Mark Dalton was only 21 when he stood in front of his first class of 30 sulking teenagers at the Business Academy Bexley in 2003.

A recent Cambridge graduate with a plummy accent, he was ill-prepared for the rigours of the rough, tough and multicultural modern-day classroom.

“I was extremely nervous,” he said. “How was I going to relate to the students? How was I going to tap into their minds? Our backgrounds were so different.”

The school in southeast London, owned and managed by the Charitable Trust Company and specialising in business and enterprise, had recently been criticised by Ofsted for the behaviour of its students and Mr Dalton struggled to engage with his pupils. In his second year as a Teach First teacher, he developed Behaviour Portal, a computer program that allows teachers to record, track, punish and reward a student’s behaviour at the push of a button.

At the end of each class, teachers input any incidents into the system. The data allows a record to be built up for each of the school’s 1,187 students and enables teachers to follow a particular student’s behaviour throughout all classes.

Mr Dalton, 25, is now assistant head at the school, where with Behaviour Portal its Ofsted behaviour rating has risen from “unsatisfactory” to “good”.

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