For teachers and school staff
Part of the Positive School Culture Guide for Teachers/School Staff: What students’ experiences of Year 7 can teach us.
This series shares insights from research exploring how students experience the transition to secondary school, and what these experiences reveal about how Positive School Cultures develop through relationships, expectations, and everyday classroom interactions.
Why clear rules do not always feel fair
Schools rely on clear rules and consistent expectations. These help create structure, predictability, and a shared understanding of how school life works.
As students describe in the student guide, part of secondary school involves working out how these expectations operate in practice — not just what the rules are, but how they are explained, applied, and experienced in everyday situations.
From a school perspective, this consistency is often closely linked to fairness. If the same rules apply to everyone, and are applied in the same way, this can help create a sense of order and a 'level playing field'.
However, students’ experiences of these same rules are not always aligned with one another. This reflects the broader pattern explored in the series: school culture is shaped not only by what is expected, but by the conditions under which students are able to understand, respond to, and participate in those expectations.
Research on students’ experiences of starting secondary school suggests that even when expectations are clear and applied consistently, they are not always experienced in the same way by all students.
The same rule, different experiences
All students arrive at secondary school needing to work out how things operate: what is expected, how behaviour is expected to differ across contexts, and how to participate in classroom and school life.For some students, this process feels relatively straightforward. They quickly understand routines, feel confident asking questions, and are able to respond to expectations with ease.
For others, this process can take longer. Expectations may feel less interpretable, particularly where students have less access to the tacit social and institutional knowledge that helps make expectations understandable in practice.
Students also arrive at secondary school with prior experiences of how rules are explained, applied, and the consequences of not following rules which shape how they understand and respond to expectations in a new setting.
This means that treating all students in exactly the same way does not always result in the same experience. What feels clear and manageable for one student may feel uncertain or more difficult for another.
A familiar example (in England): school shoes
Consider a common rule: wearing specific types of formal school shoes.
These expectations are typically intended to create consistency, reduce visible differences, and support a shared sense of belonging.
For some students, this is straightforward and rarely requires much thought. For others, it can feel more complicated — not only because they are unsure what is allowed, but because the rule connects to how they see themselves and how they feel they are seen by others.
For some students, this is straightforward and rarely requires much thought. For others, it can feel more complicated — not only because they are unsure what is allowed, but because the rule connects to how they see themselves and how they feel they are seen by others.
Some students may worry about getting it wrong, feel self-conscious about being noticed, or be unsure how strictly the rule will be applied. Others may feel that the rule does not fully reflect how they want to present themselves, particularly as they begin to develop a stronger sense of identity during adolescence.
Students also do not always have full control over these choices. Decisions about footwear are often shaped by what is available, affordable, or chosen by parents or carers. As a result, students may be required to meet expectations using options they did not fully select themselves, which can shape how manageable or fair those expectations feel in practice.
In some schools, these rules are enforced through practices such as being stopped at the gate, having to change into spare shoes, receiving sanctions, or missing social time. These approaches are often intended to maintain consistency, support order, and reinforce fairness.
From a school perspective, this can support order and reinforce fairness. But for students, these moments can be highly visible and, at times, uncomfortable or embarrassing.
The rule itself may be clear and applied consistently. However, the experiences it produces can still differ, because rules interact with students' different circumstances, identities, and levels of control over how those expectations are met.
For some students, repeated experiences of being visibly corrected can gradually shape how confident they feel participating more broadly within school life.
These moments are not only about rules and sanctions. They also shape whether students feel recognised by the school as legitimate participants within school life.
Understanding this helps move the focus from whether rules are in place, to how they function within the everyday conditions of school life.
Why 'fair' can feel different
The idea of consistency in expectations reflects an important commitment to fairness in schools.
However, consistency in expectations does not always produce consistency in how school life is experienced.
Students differ in:
- how easily they understand expectations
- how confident they feel responding to them
- how visible they feel when doing so
- how those expectations align with their developing sense of identity
- how their prior experiences of school shape their expectations of rules
These differences are also shaped by how expectations are enacted and supported across everyday school interactions.
Teachers do not simply apply expectations mechanically. They interpret and enact them through their own professional judgements, relational approaches, prior experiences, and the relational, interpretive, and organisational capacities they are able to draw upon in different contexts and moments. At the same time, teachers work within institutional conditions — including timetables, workload, class size, subject structures, and continuity of contact — that shape how expectations can be interpreted, explained, and relationally supported in practice.
In some contexts, limited time, fragmented interactions, and high relational demands can also reduce the opportunities available for expectations to be explained, interpreted, and supported through ongoing interaction.
In some contexts, limited time, fragmented interactions, and high relational demands can also reduce the opportunities available for expectations to be explained, interpreted, and supported through ongoing interaction.
As students note, this can mean that the same rule is explained or emphasised differently across contexts, which can affect how clear or fair it feels in practice.
Students are not always afforded the same margin for misunderstanding, experimentation, or minor mistakes while learning expectations. As a result, some students may experience the process of navigating school rules as more exposing or consequential than others.
Because of this, the experience of rules can vary across classrooms, interactions, and student groups, contributing to differences in how school culture is experienced and enacted in practice.
Consistency in how rules are applied does not guarantee consistency in how they are experienced. This unevenness does not arise solely from individual differences between students, but from how institutional arrangements, interactional opportunities, and prior experiences shape students’ capacity to interpret and respond to expectations. In this sense, consistency can coexist with unevenness in how rules are experienced.
This suggests that fairness in schools cannot be understood only in terms of consistency in what is expected, but also in terms of how those expectations are encountered and experienced under different conditions.
Fairness concerns how rules are experienced across different students and contexts. This includes how manageable expectations feel, how visible students become when responding to them, and whether students feel recognised as legitimate participants in school life.
How rules shape participation
Rules do more than organise behaviour. They also shape the conditions under which students are able to participate confidently and legitimately in school life.
Students do not encounter or respond to rules under identical conditions. They work out what those rules mean in practice, how they apply in different situations, and how to respond to them within the constraints of everyday school life, particularly during the transition to secondary school.
These processes are shaped not only by the school, but also by students’ developing ways of understanding themselves and the different social and cultural contexts they are part of.
These processes of understanding and navigation influence whether students feel:
- confident contributing in lessons
- comfortable asking for help
- able to take part in social and classroom interactions
- recognised as legitimate participants in school life
In this sense, rules also shape the conditions under which students are able to participate in school life.
When expectations feel clear and manageable, students are often more willing to participate.
But when expectations feel persistently difficult to interpret, uncomfortable, or do not align with how students see themselves, some students may begin to withdraw from participation or disengage from aspects of school life. In some cases, this can also lead to more visible forms of resistance, though this is not inevitable and depends on how students interpret and respond to those experiences.
What this means for schools
Clear and consistent expectations remain important in schools. However, clarity alone does not determine how rules are experienced in practice. Over time, repeated experiences of successfully understanding and navigating expectations can help stabilise students’ confidence, participation, and sense of belonging.Students work out how to respond to expectations within a complex set of conditions — including their confidence, relationships, past experiences, and how visible they feel within the school environment.
This does not mean that expectations should be reduced or made optional. Rather, it highlights that school culture is shaped not only by the rules themselves, but by how those rules are understood, communicated, and enacted alongside a wider set of relational, institutional, and cultural processes.
It also means that school culture is not simply delivered to students. It is shaped through ongoing interactions between students and staff, as rules are explained, interpreted, and lived day to day in classrooms, corridors, and social spaces. These patterns can also shift as students become more familiar with expectations and as rules are interpreted and enacted differently across year groups and contexts.
Attending to students’ experiences can therefore provide insights into how expectations operate in practice — where they feel clear, where they feel uncertain, and how they shape participation in school life.
This means that understanding school culture involves not only examining the rules themselves but also the conditions under which different students are able to engage with them.
Small moments — such as how a rule is explained, applied, or responded to — can make a meaningful difference to how that rule is experienced.
This is less about changing individual rules in isolation, and more about understanding how rules interact with the wider constellation of relationships, expectations, and institutional conditions that shape school culture and how these processes combine differently across students and contexts.
Key ideas
- Clear rules are important, but they are not experienced in the same way by all students
- Students work out how to understand and respond to expectations within everyday school life
- The same rule can feel straightforward for some students and more difficult for others
- Fairness in what is expected does not always mean fairness in how rules are experienced
- Rules shape not only behaviour, but also participation, confidence, and belonging
Reflection questions for staff
These questions are designed to help you notice how school culture is experienced in everyday interactions. They are not checklists or judgements, but prompts to explore what may be happening beneath the surface.- Which students seem most confident navigating expectations — and why?
- Where might expectations feel less clear or more difficult for some students?
- How visible are different students when expectations are enforced?
- How might rules be experienced differently by students at different stages of confidence or belonging?
- What helps students feel more confident taking part in school life?
- Are there expectations that feel more difficult to interpret or apply consistently across contexts?
This guide explores what students’ experiences of starting secondary school can teach us about how Positive School Cultures (PoSCs) are created through everyday interactions, expectations, and relationships.
The Positive School Culture Guide for Teachers/School Staff: What Students’ Experiences of Year 7 Can Teach Us
Why Clear Rules Do Not Always Feel Fair
Belonging Takes Time: What Schools Can Learn from the Year 7 Transition
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