UK: With school discipline rapidly worsening, we will need to use extreme measures in the classroom

Quiet, class, or it's handcuffs

I always liked the expression “joined-up government”. One of the sadnesses of the past eight years has been that the concept materialised mainly in the shape of a centralised, sterile imposition of targets. Ideally, joined-up government would involve accepting the links between problems, however awkward the implications. And they are awkward: sometimes when you join the dots the picture is unwelcome. Let me join two dots. Yesterday we learnt that out of eight affluent Western countries studied by the London School of Economics for social mobility, we are second from bottom. In Canada, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland children of poor parents have a much better chance of climbing the ladder. Only America is worse. Education, says the research team, lies “at the heart of Britain’s low mobility culture . . . we have 20 per cent of the population functionally illiterate. In Germany and Scandinavia they don’t have anybody down there.”

Draw a line to the second dot. On Wednesday, Five screens a film shot undercover in 15 British schools. Classroom Chaos, by the criminologist Roger Graef, equipped a supply teacher with a hidden camera and sent her to agencies across the country. They did not target failing schools or sink estates. What they record is the phenomenon oddly comfortingly described by inspectors as “low-level disruption”. Nobody gets knifed or raped but pupils shout, fight, swear, throw missiles and wander round classrooms ignoring staff. Reprimanded, they reply they “don’t give a shit”. Challenged for saying “Shite!”, a 12-year-old says “I’ve got just as much right as you to say what I want”. At one point a shrill boy’s voice is heard over the din saying: “Suck me off, miss!”

The undercover teacher blamed herself at first, but other teachers confirm it. Moreover, the chief inspector of schools said in February that 9 percent of secondaries suffer from “persistent and unsatisfactory” behaviour (a 50 per cent rise since 2000). The Teacher Support Network says 98 per cent report verbal abuse, and nearly half threats of violence. One in five has been hit, and more than a third had property damaged. There is a new sexual edge to this aggression: a recent book by Kate Myers details how teachers suffer obscene messages and sneery flirtation. Children, encouraged to consider themselves as sexual players from an early age, now readily use such tactics to humiliate staff.
This is happening. Not everywhere, but quite enough for Graef’s film to be justified. As for joining the dots to social immobility, it is glaringly obvious that clever children taught in such conditions are held back; and that the quickest way for parents to help is to buy them out — either by paying fees or moving house.

So to alleviate a whole swath of problems — from street crime to entrenched poverty to teacher shortage — it is first necessary to zap classroom disruption. No point just wringing our hands over family breakdown or the boring curriculum or teacher training or lousy food: it needs to be stopped, dead. Its causes must be handled too, but if disruption is marring a tenth of schools and rising fast, there is not much time. When a patient has a high fever you bring it down before it causes brain damage. You don’t fanny around telling him to live a healthier life in future.

Most proffered solutions are of the wise-but-wet variety. “Troubled” children should be urged not to be “inappropriate”. Teachers should be trained to “cope” (though it is hard to devise a quick course to quell 35 jeering yobs who know that nobody dares touch them, or even speak to them in the words they use themselves). The toughest sanction is exclusion, which moves the trouble on to the streets (the expelled get little teaching and no supervision). Only the Conservatives have promised to abolish the appeal process which overturns exclusions; they propose — without detail — “turnaround” schools. But in the sort of chaos that was filmed, hardly any individual child would qualify for exclusion anyway. Teachers tend to say that the big, expellable crimes are in a way less trouble than the constant lesser disruptions. Things are clearer.

Any fast cure would involve unprecedented sharpness, and some revision of the law. Ruth Kelly has promised to “support teachers who practise zero tolerance, but what does that mean? Can’t be physical restraint, can’t be irreversible exclusion . . . what? Detention? Stand them in the corner? They’d laugh.

Imagine, for a moment, real zero tolerance. Security staff would sit silent and forbidding in the classroom. At a nod from the teacher they would remove troublemakers, if necessary in handcuffs. It would be routine for teenagers who made violent or sexual threats to be prosecuted and suspended (they might as well learn early that in the workplaces where they hope to be in a year or two, sexual harassment legislation is now so fierce that they would be out without pay and virtually unemployable if they uttered the sort of remark now commonplace in classrooms). Damaging a teacher’s property would result in civil suits, with parents forced to pay. Those who stormed in to defend their children would have the interview recorded, and threatening behaviour prosecuted. Heads would have absolute power to send pupils to specialist reform units.

You gulp in dismay. So do I, actually. Nobody could be happy at the thought of all that employment for lawyers, or the miscarriages of justice afflicting lively children who don’t really deserve it; or indeed the family violence from parents enraged at heavy bills. Most teachers are gentle-hearted people who want to lead children upward, not hit them or herd them into penitentiaries. But looking at that 50 per cent rise in disruption over five years — years which have seen a great deal of money put into schools — it is clear that the fever must be curbed. My liberal instinct, when dealing with children, is always for carrots. But sticks may have their place.

Libby Purves
26 April 2005

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1056-1585479,00.html

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