Understanding schools as systems: Implications for the management of pupil behaviour

Abstract

This paper takes up the theme that many secondary schools, by the very nature of their size and complexity, experience a fundamental problem in providing their staff and pupils with a sense of coherence and relatedness that connects all the processes of school into a meaningful whole. As a result, pupils and staff evolve patterns of behaviour which serve to protect them from the chaos and uncertainty threatened by the fragmented nature of school life. These survival behaviours are symptomatic of difficulties experienced by the members of the school system in taking up their roles as pupils, teachers and so on. The approach developed by the Grubb Institute, drawing upon open systems and psychoanalytic models, offers a way of understanding school processes and the emotional experience of school life through the concepts of aim and role. Thus schools, as social institutions, prepare young people for the roles and responsibilities of adulthood through learning to take up the role of pupil, which includes learning to manage and motivate oneself and so provides a template for taking up roles in other systems in life beyond school. The approach is illustrated by an account of work with a school to develop understanding of aim and role in addressing a problem with pupil behaviour.