How to grapple with discipline in schools

The government’s new school discipline leader Tom Bennett has a difficult brief; he’s in charge of stopping the schoolchildren of the entire nation swinging on their chairs, playing on their telephones, making silly comments and passing notes. Discipline is a problem the Spectator has often grappled with over the years. Writing in 1970, Rhodes Boyson said although there had been incidents in the early19th century when schools had called in troops to put down riots, modern schools weren’t much better at keeping control.

My first deputy head told me that when he started teaching in 1890 in a small Lancashire textile town he, along with other young teachers, dared not go to the station at the end of the school day without the presence of the headmaster or he would be attacked in the street by groups of boys throwing stones and sods of earth…When I began teaching in 1950, after active service in the war and four years training, my first two terms in a Lancashire secondary modern school were a battle for survival compared with which periods in the war were like a holiday camp.