Schools across Australia have been facing a concerning rise in behavioural incident reports, fights, bullying between students, teacher burnout, and health-related leave stemming from the difficulties of managing challenging behaviours in the classroom. In this context, one question becomes unavoidable: what can be done?
There is no simple answer. The problem is complex, and its causes vary deeply from one school to another. Even so, decades of accumulated knowledge in the Behavioural Sciences and Education point to promising directions.
The intervention with the largest and strongest body of evidence for addressing behavioural problems in schools is Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) — also known as Positive Behaviour Interventions and Support (PBIS) in some contexts.
PBS in schools is not a specific technique or action — it is a way of understanding and responding to behaviour. When this understanding is shared by teachers, pedagogical staff, and administrators, it produces profound changes in how people relate to one another within the school environment. The key difference lies in the active stance of valuing prosocial behaviours, engagement with learning, and other behaviours of high social value that align with what the school aims to teach.
It may seem obvious, but even in 2026 many teachers and parents still believe that students or children doing the right thing are "just doing what they're supposed to do." This view ignores a fundamental scientific finding: behaviours need to be valued in order to increase in frequency. This does not mean that violent behaviours or bullying should be ignored — it means recognising that punishment, of any kind, only signals that a behaviour is inappropriate, but does not teach the behaviour of greater social value that is expected in its place.
Implementing a PBS culture in a school is a multi-year effort. It involves the commitment of the entire school community and a deep understanding of human behaviour, of learning, and of the school's role in developing behaviours that matter for life in society.
But what we have frequently observed across Australia are well-intentioned initiatives that focus on specific programs or actions. Let us describe, below, a typical example of such cases — to make explicit some common misconceptions and how to overcome them.
Koala Creek is a primary school (Kindy–Year 6) with 800 students. Problems related to violence — both inside the school and at pick-up — have been growing at an alarming rate. Parents complain on social media that the school and teachers have lost control; the school and teachers respond that violence has been rising in society and reaching the classroom.
Looking for alternatives, Rachel, the school's pedagogical coordinator, searches for experiences from other schools that have successfully dealt with these issues. In her search, she comes across Wombat River School, in a neighbouring town, of similar size, and well-known for its success in tackling school violence: reduced incidents, increased satisfaction among students and teachers, fewer suspensions, and a reportedly excellent school climate.
"This is exactly what we need at Koala Creek!", Rachel says to her team.
Rachel organises a visit to Wombat River. There, she discovers that the school "implemented PBS." Eager to understand how this worked in practice, the local coordinator gives her a concrete example:
Two years ago, Wombat River implemented a programme called Wombat Coin. Caring, respectful, and engaged behaviours are pinpointed by teachers on the spot, and recorded in a system that accumulates Wombat Coins for each student. Every three months, students can exchange their Wombat Coins for items, products, or experiences of their choice. The programme has been a great success with students.
Rachel loved the idea. She came back energised, spoke with her team, and the entire pedagogical coordination agreed it would be a great initiative. They organised the programme and communicated to teachers that it would work as follows:
- Students will be rewarded for positive behaviours with Koala Coins;
- Teachers will record — whenever they see fit — Koala Coins in the school app.
The teachers accepted the idea. The school notified parents via the app about the launch of the programme and rolled out the Koala Coin! initiative.
The first six months of Koala Coin
Week 1. Students are told that teachers will be observing them and may award Coins depending on their behaviour. Some students think the Coins might be exchanged for something; others aren't sure. Teachers have questions too.
Two weeks later. No student or teacher mentions Koala Coins anymore. The topic comes up vaguely in the occasional meeting, with teachers avoiding the subject — since they have no answers to the questions raised either.
Six months later.
- Behavioural records for students are rare.
- The pedagogical coordination complains that teachers haven't implemented the programme with fidelity.
- Teachers report they didn't believe in this kind of strategy in the first place.
- Students and teachers barely remember the programme existed.
This example illustrates a classic, unsuccessful implementation of an initiative to promote positive behaviour. But… why didn't it work? Was the idea a bad one? Was it implemented poorly? What could have been done differently?
This example failed because it copied the appearance of the successful programme at Wombat River School — not the elements that actually made the programme work.
One of the first steps in implementing PBS is understanding the concepts and principles that guide decisions about which actions and programmes to implement. Let us examine, below, the main misconceptions in the Koala Creek case — and what could have been done differently.
The lack of a clear definition of which behaviours should be valued is one of the first problems. What should teachers be paying attention to? Which behaviours should they value? Are different teachers recording the same behaviours? Has this valuing been consistent over the weeks?
Without clear operational criteria, each teacher ends up interpreting "positive behaviour" in their own way — which compromises both the fidelity of the implementation and the perceived fairness for students.
As a programme for valuing positive behaviours, it's essential to remember: the goal is not for students to do something right once. The goal is for these behaviours to be valued consistently, so they increase in frequency and become part of the day-to-day life of the school.
Beyond the lack of clear definitions, there is another frequent misconception: trying to solve all of the school's problems at once. For instance, by selecting different behaviours each week or month — which causes the valuing to lose its consistency over time.
Culture is precisely this: behaviours repeated over time, including across generations. Changing the culture of an institution requires an ongoing process of valuing new behaviours. The criterion for success is not seeing people do the right thing once. Just because people "know" how to do the right thing, or because they've done it once before, doesn't mean they always will: a behaviour only persists over time if it is the behaviour most valued in that environment.
For this reason, the stability and consistency of the programme are essential — and often neglected — parts of implementation.
The focus is on making the school an environment — a culture — that promotes good behaviours: more caring, more engaged with learning. When teachers learn to do this within a structured programme, generalisation becomes more likely: the behaviour of valuing positive behaviours tends to appear in other contexts as well, and begins to serve as a model for students.
In other words, a well-structured Koala Coin programme can produce effects far beyond the programme itself — shaping both teachers and students.
In the Koala Creek case, teachers were instructed to "record behaviours — whenever they saw fit — in the school app." Here lies a major error: assuming that the important consequence is the recording of information, rather than
immediate feedback to the student.Since the seminal work of behaviour analysis last century, it has been well established that the consequences that change behaviour are the ones that occur immediately after the behaviour. The student must notice that consequence — a word of encouragement, a smile, a thumbs up — and the more immediate, the better for learning. There is no way to expect success from an initiative where students aren't even aware they're "earning points."
There is also a second problem: leaving it up to the teacher — "whenever they see fit" — to decide whether to record or not.
Without clear criteria about when to give immediate feedback and record points, two things suffer:
- Fairness for students, who may miss out on what they would have been entitled to under another teacher's criteria;
- Consistency of implementation, with each teacher operating on their own standards.
Well-implemented PBS programmes combine immediate timing with clear operational criteria — not one or the other.
Another critical issue in the Koala Creek implementation was using only points in the app as the supposed valuing consequence. For consequences to work, they need to have value that is gratifying for the students. And here a question arises: what does it mean for an eight-year-old student to earn a point in an app they don't even see?
Point systems — token economies, in technical terms — only work when points represent something exchangeable for what is genuinely gratifying to the person: access to items, activities, or meaningful experiences. Accumulating points, in itself, has no intrinsic value for most people — let alone for children.
Worse: in the Koala Creek case, the points were visible primarily to parents through the school app. In other words, the system functioned as a communication channel with families, but not as an immediate, valuing consequence for the student. The contrast with Wombat River is clear: there, points were part of a system in which, every three months, students could exchange them for something they themselves valued.
The question every school needs to ask when designing a point system is simple: what does the student actually get from these points, and is that, in fact, valuable to them?
Another critical problem at Koala Creek was the complete absence of planning to sustain teacher engagement. Teachers were not consulted before implementation, their voices were not heard, and there was
no co-construction of the strategy. Nor did they receive adequate training or clear guidance about what was expected of them.
This is a misconception we see repeated often: teachers are treated as mere implementers of a programme designed by others, and then people wonder why engagement doesn't follow.
Well-implemented PBS programmes consider, from the design stage,
how to make engagement in the action as reinforcing as possible for the team. There are two complementary pathways:
- Natural reinforcers: when teachers understand and believe that the programme reduces behavioural problems in their daily work, they are far more likely to engage because of the intrinsic value of the action itself. The results become the reinforcement.
- Planned reinforcers: even so, it's important that teachers' participation be acknowledged and valued in an immediate way — by the coordination team, by peers, or through institutional routines.
In short: just as we expect teachers to value student behaviour, the entire school structure must value the behaviour of the teachers who sustain the programme.
Those who reinforce also need to be reinforced.There is also a question that comes before all the others: on what basis did Rachel take the Wombat River programme as a model to be followed?
What data actually existed? Were there
behavioural measures demonstrating reduced problems or increased frequency of positive behaviours? Or was everything based on the opinion of those who implemented it, on reports on the school's website, on local reputation?
This kind of question often sounds too demanding for the day-to-day life of a school — yet it is exactly what separates a well-founded intervention from a well-intentioned one.
Well-implemented behavioural interventions always include baseline measures (a record of how things stand before the intervention begins) and ongoing measures of effect over time. Without this, there is no way of knowing whether a programme is producing the outcomes attributed to it — neither in the model school nor in the school copying it.
More than that: being evidence-based is not simply a matter of adopting what is described in books or in official guidelines. It means following the procedures of the field, including measurement. In the Behavioural Sciences, measuring data is part of the technical and ethical commitment of those who work in this field.
The initiative to implement a PBS action in a school is a worthy one. But it's important to remember:
no intervention aimed at changing behaviour or culture is simple. It will always require deep knowledge of the underlying concepts, principles, and procedures — and can never be carried out without the direct engagement of teachers, school staff, students, and families.
The Koala Creek case illustrates, in miniature, the most common misconceptions we observe in practice:
- Lack of operational definitions of what to value;
- Focus on isolated behaviours rather than cultural change;
- Absence of immediate consequences for students;
- Use of points in an app as if they were, in themselves, reinforcers;
- Absence of support and reinforcement for the teachers sustaining the programme;
- Adoption of models without data demonstrating their effect.
For schools seeking alternatives, we recommend three pathways:
- Seek support from specialists: check whether your state's Department of Education offers support for PBS implementation;
- Make ongoing capacity-building available for your teams, focusing on concepts and principles, not just specific programmes;
- Co-construct with your teams: — programmes grounded in science (evidence-based) and tailored to the specific needs and characteristics of your institution (person-centred).
Good intentions are a great first step.
But they remain insufficient to create school environments that truly cultivate good behaviours.
AI use disclosure: This article was drafted by the author and refined through collaborative editing with Claude (Anthropic), including English review, and final proofreading. All conceptual content, professional judgements, and final editorial decisions are the author's own.