What does behaviour incident logging teach students?
Monday, March 24, 2025One of my favourite ways to access a bit of light relief at work is to read the day's behaviour log.
I roll my eyes that little Johnny has thrown his shoe at someone again, or Jodie has stormed out of another lesson. Occasionally I read that a child I get on well with has done something silly, and make a note to discuss it with them. When I record behaviour incidents myself, I try to make my summaries at least a little entertaining; I know some other teachers do the same. Partly for voyeurs such as myself, and partly because I know the behaviour staff often find the work soul-crushing. So I'll drop in tongue-in-cheek euphemisms ("drew an anatomical diagram on his desk"), abrupt frankness ("persistent nipple rubbing to amuse friends"), and other levity ("used her lunchtime banana as a projectile weapon").
If you're my age or older, or you don't have children, you might not know what I'm talking about. These days, in virtually every school, all behaviour incidents are recorded in a database. Every incident is permanently tracked through the child's entire school career, and their parents are informed via smartphone notification every time they do something wrong. These applications can even automatically assign and schedule detentions when certain parameters are reached. Children get a behaviour score, a balance of positive "merit points" and negative "behaviour points", with rewards and punishments for reaching certain thresholds.
If this sounds Orwellian, that's because it is. The benefits to the school are clear — patterns of poor behaviour (and oh boy, there are a lot of these) are easily identified. A student can't go from lesson to lesson, causing minor trouble in each one, without the system flagging that up. This is certainly useful in a school system that values "behaviour management". It also puts less pressure on teachers to have the right personality to manage behaviour — students needn't respect/fear the teacher, as the teacher can simply record poor behaviour and let "the system" (i.e. senior staff, aided by the software) follow it up. Frankly, this can be a godsend, especially for new teachers struggling to get established. Moreover, it saves teachers time, as they do not need to implement their own system of rewards and sanctions.
But I do worry about what messages the students may internalise from such a system. We are normalising the use of digital tools to surveille conduct, the sharing of that data between multiple agencies (i.e. school and parents), the automatic assignment of sanctions, and normalising a "social credit score" (of the kind the media like to sensationalise about operating in China). In a world in which governments, corporations, and employers are increasingly willing and able to implement digital surveillance systems of their own, will our students have the will to resist overreach from such systems if it is all they have ever known?
Teachers' hands are quite tied when it comes to perpetuating these digital monitoring practises. When there is a whole-school policy on behaviour, being the teacher who doesn't follow it is asking for trouble from students and parents, and means the school's leadership can't/won't support you with any difficulties that do arise. School leaders may be able to bound the extent of the monitoring, failing that, perhaps unions could advocate for a more measured approach. Until then, I'll just enjoy reading the vignettes of the bizarre goings on in other teachers' classrooms.