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.