Post remote learning, Victorian teachers are reporting unprecedented levels of student violence, aggression, disruption and the breakdown of an already thin remnant of social cohesion.

The evidence is in almost every school. Teachers are reporting a distinct Lord of the Flies effect where the habits of co-operation and collaboration have been replaced by competitive, and sometimes downright nasty, behaviours as students look to re-establish their place in the pecking order.

Teachers are reporting a surge in bullying and ill discipline following the long lockdowns.Credit:Janie Barrett

They say many children can’t play a basic game, like basketball or four square, without it descending into tantrums when results don’t go their way. Other students can’t compete without bullying creeping in – they put others down to elevate themselves.

Teachers trying hard to solve this problem. But they are at breaking point themselves and our responses when we’re exhausted tend to be kneejerk, populist or reflective of an old-school disciplinary crackdown that we hope will “straighten these kids up”.

But they don’t straighten up.

These traditional models, under the duress of staff absences, exhaustion and disaffected kids, have been exposed as not only outdated, but fraudulent. Our teachers deserve a better return on the time and effort they get from flawed control-oriented strategies.

What our students need right now is continuity in their learning and a healthy dose of the time and space required to relearn the ways of working productively together. And our teachers and principals are sick to the back teeth of implementing new bullying awareness and behavioural programs, investing countless hours and huge budget chunks, for so little return.

This leaves those of us interested in education policy at a fork in the road. When schools like Greater Shepparton College hit the headlines due to fights recorded on mobile phones going viral, can we resist the urge to spark a crackdown or throw another program at these dedicated, yet utterly exhausted, professionals to implement?

Can we, for once, not blame these educators and instead help them in establishing a culture where students are more likely to succeed and co-operate than fail and turn on each other?

Even when looking at the most concerning of student behaviours, such as bullying, we get it wrong with embarrassing monotony. The global count on anti-bullying programs is now out beyond 9000.

That’s 9000 times that a clever person in an edu-enterprise, an education department or a think tank has had the brainwave of a new intervention that will once and for all end bullying. That’s also 9000 times they’ve been wrong and wasted the scarce time of our teachers.

Bullying, you see, isn’t simply a behaviour that can be deprogrammed from students. It’s a cultural phenomenon. Put simply, the culture of a school tells you whether bullying is easy or normalised, or not. And for this very reason, parents of both bullying victims and perpetrators are inclined to change schools when their attempts to stop it fail.

Yet, we seem obsessed with “awareness raising” around bullying. I believe we’re all thoroughly aware that school bullying is a huge problem. Now what?

The University of London looked into this in 2012 when they explored 1378 schools which were performing admirably to counter bullying. They found the most common feature among them was “a restorative culture and ethos”.

Poor student choices are addressed by students spending their time and energy making amends with those that they’ve negatively impacted rather than spending hours plotting revenge in pointless detentions. It’s really not rocket science or particularly controversial.

And while we already have access to these restorative practices in Australia, our challenge is making them culturally normalised and habitualised. Restorative practices are not a program, they are a way of working and being that enacts fairness, kindness, empathy and personal responsibility.

Done well and implemented fully as the underpinning of a school’s culture, these restorative practices slowly and steadily build the empathy and the responsibility required to co-operate with others and to solve problems together.

I’ve personally worked with dozens of schools, school leaders, parents and students to implement restorative practices and the results have been remarkable in terms of not only reducing bullying but improving the classroom behaviour of students, increasing teaching time and growing a sense of connection.

When restorative practices are done right, we also unlock measurable improvements in school climate and trust between teaching colleagues. Parents also report measurable improvements in their overall satisfaction levels of the school.

It’s more than possible, although far from easy, to help schools like Greater Shepparton College make the critical restorative shifts required for long-term recovery and results.

To begin, we’ll need to train ourselves to worry just a little less about the behaviour of the day and a little more about why it’s happening. It’s way beyond time to treat the root cultural causes of student misbehaviour, rather than the most recent symptoms.

Seizing this moment to change might just be the difference between keeping our best and most experienced educators in the caper and losing them. We really don’t have a moment to lose.

Adam Voigt is a former principal and founder and CEO of Real Schools.

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