Concordia Magazine 2025

Many schools have turned to tried and trusted techniques to support teachers in the extraordinarily difficult and complex process of negotiating a child through their adolescence. We have found it useful to create a coaching culture. Our focus is on questioning techniques, an emphasis on the need for adults to listen and, above all, to have insight that the person being coached, whether adult or child, already possesses the answers they need to find success and resolution. To find that answer they do not require instruction; they can discover it themselves through our careful questioning. Who knows our own needs better than ourselves? In addition, good schools will have a culture that will not tolerate shouting. The notion that an adult should impose their will on a child through anger, intimidation and fear is not one that sits easily in a caring school.

There is a big difference between pastoral support and disciplinary processes. In most schools, the same team will usually administer both pastoral and disciplinary procedures; but while the disciplinary might (we hope) impinge only occasionally on a pupil’s life, the pastoral support they receive should be ever-present. A child might misbehave for reasons connected with the pastoral. Emotions and frustrations arising from home life, academic worries or the simple process of growing up can lead some boys to challenge the system. Some may be wanting to gain attention or to exercise a form of control on the world. A pupil may not even be able to articulate his needs or frustrations. He may not know why he did what he did. But, however much the disciplinary systems are deployed to correct misbehaviour, there should never be any doubt in that child’s mind that the school cares for him and values him unwaveringly.

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