School Punishment Prevents Moral Learning
Alfie comes into the hall with loads of gravel in his hands, looks me in the eye with that cheeky twinkle which is endearing and infuriating at the same time. Before I know what’s happening, the gravel has been thrown everywhere. I feel the frustration coming up from my stomach to my mouth, but, on this occasion, I catch it… “WOW!! what an amazing explosion, that was so big!” I say. Alfie looks at me a little surprised. “Shall I help you clear it up or do you want to do that yourself?” Alfie grabs a broom and gets to work. While we’re cleaning together we discuss why the hall might not be the ideal place to throw gravel about.
There is something about punishment which feels shoehorned into education. It is a fabricated system, a technology. Punishment is not inevitable; we can question whether it is fit for purpose. And yet most of us can't imagine schools without punishment.
Punitive behaviour policies – which simplify behaviour into good and bad, black and white – can be received by practitioners as welcome clarity in the often chaotic environment of schools. We know exactly how to punish because most of us were brought up in punitive households. But being familiar does not make it effective.
Punitive systems in schools can be emotionally harmful (Jones et al., 2023), and costly (Bennett, 2017). The Child and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition (2023, p. 5) reported that the majority of parents and young people do not feel behaviour management techniques in schools support behaviour to change for the better and that schools ought to invest in training in relational and restorative approaches (Laura Oxley (2019) writes more about restorative approaches in her blog post for Pedagogies of Punishment). Difficult behavior is cited as an increasingly common reason for teachers leaving the profession (Public Accounts Committee, 2025), and we’re wondering: would it be the same if people were equipped with tools and processes for responding to behavior in a way that felt more meaningful?
We the authors have both worked in a school that doesn’t use punishment. We don’t have the scope to talk about it in depth here but what we can say is that, while it wasn’t perfect, it was a school where most of the young people were pretty happy. They did not seem to see the lack of punishment as an excuse to be harmful or disruptive. There was, in our judgement, less bullying than in the mainstream settings we have worked or spent time in.
This suggests that it can be done: we can create schools where we no longer have to rely on inflicting some kind of unpleasantness as the main fallback for regulating our relationships with young people.
Removing punishment in this way feels like opening things up.
But what comes next? What do we do instead?
Non punitive practice is about responding to harm or challenging behaviour in a way that seeks to support reflection and repair. So when someone screws up, rather than saying, ‘I'm going to give you that sting of punishment’, we're saying, ‘everyone screws up. I've screwed up many times myself. I'll screw up again. And so will you. I'm going on this journey with you. So how are we going to fix this together?’
In a non punitive approach, obvious examples of punishment (like detention, behaviour points, and sticking names on rain clouds) are the first to go. The deeper and more complex step is questioning where punitive approaches are more subtly embedded in our work as practitioners (e.g., threatening young people with a phone call home in order for them to do more work) and developing tools to work non punitively (e.g., explaining why a piece of work is important to complete in a way the young person will understand and/or listening to their feelings about that work).
At the start of this post, we gave an example of how an instance of ‘difficult behaviour’ can be responded to without punishment, and in a way that still involves accountability but also enables reflection and learning. It’s about fighting the instinct to throw the rulebook at someone - which so often shuts down the chance for repair - and instead leaning into the more rigorous task of appropriate dialogue.
This does more than simply avoid the harmful impacts of punishment as highlighted earlier. It also opens up space for a vital learning process to take place. This is an often underdiscussed - yet crucial - outcome of non-punitive work.
So much discussion around education is focused on the idea that challenging behavior is stopping learning from happening. But imagine if a behavior policy was about creating a culture where we can learn through behavior - so that we're actually educating through conversations about need, about everyone’s and boundaries, about community and respect.
This involves asking: What does it mean for this difficult thing to have happened - whether that’s a young person saying something harmful to a peer, disrupting a lesson, or throwing gravel round the school hall - and what can we do to fix that? It involves exploring: What can we do to help you feel able to act differently next time? How do we support you as well as the people affected? How do we all try to get our needs met (together)?
This process means the young person has to reflect on their own feelings and needs, as well as the feelings and needs of the people who've been affected. That’s a steep and vital learning curve that we deny young people when we turn to the convenience and oversimplifying ‘fix’ of punishment. Non punitive work might sound fluffy, but it's so much easier to get your head down in detention or be given a demerit than it is to truly reflect on how your actions might affect someone else, and engage in repairing the harm. This work is not easy.
As educators we know that if you want someone to understand something, you don't necessarily just lecture them about it; that's not how we all learn. We learn through experience, through reflection, through feeling, through exploring and repeating. Non punitive work approaches that complexity. And this is why punitive practice is much less effective at tackling bullying, because it tries to scare people out of harmful behavior, and it does nothing to try and tackle the root cause - the empathy gap or the unmet needs in that person - underpinning it (Thompson & Smith, 2011). Punitive systems rob young people of the opportunity to learn - about both themselves and others - through conflict.
We want a world in which young people grow up able to approach conflict and harm constructively, to set and respect boundaries and understand their needs and the needs of others. That's the world we need in order to tackle - effectively and together - some of the most challenging ethical problems of our time.
References
Bennett, T. (2017, March). Creating a culture: How school leaders can optimise behaviour. Department for Education. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7506e4ed915d3c7d529cec/Tom_Bennett_Independent_Review_of_Behaviour_in_Schools.pdf
Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition. (2023). Behaviour and mental health in schools inquiry: Key messages. https://cypmhc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Behaviour-and-Mental-Health-in-Schools.-Key-Messages.pdf
Oxley, L. (2019, October 16). From punishment to collaboration: Working together to improve behaviour in UK schools. Pedagogies of Punishment. https://www.pedagogiesofpunishment.com/blog/2019/10/16/from-punishment-to-collaboration-working-together-to-improve-behaviour-in-uk-schools
Public Accounts Committee. (2025, July 9). Teacher shortage: PAC report tells govt to look at pay and flexible working arrangements. UK Parliament. https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/208241/teacher-shortage-pac-report-tells-govt-to-look-at-pay-and-flexible-working-arrangements/
Thompson, F., & Smith, P. K. (2011, April). The use and effectiveness of anti-bullying strategies in schools(Research Report DFE-RR098). Department for Education.https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/182421/DFE-RR098.pdf
Jones, R., Kreppner, J., Marsh, F., and Hartwell, B. (2023). Punitive behaviour management policies and practices in secondary schools: A systematic review of children and young people’s perceptions and experiences. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2023.2255403
Freya Aquarone is an educator and researcher with an interest in social justice, democracy, inclusion and SEND. They have worked in a variety of education spaces including schools, higher education, community education, and the charity sector. They have a PhD from Kings College London - their thesis examined how to place democracy at the heart of post-16 education.
José Mario Dellow is an educator and artist whose practice centres on care. They have a background in pastoral care and safeguarding leadership in schools. Mario studied art at Oxford and later completed a Master's in Education at UCL. They recently produced Graded, a podcast about Michaela, a no-excuses school run by “Britain's strictest headmistress”, Katharine Birbalsingh.
Freya and Mario write a blog about education together, Scribbles in the Margins.