Disruptive student behaviour in schools is an international problem. It forms one of the complexities of schooling and is frequently the subject of popular media, industrial and scholarly attention. Much of this attention is focused on rising anxieties about student behaviour in schools and calls for improved methods for identifying the causes of disruptive behaviour in order to develop better policy and practice solutions. Policy quick fixes, government commitments to ending disruption and evidence-based solutions dominate this landscape in the quest to find answers. Despite, or perhaps as a result of, decades of government commitments, in NSW Australia, there are now more students than ever diagnosed with some form of behaviour-based disorder who are increasingly excluded within and from their local mainstream school, and at younger ages (Van Bergen, Graham, Sweller, & Dodd, 2014). Student behaviour and what to do about it continues to be one of the dominant schooling discourses (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012) and poses a challenge to public schooling increasingly impacted by neoliberal policies of choice and competition.

In developed nations across the globe there is a move towards models of school-based management, where choice and competition drive schools' position in the education marketplace. As a consequence, education policy and research has turned its attention to leadership and its role in determining the success of schools. Leadership has become, for many governments, the policy solution to raising academic standards within schools (Gunter, 2012). Raising academic standards inevitably includes raising the behavioural standards of students, based on the assumption that ordered spaces are essential to having optimum conditions for learning.

In the dominant scholarly literature, it appears as accepted that leadership by the principal is required for the effective management of disruptive behaviour. At the same time the leadership and school effectiveness literature portrays orderly climates as an essential characteristic of an effective principal's leadership of a good school. These bodies of scholarly work create an assumption that behaviour is a problem for which leadership is a solution. There are however few examples of scholarly work which problematise the ways that these dominant discourses of leadership, disruptive student behaviour and effective schooling intertwine to produce practices that is supportive (or not) of the inclusion of students with disruptive behaviour in schooling.

The pervasive modernist assumption of  "sure and incremental increase of knowledge and understanding" (Lingard, Hayes, Mills & Christie, 2003) permeates the discourse of educational leadership and student behaviour with an empiricist assumption that the solution to disruptive behaviour involves the translation of 'what we know', meaning evidence-based practice about the management of disruptive behaviour, into school practice. Behaviour literature tells us that this is the work of leadership, and good leaders do this more effectively. This paper challenges this linear rational view of knowledge as simply the translation of theory into practice.  The paper draws on quantitative data from 341 NSW principals alongside qualitative data from three case studies of primary principals nominated as effective in supporting students with disruptive behaviour.  Employing Bourdieu's 'thinking tools' of field, capital and habitus, the paper offers a theory of knowledge as practice, of and by the principal, who embodies and is embedded within discourses of behaviour, educational leadership and the 'good school'. The paper contends that there is an inclusive disposition in the habitus of some principals' that shapes transformative practice in schools.  Such dispositions are necessary to challenge the reproductive practices that are a result of dominant discourses which 'collide and collude' and contribute to rising exclusions of students with disruptive behaviour. 

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