Labour have become alarmed by the strict, ‘cruel’ approach to discipline in schools and the rise in the number of pupils being excluded. Teachers will need to be more relaxed about ‘bad behaviour’. But though moving the goalposts of acceptable behaviour may reduce the exclusion figures, it is bound to increase the burden of disruptive behaviour on teachers and other pupils.
My own experience of teaching tells me that the new guidelines will increase bullying and reduce special needs inclusion, undermine the most disadvantaged families and ultimately increase educational inequality. So why are they doing it?
The simplest explanation is just the return to dominance, in the post-Conservative era, of the ‘priest class’ of the progressive teaching establishment and their enthusiasm for ‘student-led’ classrooms. Tom Bennett, the education department’s current behaviour czar, has a low-tolerance, high-expectation approach. But he’s due to leave next year, and may be ousted sooner.
School should be the great leveller, a safety-net of authority with the same high expectations for every pupil, no matter what sort of background they have. Fortunate kids have parents who encourage them to behave and to succeed. Other kids have parents who don’t, which is why schools that do have high standards disproportionately help those who have been undermined by their backgrounds. The irony is that it’s most often the liberal, middle-class parents at the more privileged and stable end of the spectrum who complain about discipline in schools. They rail against ordered schools as if they were sadistic Victorian workhouses.
This is the ‘Matthew Effect’ in education, ‘To everyone who has, more will be given; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.’ The new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is herself a case in point. Having grown up in poverty in Tyne and Wear, she has described her luck at attending good state schools. But where she was truly lucky was that her family encouraged her and expected her to succeed. This is what it takes for a child to beat the odds of disadvantage.
The value of holding all children to the same standards is immense. Katharine Birbalsingh’s ‘strictest school in the country’ is also the most improved school in the country, and far outperforms other schools with comparative intakes.
It’s impossible to see how a more relaxed approach to discipline won’t be a disaster. A phone-free classroom is utterly essential for brain development, for instance, but children are now desperate to keep their phones. How can a ban on phones possibly work if a teacher can’t properly discipline those who disobey? Permitting ‘low-level’ rudeness towards teachers (talking back, shouting out, tutting) embeds disrespect for teachers into another generation of future parents, and this lack of respect will cast its own shadow across society for generations. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, emancipating children from the authority of adults leaves them to the tyranny of bullies.
Awkwardly for progressives, it is well known that autistic children benefit from quiet in school, and one of the major reasons for neurodiversity-related exclusions is the increase of noise and chaos in the progressive ‘student-led’ classroom. This can send neurodiverse pupils into a downward punitive spiral.
There is widespread agreement that part of the problem in schools is truancy: the less time children are in school, the less they benefit from the structure it provides and the more they are at the mercy of the happenstances of home life. But allowing pupils to be rude will only make this worse.
The worst truancy in modern history was in fact enforced by the state. Schools were sporadically closed from March to September 2020, and then again from Christmas 2020 into spring of 2021, disrupting two academic years. Of course, this disproportionately affected the most disadvantaged families, further increasing the achievement gap. Teachers can see the effect of that catastrophic interruption as these whole-year cohorts rise through the system. The last children of the lockdowns are not due to leave school until 2033.
Too often in my school I see hands-off progressive teachers using teaching methods that are radically progressive and student-led alongside clumsily applied military discipline. The kids end up falling between two approaches in a worst-of-all-possible worlds.
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