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If you judged Australia’s schools by recent headlines alone, you would conclude that bullying has reached epidemic proportions.
Hardly a week passes without another news report detailing students being relentlessly harassed online, teachers assaulted in classrooms, parents demanding answers after violent incidents, or schools introducing new behaviour policies in response to community concern. The public conversation has become dominated by extreme events. These stories deserve attention. Every student deserves to feel safe at school, and every teacher deserves to work in an environment free from abuse and violence.
But these incidents, concerning as they are, risk distracting us from a much larger problem.
The greatest threat to learning in Australian classrooms is not the relatively rare incident that makes the evening news. It is the thousands of tiny interruptions that happen every lesson, every day, in almost every school across the country.
The student who continues chatting after instruction has begun.
The classmate who calls out instead of raising a hand.
The pupil wandering around the room while others are trying to work.
The repeated reminders to take out a book, face the front or stop distracting others.
None of these behaviours are dramatic enough to attract media attention. Yet together they quietly consume one of education’s most precious resources: instructional time.
Every minute spent regaining students’ attention is a minute not spent teaching. Every interruption breaks concentration, increases cognitive load and forces both teachers and students to continually reset their focus. While a single distraction may last only seconds, multiplied across six lessons a day, five days a week, nearly forty weeks a year and thousands of classrooms, the cumulative loss is enormous.
Perhaps the clearest evidence comes from the world’s largest international assessment of education.
The 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), surveyed more than 690,000 fifteen-year-old students across 81 education systems, including over 13,000 Australian students. Alongside measuring mathematics, reading and science achievement, PISA also asked students about the learning environment in their mathematics classrooms.
The results should concern every educator.
Only around two-thirds of Australian students reported that students listen to the teacher in most or every lesson. More than one in three said this was not the norm.
Around one-third reported that there is noise and disorder in most lessons.
Almost one-third said students cannot work well because classmates refuse to listen.
Large proportions also reported that teachers have to wait a long time before students settle down and learning can begin.
These are not isolated classrooms. They represent a substantial proportion of Australian secondary education.
Even more concerning is Australia’s position internationally.
Compared with many of the highest-performing education systems, Australian classrooms are noticeably more disrupted. Countries that consistently perform well on international assessments, including Singapore, Japan, Korea and Estonia, also tend to report calmer, more orderly classroom environments. While no education system is perfect, the pattern is remarkably consistent. Students learn more where classrooms are predictable, orderly and focused on learning.
The relationship between behaviour and achievement is not merely correlational.
The OECD’s analysis found that students in classrooms with stronger disciplinary climates performed substantially better in mathematics than students experiencing frequent disruption, even after accounting for socioeconomic background. Orderly classrooms create more opportunities to learn. More opportunities to learn translate into higher achievement.
This should not surprise us.
Learning is an act of attention. Before a student can remember something, they must first attend to it. Before they can think deeply, they must be able to concentrate. Before they can solve complex problems, they must have uninterrupted time to practise. Every unnecessary interruption competes for the limited capacity of working memory, making learning more difficult than it needs to be.
Cognitive science has been telling us this for decades. Human attention is finite. Working memory is limited. Switching attention between a teacher’s explanation and a classmate’s behaviour carries a cognitive cost. In classrooms where disruption is frequent, that cost is paid hundreds of times every day.
The consequences extend well beyond academic performance.
Teachers consistently report that managing behaviour is one of the most demanding aspects of their job. Surveys by the Australian Education Union have found increasing concerns about student behaviour, workload and teacher wellbeing. New teachers, in particular, often identify behaviour management as the area for which they feel least prepared.
It is hardly surprising that teacher attrition has become a national concern. Teaching is intellectually demanding. It becomes exponentially harder when every lesson requires constant negotiation simply to establish the conditions for learning.
Students pay the price too.
The student who wants to learn loses valuable instructional time because of classmates’ behaviour. The student who struggles academically receives fewer opportunities for guided practice because lessons progress more slowly. Even the student causing disruption misses out on learning, often falling further behind and becoming even more disengaged. Poor behaviour and poor achievement frequently reinforce one another in a cycle that becomes increasingly difficult to break.
Yet despite the overwhelming importance of classroom behaviour, discussions about improving Australian education often focus elsewhere.
We debate curriculum.
We debate assessment.
We debate technology.
We debate class sizes.
We debate funding.
Each of these matters. But none can compensate for classrooms where students are unable to learn because the basic conditions for learning have not been established.
As behaviour expert Tom Bennett has argued repeatedly, behaviour is not separate from learning. Behaviour is the infrastructure that makes learning possible. A brilliantly designed lesson cannot succeed if students are not listening. The most knowledgeable teacher cannot explain effectively over constant interruptions. The richest curriculum has little value if it is never heard.
For too long, behaviour has been treated as something that happens alongside education.
In reality, behaviour is education.
Before schools can raise achievement, close equity gaps or improve student outcomes, they must first create classrooms where teaching can actually take place.
That begins not with bigger punishments or stricter rules, but with recognising a simple truth that many successful schools already understand.
Good behaviour is not something we hope students bring through the school gates.
It is something we deliberately teach.
How Did We Get Here?
If classroom behaviour is so fundamental to learning, why does it feel like maintaining order has become increasingly difficult?
There is no single explanation. Behaviour is shaped by families, peers, communities, technology, school culture and broader social change. Reducing the issue to one cause is tempting, but ultimately unhelpful.
Instead, what we have witnessed over the past two decades is the convergence of several trends that have collectively made classroom management more challenging than it once was.
The first is that schools have increasingly focused on why students behave the way they do, sometimes at the expense of teaching how they should behave.
Understanding behaviour matters. Students arrive at school with vastly different experiences. Trauma, disability, mental health challenges and family circumstances can all influence behaviour, and effective teachers should strive to understand the students in front of them. Compassion and high expectations are not mutually exclusive.
The difficulty arises when explanation becomes substitution. Knowing why a student struggles to wait their turn does not teach them how to wait their turn.
Understanding why a student calls out does not teach them how to participate appropriately in classroom discussion.
Empathy can explain behaviour. It cannot replace the explicit teaching required to change it.
Tom Bennett has frequently warned against confusing causes with solutions. Schools often devote considerable time to analysing the reasons behind poor behaviour while investing comparatively little in systematically teaching the behaviours they want to see instead. In doing so, behaviour becomes something to investigate rather than something to instruct.
A second shift has been the widespread adoption of restorative approaches.
Restorative practice began with a sensible premise. When relationships are damaged, repairing those relationships matters. Helping students understand the impact of their actions, take responsibility and restore trust can be a valuable part of school discipline. Few teachers would argue that every behavioural issue should be met with punishment alone.
The problem is that restorative practice has often expanded far beyond its original purpose.
In many schools, it has become the dominant philosophy rather than one tool among many. Consequences have been delayed or avoided altogether. Students have become accustomed to lengthy conversations replacing immediate correction. Teachers have been encouraged to prioritise repairing relationships while sometimes feeling reluctant to impose meaningful consequences for repeated disruption.
This places an unfair burden on classroom teachers.
Every minute spent negotiating behaviour is a minute not spent teaching. A consequence that takes twenty minutes to administer is often no consequence at all, particularly when the rest of the class is waiting for learning to continue.
Restoration has an important place after harm has occurred.
It is a far weaker strategy for preventing disruption in the first place.
Similarly, many Australian schools have adopted Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL), an approach that emphasises explicitly teaching behavioural expectations, acknowledging positive behaviour and using data to inform decision making.
On paper, these principles are difficult to disagree with. Teaching expectations explicitly is entirely consistent with what we know about learning. Recognising appropriate behaviour can strengthen school culture. Consistency across classrooms benefits both students and teachers.
The challenge lies not in the principles, but in their implementation.
Too often, PBL becomes associated with colourful posters displayed around the school, reward tokens, certificates and slogans. Expectations are launched enthusiastically at the beginning of the year before gradually fading into the background as competing priorities emerge.
Students may be able to recite the school’s behavioural values.
That does not necessarily mean they know what those values look like during a mathematics lesson at 11:30 on a Thursday morning.
Knowing that a school values “Respect” provides remarkably little guidance for entering a classroom, transitioning between activities, participating in partner work or seeking help without interrupting others.
Behaviour cannot remain at the level of abstract values. It must be translated into concrete actions.
This is where Bennett’s work offers an important challenge. He argues that schools often mistake expectations for instruction. Telling students to “be respectful”, “be responsible” or “be resilient” is no different from telling students to “be good at fractions”. It communicates the desired outcome without teaching the process required to achieve it.
Imagine a Year 4 teacher introducing long division.
No teacher would stand at the front of the classroom and simply declare, “At this school we are mathematicians,” before expecting every student to divide four-digit numbers successfully. We instinctively understand that mathematical competence requires careful explanation, modelling, guided practice, feedback and repetition.
Yet schools routinely expect behavioural competence to develop after little more than a short assembly, a poster on the wall and occasional reminders. Perhaps we should not be surprised when it doesn’t.
A further challenge has been the increasing complexity of today’s classrooms.
Australian teachers are educating students with an extraordinarily diverse range of learning, behavioural and emotional needs, often within the same classroom. Inclusive education has rightly enabled many students to access mainstream schooling, but inclusion without sufficient support places enormous demands on teachers. Differentiating academic instruction is difficult enough. Simultaneously managing a wide range of behavioural needs requires expertise, time and resources that are not always available.
Finally, there is the influence of technology.
Today’s students have grown up in a world of constant notifications, short-form video and instant entertainment. Attention has become increasingly fragmented. While technology has brought enormous benefits, it has also made sustained concentration more difficult for many young people. Schools are now expected to cultivate habits of deep attention in a culture that often rewards distraction.
None of these factors, individually, explains Australia’s behaviour challenges.
Together, however, they help explain why so many teachers feel they are working harder than ever simply to establish the conditions for learning.
The encouraging news is that none of these trends is irreversible. Behaviour is not fixed.
Students are not born knowing how to transition quietly, contribute productively to discussions or work independently for extended periods. These are learned behaviours.
And if behaviour can be learned, it can also be taught. That simple idea sits at the heart of Tom Bennett’s work and, increasingly, at the heart of the most effective schools around the world.
The question is no longer whether behaviour should be taught.
The question is why we ever assumed it didn’t need to be.
Behaviour Is a Curriculum
Schools devote enormous time and expertise to deciding what students should learn academically. We carefully sequence reading instruction. We identify prerequisite mathematical knowledge. We break complex concepts into manageable steps. We model, provide guided practice, check for understanding and revisit learning until it becomes secure.
In other words, we accept that academic success depends on explicit instruction. Yet when it comes to behaviour, we often assume students will simply know what to do.
We expect them to enter classrooms quietly, transition efficiently, listen attentively, contribute appropriately to discussion, work independently, collaborate productively, seek help respectfully and pack away responsibly. These behaviours underpin every successful lesson, yet they are rarely taught with the same care as academic content.
Instead, they are often communicated as expectations. There is an important difference. Expectations describe the destination. Teaching provides the map.
The Australian Education Research Organisation has increasingly emphasised the importance of explicit behaviour instruction, arguing that schools should identify, teach, model and reinforce the behaviours that support learning. This reflects decades of cognitive science. People are far more likely to perform successfully when expectations are concrete, observable and practised repeatedly.
This is exactly how expert teachers approach academic instruction. It should also be how schools approach behaviour.
Imagine walking into a classroom midway through the school year. Students enter quietly, immediately collect their books, begin the retrieval task on the board and settle to work without prompting. From the outside, it can appear effortless. Visitors often assume they are watching a naturally compliant class or an unusually gifted teacher.
More often, they are watching the result of weeks of deliberate instruction.
Students are not born knowing how to behave in a classroom. They learn.
Reclaiming the Classroom
This deliberate instruction requires schools to view the beginning of a school year and the start of every lesson not as a time to merely announce rules, but as a time to teach routines.
Every micro-action that happens within a school day can be broken down, practised and mastered. How students enter a room, how they pass around resources, how they transition from independent work to group discussion and how they pack up their bags at the final bell are not organic social occurrences. They are procedures. When they are taught explicitly, they become automated habits. When they become automated habits, classroom disruption plummets, cognitive load decreases and instructional time is radically reclaimed.
The benefits of shifting from a culture of expectation to a culture of instruction extend to everyone inside the school gates:
For teachers, it replaces the exhausting, emotionally draining cycle of constant negotiation with a predictable framework for management, drastically reducing burnout.
For high-achieving students, it protects their right to push themselves without being anchored by ambient noise.
For vulnerable or struggling students, it provides the ultimate form of equity, offering a calm, safe and highly structured environment where they know exactly how to succeed.
For too long, the national conversation surrounding Australian education has been trapped in macro-level debates. We will undoubtedly continue to argue over funding models, curriculum overhauls, standardised testing and screen time. Each of these discussions has its place.
But none of them matter if the child sitting at the desk cannot hear the teacher over the hum of a disrupted room.
If we genuinely wish to reverse our declining international performance, close our stubborn equity gaps and retain our brightest educators, we must start at the absolute foundation. We must stop treating good behaviour as a prerequisite for entry and start treating it as the core infrastructure of learning.
We must stop waiting for good behaviour to happen. We have to teach it.