Manners Make Marks?

Stand in the doorway during your child’s online lesson, and you will usually see a reassuring picture: a child at a desk, with headphones on and eyes on the screen.

Is that good behaviour? Most of us would say yes, because the word “behaviour” makes us think of a student being rude to a teacher, and nothing like that is happening here. Rudeness is part of behaviour, but in our experience it is the rarest part.

Now try a harder question. Of all the things that decide what that lesson is worth, how many could you see from the doorway?

From there, you cannot tell that the lesson began at 5:30 and your child joined at 5:34, after four minutes spent looking for the link again. You might not notice the phone lying face-up on the desk and lighting up. And you cannot know whether your child will stay until the end, or say a single word all hour. None of these habits is rude, yet every one of them is behaviour.

Small habits, large costs

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), which reviews evidence for schools in England, has a name for the opposite of these habits. It calls the good version “learning behaviours”, and defines one as “any behaviour that supports learning, such as paying attention to the teacher or persevering”.^[1] In that sense, behaviour is about being able to learn rather than about being good.

How much time does misbehaviour cost a lesson? The Department for Education asks teachers this question every year, and in May 2023 their answer was about 7 minutes of every 30 minutes of lesson time.^[2] That is almost a quarter of every lesson.

In the 2025 survey, 74% of teachers said misbehaviour had stopped or interrupted teaching in at least some lessons that week, and 62% of secondary pupils said other pupils’ misbehaviour interrupted their own work.^[3]

Nobody stood at the back of the room with a stopwatch. The figures are what teachers and pupils report, so read them as estimates rather than as a measurement. Still, teachers at the front and pupils at the desks describe the same hour.

A review of 69 studies, covering nearly 200,000 students, looked at three kinds of engagement: how a student feels about school, how deeply they think about the work, and whether they turn up, take part and stay on task. The strongest link with achievement came from the third kind, the plainest of the three.^[4]

Being there, all of it

Part of behaviour is simply being in the room for the whole session. Suppose a student misses ten days of Year 11: a Monday in October, a Friday in February, a week lost to a bad cough, and three more days after that. How much would those ten days change their chance of a grade 5 in English and Maths?

The Department for Education followed the Year 11 group who sat GCSEs in 2023. Pupils who attended 95 to 100% of the time were 1.9 times more likely to get a grade 5 in English and Maths than pupils who attended 90 to 95%. A 90% attendance record worries nobody at a parents’ evening. Yet the Department’s summary is blunt: missing about 10 days of Year 11 reduced the likelihood of a grade 5 in English and Maths by around half.^[5] That result still holds after the Department allowed for earlier results and background, though it shows a link rather than proving a cause.

Lateness counts too. English schools are required to manage it, and when Ofsted asked teachers what low-level disruption looks like, they put “turning up late” on the list themselves.^[6] The clearest research on lateness and results comes from primary schools in the United States, so we will not put a GCSE number on it. That study found that late pupils scored lower, and so did the classmates whose lesson they walked into.^[7] A late arrival at 5:34 costs two people, and only one of them was late.

We wrote about the cost of a late start in The lesson that starts four minutes late.

At the desk, but not in the lesson

Online lessons add one more habit to the list, which is the hardest of all to see from the doorway. A child at a desk with headphones on looks exactly as a student should, whether the screen shows the lesson or a second tab.

In one study, students who used a laptop for other things during a lecture scored lower afterwards. So did the students sitting near enough to see that screen.^[8]

In another, researchers logged what students actually did online during class. Students who browsed for reasons unrelated to the class had lower grades, and the link held after allowing for motivation, interest and intelligence. Browsing for class reasons brought no benefit either.^[9]

Those two studies are why we ask students to sit down with the camera on and other tabs closed. The point is not to watch anyone’s bedroom: when every camera is on, nobody is being watched, because everybody is simply there. The main reason students switch a camera off is that everyone else already has, and the researchers who asked them strongly advise against making cameras compulsory.^[10] A camera on is the difference between a person in a lesson and a name on a list.

The adults go first

It is tempting to say that a student’s attitude is the barrier, and that the student must remove it first. That was our own first answer, too. The evidence puts things in a different order.

Official guidance for schools, and the EEF’s review of what actually works, both start with the adults: set clear routines, teach the behaviour you expect, and hold the standard every week.^[1][11] Engagement also rises and falls with how a session is run, which makes it partly a product of the session rather than a fixed feature of the child.^[12] Running the session well is our job before it is anyone else’s.

Our part comes first. Sessions start on time and run to the same shape every week, students are greeted by name, and what we expect is said out loud, in the same words, by every tutor.

Your child’s part comes next. That means arriving before the start, staying to the end with the camera on and other tabs closed, and saying something at least once. They should ask whenever they are unsure, because an hour holds nothing more useful than one honest question.

If the problems continue, the next move is ours again. When a student is repeatedly late, absent, silent or difficult, we do not simply repeat the rule, louder. Persistent difficulty is sometimes a sign of something else, and the Department for Education tells schools to look for what that might be.^[13] So we telephone you and ask what is going on.

Attending a lesson, or taking one

We think a student who arrives on time, stays to the end, keeps their camera on and asks one question has done more for their grade in that hour than any amount of good intentions afterwards. From the doorway, that student looks exactly like one who joined late, kept a second tab open and said nothing all hour. Behaviour is the difference between attending a lesson and taking one.

Five things to do this week

Not one of these five things involves sitting beside your child while they work.

1. Set the household start time five minutes before ours. If a session starts at 5:30, being at the desk by 5:25 is a rule in your house, not a preference. The government’s guidance asks schools to get parents reinforcing the same expectations at home.^[11] A start time is the cheapest expectation there is. It sounds small, and we think it changes more than the other four put together.

2. Clear the desk before the session, not during it. Put the phone in another room and leave one tab open. Make sure the lesson link is found and clicked at 5:25, rather than searched for at 5:31 while a tutor waits.

3. Ask your child what they asked. After the session, put one question to them: what did you ask today? If the answer is “nothing” for three weeks in a row, tell us, and we will make sure your child is asked something directly next time.

4. Give ten minutes a week to the conversation that moves the grade. A review of 50 studies of parental involvement at secondary level found that help with homework was the one activity with no positive link to achievement at all. The strongest link was with what researchers call academic socialisation: talking about expectations, about why the work matters, and about what happens after school.^[14] A car journey is long enough for that conversation, and so is the washing-up.

5. Tell us before we have to ask. If something has changed at home, or your child has been ill, or a term has gone badly, say so. A tutor who knows why a student has gone quiet teaches that student differently from a tutor who is guessing.

None of the five takes a whole evening, but between them they decide what every hour we teach is worth.

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