The first time Marcus spoke in a full staff meeting, I noticed the room go quiet. Not the usual silence that falls when a senior leader clears their throat, but something sharper. People were actually listening.
Marcus was fifteen. He’d been excluded from two previous schools, and when he arrived at ours, his file was thick enough to make most teachers wince. He was known. That’s the word they use — known. It means that you’ve already been labelled before you’ve even found your locker.
Our school isn’t special. It’s a mainstream secondary in a town with the usual pressures: housing costs, precarious work, and a visible police presence near the bus station. But a few years ago, we started doing something differently. We stopped treating behaviour management as something we did to students, and started doing it with them.
It wasn’t a big-bang reform. No new curriculum, no expensive programme. It was a gradual shift in how we spoke about young people. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with this kid?” we started asking, “What happened to this kid?” and then, more importantly, “What does this kid think would help?”
That sounds simple, but it changes everything.
The first practical step was introducing weekly community circles in form time. Every class, including Marcus’s, sits in a circle for twenty minutes. There’s no agenda other than checking in. Students can pass if they want. No one is forced to share. But over time, they do. They talk about sleep, about football, about a falling-out at the weekend. Sometimes they talk about being scared to walk home.
We didn’t call it “restorative practice” with the kids. That language puts people off. We just said: “We’re going to talk to each other properly.” The rules are basic: one person speaks at a time, no come-backs, what’s said in the circle stays in the circle. Adults are part of it, not above it. I’ve sat through circles where I’ve had to admit I was tired and short-tempered, and the students accepted that more easily than you’d think. They don’t expect teachers to be perfect. They expect us to be honest.
The effect on attendance wasn’t immediate. For the first term, nothing changed. Kids still bunked off, still got sent out of class, still collected detentions like trading cards. But slowly, the tone of the building shifted. The students started to notice that adults were asking questions rather than making pronouncements. When a Year 9 student was caught vaping in the toilets, the response wasn’t a three-day exclusion. It was a conversation: “Why do you think you need to vape in the middle of a school day?” That doesn’t sound like much, but for the kid involved, it was the first time an adult had shown curiosity rather than contempt.
And that’s where the links to exclusion, absenteeism, and eventually knife crime start to become clear.
There’s a well-worn path from exclusion to vulnerability. When a young person is formally excluded, they lose more than a lesson. They lose the structure of the day, the eyes of adults, the informal safety net of peers. They go from being someone the school is trying to manage to someone the school has given up on. That doesn’t make them a future criminal, but it makes them more exposed. It’s easier to recruit a teenager who has been excluded than one who has a trusted adult waiting at the gate. That’s not a moral judgement. It’s just logistics.
The schools that feed the prison system aren’t uniformly cruel. Many have strict behaviour policies because they’re under pressure. They exclude because they feel they have no choice. But the choice exists. It’s just harder.
In our school, we rewrote the behaviour policy with a group of students. They helped design the referral form. The old form had a checkbox for “defiant” and “disruptive.” The new form asks, “What happened before this behaviour?” and “What does the student need now?” That sounds bureaucratic, but it changes outcomes. When a teacher has to write a sentence about context, they start to see the child differently. It’s harder to punish a person you’ve described in full sentences.
Marcus wasn’t ever a violent kid. He was loud, sometimes intimidating, and he had a temper that flared when he felt disrespected. In his previous schools, that meant being marched out of lessons, isolated, and eventually sent home. Here, we tried a different route. After an incident in the corridor — a slammed door and a shouted insult at a teacher — he was asked to come to a meeting. Not with the deputy head. With three people: his mum, a teaching assistant he respected, and a sixth-form student he’d never met. That made him pause. Why would an older student care enough to sit in a meeting about him?
The sixth former said: “I used to be in your chair. I know it feels like everyone’s waiting for you to slip up. But it’s not true. They’re waiting to see what you do next.” That phrase got to Marcus. He didn’t apologise dramatically. He just stopped slamming doors. Later, he told me it was the first time he felt someone was talking to him, not about him.
This is the alternative to the authoritarian model. It’s not soft. It’s demanding. Holding a fifteen-year-old accountable in a circle, face to face, is far harder than sending them home. Exclusion is easy. It’s a quick hit of consequences without any of the messy relationship work. But it doesn’t repair anything. It just moves the problem into the street.
The link with knife crime isn’t mystical. A teenager who feels listened to at school is less likely to carry a weapon for status or protection. The Newcastle study that came out last year spelled it out: kids who felt connected to school were significantly less likely to offend, while exclusion was one of the strongest predictors of later involvement in violent crime. I’m not quoting that to sound clever. I’m quoting it because it matches what I see in the classroom.
When students are given real voice — not a token student council that chooses the menu for canteen Thursday, but actual power over the things that affect their daily life — they become invested. They attend more because it’s their school. They behave better because they helped design the rules. And when they do mess up, they’re not thrown out. They’re brought back in.
We still have exclusions at our school. No one pretends it’s perfect. There are a small number of students who need a different setting, and pretending otherwise is naive. But that number has dropped. Attendance has risen. And in the three years since we started this approach, I can’t point to a single student who has been involved in serious violence outside the gates. That’s not a famous success story. It’s just an absence of failure.
There are days when the circle feels like a waste of time. When the behaviour policy rewrite takes hours, and the students make suggestions that are impractical or unrealistic. But then a kid like Marcus stays in school, and you remember why we do it.
He left at sixteen with a pass in engineering and a vague plan to join a mechanics apprenticeship. I don’t know if that happened. He’s not on any radar I hear about. But he walks past the school sometimes, and he nods. That’s enough.
The school-to-prison pipeline isn’t a mystery. It’s built on small decisions made every day, in corridors and classrooms, when adults are tired and kids are difficult. Disrupting it doesn’t require a revolution. It just requires us to stop, ask a question, and actually listen to the answer. It’s frailer than it looks. And it can be dismantled one conversation at a time.
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