Australian Students Need Self-Regulation Training as Teachers Lose 12 Weeks to Classroom Disruption

Australian classrooms are facing a persistent disruption crisis, with teachers losing significant instruction time to low-level noise and international testing showing Australia ranking among the most disorderly environments assessed.

As The Epoch Times reported on Sept. 2, teachers are losing an average of nine minutes in every 30-minute lesson—about 12 weeks of teaching time a year—to low-level classroom disruption, according to a Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) survey of teachers.

The survey found 82 percent of teachers felt confident managing misbehaviour, even as 75 percent said it had hurt their own health and wellbeing. It recommended schools adopt an explicit “behavioural curriculum.”

Separate findings from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)—a global OECD study—also point to persistent classroom disorder.

Focusing on science classrooms, PISA found Australian classrooms were more disorderly than those in 68 of the 84 other countries and economies assessed.

A report on the Australian results, published by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), found 41 percent of Australian students said there was noise and disorder in most or all of their science lessons, compared with an OECD average of 31 percent.

However, the picture is not one of escalating serious misbehaviour. The same report found Australian principals rated serious misbehaviour—including vandalism, theft, and physical injury among students—at or below the OECD average. It also found Australian classrooms were calmer overall than in 2015, the last time science was PISA’s focal subject.

Unpacking the Root Causes

Against that backdrop, The Epoch Times asked three education and behavioural experts about what may be driving classroom disruption and how schools should respond. A fourth offered a contrasting view on where responsibility lies.

Christa van Aswegen, a registered psychologist and early childhood education expert at Griffith University, said the CIS finding regarding teacher confidence should not be mistaken for resolution.

“Teachers are most definitely not overconfident about student behaviour,” she said.

“While many teachers develop strategies to manage disruptive behaviour and maintain classroom functioning, this should not be mistaken for confidence that the problem has been solved.”

She said much apparent disruption reflects underlying difficulties such as “ADHD and executive-function difficulties,” anxiety, or “a lack of engagement with classroom instruction.”

Skills such as listening and collaborating, she added, “are developmental competencies, not innate abilities” requiring explicit teaching, modelling, practice, feedback, and reinforcement.

Professor Robyn Gillies, from the University of Queensland’s School of Education, similarly described self-regulation as a developmental process that continues into adulthood.

“The ability to be able to regulate their behaviours … doesn’t really mature until about their mid-20s,” she explained, noting that teachers need to continuously guide behaviour through routines like forewarning students before activity transitions.

She added that while unregulated access to digital devices was a contributing factor, brain immaturity remains the underlying factor: “It’s not really deliberate. It’s just … immaturity in their brain.”

The Cost of Constant Interruptions

Associate Professor Erin Leaf, a behavioural analyst and senior fellow at Monash University’s Higher Education Academy, noted that high teacher confidence figures can be misleading.

“The 82 percent who feel confident may believe they can restore order—not that disruption is rare or cost-free,” she said.

“A skilled teacher can successfully manage dozens of interruptions and still lose a substantial part of the lesson.”

The cumulative effect goes beyond lost minutes, she said, with interruptions fragmenting explanations and leaving misconceptions unchecked.

While Leaf supported implementing a behavioural curriculum, she warned that passive approaches are useless.

“It would not work if it amounted only to a poster, an assembly or a talk at the start of the year,” she said.

Instead, students must rehearse routines during actual lessons, backed by consistent consequences and targeted support.

The Role of the Home Environment

Graham Young, executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, took a different view, placing greater weight on the home environment.

“There are some things that are hard to teach at school, and there are some things that can only be taught at home,” he said. “But if they’re not taught at home, they make it harder to teach at school.

Young argued that while teachers bear some blame for falling standards, parents bear the responsibility when children enter school from “a home full of chaos and lack of hierarchy.” He added that the issue is compounded when parents “extend the chaos from their homes into the class by unreasonably interfering with how the teachers deal with their children.”

However, van Aswegen, Leaf, and Gillies each cautioned against attributing disruption to parents or any single cause.

Leaf noted that schools “cannot assume that every child arrives having mastered the behaviour needed for classroom learning,” regardless of home life.

Van Aswegen concluded that the “most effective response is unlikely to be either a purely disciplinary approach … or a purely therapeutic approach.”