I don’t know who first coined the term, ‘low-level disruption’, but at some point Ofsted got hold of it and it has become widely-used in schools: the September 2021 Ofsted Handbook says, in the section describing the key characteristics of Good behaviour, that ‘low-level disruption is not tolerated and pupils’ behaviour does not disrupt lessons or the day-to-day life of the school’.
I’ve not seen a formal definition of ‘low-level disruption’ but it mostly means students chatting. By ‘chatting’, I mean people talking about things that are not related to their work – how their favourite team is doing, what they watched on Netflix last night etc… Chatting is, of course, an entirely natural thing to do – human beings are hugely social creatures, we enjoy talking to other people and, indeed, we need to – but in the context of lessons in school, it should not be tolerated. Here’s why:
- Lesson time is a very scarce resource: in secondary schools, students typically have 5 or 6 periods of science per week, in which they have to learn all of the content-heavy programmes of study in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. And Science typically gets more lessons than any other subject in the curriculum – there will be only two or three lessons of a modern language, of geography and history etc… – so the school curriculum has to squeeze a lot of ‘learning’ into a very small amount of learning time.
- When you’re chatting, you aren’t working. Forget all this nonsense about ‘multi-tasking’ – ‘I can talk AND work, Sir!’ some students would try to tell me when I was teaching them French some years ago. Any time spent chatting in lessons is time taken out of learning Science, languages, geography, history and all the other important school subjects. The human being who can cope with the cognitive demands of learning about chemical reactions whilst at the same time chatting about the Eurovision Song Contest with the person next to them hasn’t been born yet.
- Chatting can hoover up breath-taking amounts of learning time: a chatty person might spend, or try to spend, half of their lesson time engaged in it, or more. If they do that, they are working at only 50% capacity, or less; what a waste! And it’s not just the learning time of the person who wants to chat that is affected; it’s the people around them, too – if someone keeps trying to chat to you in a lesson, it will have a negative impact on your learning. How could it not?
- Low-level disruption is the bane of many teachers’ lives. It saps their energy, adds to their stress levels, and creates a deep sense of frustration. We know that many teachers leave the profession within the first five years of qualifying; the two main reasons they cite for this are workload and the stress resulting from managing behaviour. There are many different kinds of behaviour, both positive and negative, but of the negative kind, ‘low-level disruption’ in lessons is by far the most common one.
- The key point here is that habitual chatting harms young people’s learning. Try wrestling with one arm tied behind your back; try writing with the hand you don’t normally write with; try singing with a desperately heavy cold – you can still do all of these things, but it’s that much harder to do them well. Schools exist principally to help young people learn well and make good progress and achieve, in a variety of ways. Low-level disruption sits firmly in the column of barriers-to-learning-well in school, both for those students who are apt to chat and for the people around them, including their teachers.
The other point to make is that we can all be fooled into thinking that ‘It’s only a bit of chat!’ – linked to point 2 above. ONLY. That attitude can lead, in turn, to a feeling in some students’ heads that chatting in lessons is fine, or at least okay; and some teachers can find themselves nudged into a sort of tacit understanding with their students who are apt to chat – if you keep it quiet and don’t do it too much, I guess that’s all right. I get that: not wanting to be, or be seen as, overly strict, one can let ‘a bit of chat’ go. Not wanting the constant hassle of challenging people for chatting, one can let it go. But, ultimately, that way lies wasted learning time, disrupted learning, and less progress and lower attainment for students.
We owe it to the young people in our care to not tolerate low-level disruption by tackling it swiftly when it happens – doing this every lesson every day is clearly a challenge, but the big winners from us doing it are the young people in our care.
