). However, not all schools serving predominantly working-class neighbourhoods were thus pro-active. Two schools that were more comprehensive in their intake vis-à-vis social class were notably less proactive in their local communities (A, B). Furthermore, these last-mentioned schools were also less successful in their handling of violence from pupils drawn from local authority housing estates than they were from those from middle-class families. C, D and F each successfully developed relations of various kinds with neighbourhood bodies as a conscious strategy. The headteachers of both C and F took a very active role in this. C and D were extremely active and effective in this kind of outreach activity. Furthermore, both had developed a profile of the school locally such that they were seen as not merely reflecting their neighbourhoods and catchment areas, but as constituting a very positive presence that was open and accessible, yet safe and supportive of local individuals and groups. School F was also attempting to work towards the same model. In the case of D, several members of staff had taught the parents of some of the pupils, and this consistency over time appeared to be part of the school’s profile locally. Over a number of years one of the assistant heads had devoted much time to working with local partnerships as committee member and active participant on behalf of the school, building strong ties to other local bodies and community organisations. This had resulted in benefits to the school and the community, and in particular had brought new resources into the school through a series of schemes. It also further widened the network of local individuals, organisations and groups who were connected to the school and interacted directly and indirectly with it. This included the resultant informal information system that fed-back local perceptions of the school, pupils behaviour, information about specific trouble spots and potential emergent problems, providing the school with an invaluable resource and extending its presence in the neighbourhood well beyond the boundary of the school perimeter. School C was similarly tireless in its building of relationships with local shop-keepers, community groups and neighbourhood and boroughwide organisations. This, too, was the product of a distinctive view of the potentially positive role a school should play in the community it serves. Despite complex local problems of many kinds, the school was widely regarded as an oasis, giving protection from the general flow of neighbourhood conflicts and difficulties.
(7) Racism, sexism and homophobia. We found that while some racist language and bullying was reported — although not exclusively perpetrated by white pupils — most schools supported a culture that was antipathetic to racism and this was widely understood and largely endorsed by the pupil population. Although there was a clear decline in the number of staff with some kind of responsibility for issues to do with racism, the question seemed broadly better addressed than did sexism. Both racism and sexism were also a long way ahead of homophobia. Although we found only a few accounts of homophobic bullying involving violence, homophobic name-calling was endemic - as it appears to be generally in the south east. Often dismissed by staff as meaningless, its relationship to the construction and reproduction of boys and girls identities, and to the reproduced culture of masculine aggression — boys ‘being boys’ - can only be seen as supportive. There was a clear ambivalence — sometimes even complicity - in teachers’ attitudes to homophobia, and connections to sexism more widely were rarely drawn. The relevance of this cluster of issues around masculine identities is particularly acute in the light of the predominance of boys in the exclusion data. Positive work vis-à-vis masculinities was attempted patchily for the most part. School F, however, — the all-boys school —did take the issue very seriously. Senior staff also acknowledged its problem with homophobia, especially among its African-Caribbean intake, although staff generally were resistant to tackling the issue. The staff gender balance - 50/50 male female — and its gender balance at senior school management level, were consciously part of the school’s way of addressing aggressive masculinities through a range of role models. Nevertheless the school’s high levels of exclusions for violence were also amplified by some dramatic violent incidents in and around the school. The school also suffered from a culture of extortion — playground ‘borrowing’ that graduated into extortion with threats, and a related problem of potential intrusion - as reprisals and/or the enforcement of extortion came to involve friends and relatives. Both of these features it shared with school A, which was also described as having a problem with homophobia. Interestingly, although school F was far ahead of all other schools in its rate of violence-related exclusions per thousand pupils — 153/1000 (1996/97) and 215/1000 (1997-98) — School A was ahead of the other three mixed schools with 99/1000 (96/7) and 68/1000 (97/98). Despite the influence of different school policies regarding exclusion, the volume of exclusions in school F by contrast with the other four does appear to say much about the mitigating effect of the presence of girls — by whatever mechanism/s that occurs. It also appears to be the case that there is a ‘violence value-added’ effect in allboys schools where some masculine identities produce a disproportionate impact on the cultures of interaction.
