School Discipline - 4th September 2011

Michael Gove’s speech on school discipline last week was a breath of fresh air. There is an obvious link between illiteracy, disruption, truancy, exclusion and crime, and we need to break that link. Over the years there has been a slow, and sustained, erosion of legitimate adult authority in this country. The real right we have to defend is the right of every child to be taught properly, and it is currently undermined by the twisting of rights by a minority who need to learn an unambiguous lesson about order and authority.

That is why the government is to scrap the requirement that teachers keep a record of each time they use physical restraint on pupils. The government has also made it clear that schools should not have a “no-touch” policy, and it has removed the requirement for teachers to give 24 hours notice before issuing a detention. The rules on persistent truancy will be tightened and the sanctions schools have available will be reviewed.
All this is welcome but it will take a long time to repair the damage done over a generation.

It is a wonder to me that the situation was ever allowed to get this bad. I recall a seasoned old beak telling me before I we went into class to teach for the first time, that I should find an excuse to hit the biggest boy, and then I’d never have a problem with discipline thereafter.  The cane was a useful tool and particularly effective at nipping bullying in the bud. Although, I never doubted that a well disciplined and good school could be run without the cane, it was always bound to be much harder work. The cane relieved the master (and indeed the pupil) of subsequent tedious supervision of a punishment. The danger, when we discontinued corporal punishment, was that you would -even if subconsciously- avoid places where you were likely to encounter boys misbehaving, or you might choose not to hear a cheeky remark whispered under the breath, all in order to avoid the administrative overhead of inflicting punishments. Consequently, and almost imperceptibly at first, standards would begin to slip.

Almost every heresy of the modern age was welcomed by teaching unions. I recall teachers at one union conference being urged to rely on cultivating a ‘stern look’ in order to maintain discipline.
When I was a school governor I remember asking why the timetable had no times on it, only to be told that each class consisted of a number of tables each of which would be doing something quite different, that the pupils could move freely between the tables and that there was no way of knowing how much time any child had spent on any subject. Well, middle class children could always go home and their parents would teach them to read, but many of the children in that school spoke a different language at home, and a significant number went home to bed and breakfast accommodation. Their only chance at education was being wasted by a profession, or at least a small part of it, that appeared to have collectively taken leave of its senses. Little wonder then that elected politicians lost patience and stepped in, however clumsily, to impose a national curriculum and a testing regime to go with it.

It is teachers that are in the front line and bear the brunt of all the social problems that start elsewhere but manifest themselves in schools. I believe that overwhelmingly our teachers are dedicated professionals to whom we need to entrust much greater power, discretion and responsibility. Although the source of our social problems go well beyond our schools,  order and discipline in school helps. There was something in the very architecture and layout of the Victorian classroom which sent a powerful message: “however disordered your street or your home, there will be order in this classroom”. We all need to relearn some basics.