ABSTRACT
All children need routines. Pupils in difficult schools need them even more urgently because their behaviour is so extreme that they need to know that there are reassuring parameters to contain them. You can make the school routines your classroom routines as far as that suits you, but in a difficult school many of those routines will be only figments of the imagination written on behaviour policy documents that are often unenforceable. So leave anything that you cannot insist on as a routine in your classroom. Chewing gum in lessons and dropping litter may be best ignored in a horrendous class but followed up in a class that is more pliable. The worst thing you can do with a difficult lesson is to try to enforce so many routines that you never get the lesson momentum in place.
