About the RTL strategy

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In 2014 Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) found low level disruption - the chatting and failing to settle down to work during lesson time by students - to cost UK secondary schools 20% of all teaching and learning time. This figure equates to: 

• £1.75bn per year or almost 32 million hours countrywide

or:

• one year in every five years of an individual student's education

simply being lost.

No behaviour management system has managed to correctly identify the causes of low level disruption or how it should be managed.

In doing so the RTL strategy, devised and tested in a North London state school, returned 92% of that wasted time to teaching and learning and improved pupil performance by 65%.

In 2020 the Return to Learning strategy was founded on the premise that:

1. existing sanction systems make conditions for teaching and learning worse rather than better;
2. the negative effects of those sanction systems are not only found in children in classrooms but in adults throughout society;
3. these negative effects are caused by our natural inability to achieve fairness in our lives due to conflict between our conscious mind and our instincts which leads to poor concentration and resulting inconsistency;
4. this inconsistency permeates all systems throughout society.

In classrooms the RTL strategy provides a simple way to reverse this: for teachers to demonstrate consistently and quickly:

• fair sanction systems for managing low level disruption in classrooms,  
• significant increases in teaching and learning time, and
• higher levels of concentration in the classroom,

along with knowledge to extend this beyond the classroom and into society.