11 Agreeing a way forward

That such information has only come to light recently does not make it easy to establish whether this conflict and its outcomes are natural to human life or even inevitable. 

Yet it should be clear from the many examples cited that pioneering schools can contribute greatly to the process of finding out, not least as the only social structure with all necessary components to establish a resolution under one roof. 

Primarily this includes:

• to what extent inconsistency and the conflict it causes can be reduced, and
• to what extent childhood and adulthood can benefit from this reduction.

What is certainly clear is that existing assurance and control measures involving increasingly complicated rules and regulations, and monitoring/counselling to increase compliance with these measures, are not only inadequate but encourage greater inconsistency. Better understanding of how criticism/conflict and resulting inconsistency are caused in all parties involved in education (i.e. adults and children), and the establishing of better management systems that help reduce them and their effects, is the only sustainable way forward. 

In the early stages this means significantly reducing the need to refute conflict-inducing criticism when the process of identifying issues which lead to criticism is inconsistency led. To achieve this a teacher demonstrating consistency of behavioural expectations (i.e. prior to criticism becoming necessary) should be preferable to a teacher discussing inconsistency of behavioural expectations in their students (i.e. once criticism has been delivered). This is the only appropriate way for schools to move away from strategies that fail to reduce inconsistency and invite further inconsistency through poor design or poor management that lead to excessive workload and/or excessive stages involved in the completion of that workload. 

In short it is for schools to accept that strategies which legislate against inconsistency rather than resolve inconsistency usually increase inconsistency.

Therefore, in order to reduce criticism and conflict by reducing inconsistency, substantially reduced teacher workload must be prioritised within the overall aim of any strategy aiming to succeed in stopping low level disruption, with a fast, fair, consistent and sustainable process the optimal goal.

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