Whenever I talk about the downward spiral which some young people get caught in at school, someone says ‘Well I’m more concerned about those who are choosing to behave and whose learning is being disrupted’. It’s a neat semantic trick, which positions the children for whom things are going wrong as those who are ‘choosing to misbehave’. Essentially, it defines them as ‘bad’, and so we don’t have to worry about them. It’s a particular way of seeing young people – those who are doing well at school are choosing to do so, whilst those who are doing badly are choosing that too. Interventions are focused on converting the second group into the first group – let’s just make them choose differently with the use of sanctions. If this is the case, then this begs the question – why would anyone choose to be the one who does badly? Do we really think that some kids set out to be failures at school, by choice? Would we apply the same logic to academics, are those who are slow to read choosing to be so? Or those who really struggle with maths, is that a choice? We know from the research that by age 7, children are already aware whether they are considered to be ‘clever’ or not, and it bothers them. I’ve met young children who tell me that they are stupid and they’ll never catch up – so there’s no point in trying. Did they choose that? Behaviour is something which young people are learning, just as much as English or Maths, and it’s also something for which capacity develops at different rates, just as much as English or Maths. We know that teenage brains are developing until age 25, and that they are particularly developing the ability to self manage and work towards a future goal. This happens at different rates, just like any other aspect of child development. If a young person’s behaviour is challenging, then how adults respond makes all the difference. If we write them off as ‘choosing to misbehave’ then we’ve stopped being curious as to what is going on. We’ve stopped looking for reasons, and for some of those young people that means they go into a downwards spiral. We can say that that doesn’t matter – or we can try to do things differently. Someone who has written extensively about this and carried out research is Dr Ross Greene, livesinthebalance.org. He works with the most challenging young people. His ethos is that kids do well if they can. If they can’t, then it’s up to us to work with them to work out the reasons why.