Jane, 14, is the pupil that every teacher dreads at her London comprehensive. While the government is tearing its hair out over truancy, Jane’s effect on class discipline is so catastrophic that most days her teachers pray she will skip school.
One teacher, Alan Wilson (his name has been changed to protect their identities), last week described her as insolent, mouthy and highly disruptive. “When Jane came in late to class recently carrying her mobile, I asked her to sit down and put the mobile away. There is a no-mobile rule in the school, but nobody pays any attention to it,” he said.
Wilson’s request was reasonable enough but merely sparked foul-mouthed abuse.
“She told me to f*** off,” he said. “Then she tried to leave the room. I put my arm across the door to prevent her leaving and she walked into it. Then she accused me of assaulting her.”
Jane is undoubtedly difficult, but it would be a mistake to dismiss her or her school as extreme or exceptional.
David Bell, the chief inspector of schools in England, reported last week that bad behaviour is endemic in schools and getting worse. Officials judge that behaviour in up to a third of all schools is in need of improvement. In one in 10 schools behaviour is rated as poor.
It is a damning report for the government, which has spent £660m in the past three years to improve behaviour. So far all that money, spent on employing 10,000 special behaviour mentors, specialist pupil referral units and learning support units, has produced no discernible gain.
Many teachers are left in despair, as evidenced by personal testimonies posted on the website of The Times Educational Supplement.
“I was so full of enthusiasm and excitement (for the job),” wrote one teacher who dared to give a child a detention only to find later that the tyres on his car had been deflated. A note also warned that next time his brake pipes would be cut. “Now I feel beaten totally. I’ve handed my notice in and will leave at Easter.”
This newly qualified teacher seems destined to join the one in 10 who deserts the profession every year.
On top of the disruption in classes comes a dismal record on truancy. According to a report by the National Audit Office, almost 450,000 children are absent each day from school for various reasons, with 50,000 playing truant.
Although the government has spent hundreds of millions of pounds to improve attendance, the truancy rate is as bad as it was in 1997. Last week Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, promised yet more money to combat truancy and a “zero tolerance” policy of even mild misbehaviour.
It is too late for many middle-class parents who say that bad behaviour is a key motive for abandoning the state education system. One mother of a 10-year-old girl who recently moved into the independent sector said: “In my daughter’s state primary class there were seven or eight boys out of a class of 28 who were ridiculously out of order. My daughter couldn’t get on with her work — it ruined her year.”
Amid the gloom, however, there is some hope. New schools and firm measures at old ones are showing how sometimes the disruptive pupils can be conquered.
WHEN it comes to causes of indiscipline, theories abound. Clarissa Williams, headmistress of Tolworth girls’ school in Surbiton, Surrey, believes that an increase in the number of unhappy children is a factor. “It may be there are more children from broken families,” she said. “The unhappy seem to club together.”
Other teachers link it to a general decline in deference, a social malaise that fuels the constant back-chat, rowdiness and lack of interest that so disrupts other pupils. Simon, a teacher in Wales who has taught English for more than 30 years, knows it well.
“If you are reading a story, someone will shout something like, ‘Did you see such and such on telly last night?’ or ‘This is crap, what are we doing it for?’,” he said. “The work doesn’t seem to mean anything to a lot of children. They just can’t or won’t engage with it.
“They live on a diet of fizzy drinks — they have so much caffeine in them that they just can’t sit down. I feel the children might as well be taught by the milkman because they would have behaved the same for him as for me.”
For Francis Gilbert, a teacher and writer, parents are part of the problem. He is happy with his current school but in previous posts found that the parents were uncertain allies in disputes over discipline.
Some parents immediately took the child’s side and complained to the school about the teacher. Others were so aggressive with their offspring that Gilbert never asked for their involvement again.
“I had one parent tell me he intended to put his badly behaved child in the bath and turn on the cold tap,” he said.
Other parents are simply out of their depth with their own children. “One mother agreed with me that her child was difficult,” remembered Gilbert. “When I phoned her she said, ‘He’s riding his bike round the living room as we speak’.”
Gilbert also blames the “enormous Stalinist nature” of many secondary schools for some of the behavioural decline. Children struggle to cope with the impersonal scale of big secondary schools, he argues, and many bright ones are swamped.
Boys in particular drown in the peer group pressure of such schools to misbehave and shun learning. Gilbert suggests that the millions being “wasted” on behavioural advisers and mentors should be redirected into building smaller, more human-scale schools.
For Chris Woodhead, the combative former chief inspector of schools, the solution to rising indiscipline is clear: strong leadership from head teachers. “Where the head is visible around the place and he/she is down like a ton of bricks on kids who misbehave, then discipline is not a problem,” said Woodhead.
“You have to have a consistent approach and a clear behaviour policy with a system of sanctions and rewards.”
Such leadership was the central theme in the recent television dramatisation of Lady Marie Stubbs’s “resurrection” of St George’s school in west London after its decline following the murder of Philip Lawrence, its headmaster, as he tried to protect a pupil.
Frontline teachers complain that sanctions against insolent and disruptive pupils have been undermined. The government has trumpeted the fall in the level of exclusions, which now stand at 9,000 a year. But teachers say there is a direct link between the reduction in exclusions and the rise in classroom chaos.
The latter is on the rise, they say, because the government has pushed head teachers to keep pupils who would previously have been excluded. More recently it planned to make schools take their “fair share” of disruptive children.
The government is now backtracking on that policy. But what should it do with the children who are excluded?
ONE answer being considered by Sir Cyril Taylor, a specialist adviser to Kelly, is for the country’s 32 state boarding schools to be allowed to take excluded pupils.
The idea has apparently “received encouragement” from ministers. Nor has Taylor ruled out the possibility of private schools taking disruptive youngsters. Top independents, such as Rugby, already take some children from difficult backgrounds whose fees are paid by charities.
Another possibility is that the 200 city academies that the government wants to build will include special facilities for disruptive children.
“The risk is that children excluded from mainstream schools are more vulnerable to sinking into a life of crime,” said Taylor. “We cannot go on placing excluded children in a few hundred schools that are already failing.”
Meanwhile, Lord Harris, the carpet tycoon and sponsor of several city academies, has had talks with both government and opposition about setting up a new school in south London. The most disruptive pupils would be educated there using the latest behaviour and anger management techniques before being returned — in modified form — to mainstream school.
Harris’s concept seems to be very similar to the Conservative party’s proposals for “turnaround schools” for the badly behaved. Tim Collins, shadow education secretary, has promised that the Tories would restore head teachers’ authority over pupil behaviour. The Tories have also suggested more vocational courses to attract truants back into school, in a similar way to the government’s review into the future of education proposing more vocational options.
There are, however, smaller, simpler policies that are already meeting success at two schools.
At Islington Green school, north London, just streets away from Tony Blair’s old home, Trevor Averre-Beeson, the head teacher, has stopped excluding troublemakers and has managed to get his truants back inside the school.
Each week there is a £20 prize draw for children with full attendance records. Wayward pupils are taught in small groups in a special learning zone. Although it might be dubbed the school “sin bin”, it is rather plush with an enviable balcony view, computers and comfortable seating. Here some 60 children are taught by specialist teachers.
None of this comes cheap and Averre-Beeson has been getting £200,000 a year from the government’s behaviour improvement programme.
If Islington Green is operating a carrot policy, Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, east London, prefers a more traditional stick approach. At the new £27m school, Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head teacher, has started as he means to carry on. He requires, among other things, all pupils to wear uniform, to stand when a teacher enters the classroom and to ask permission to remove their blazers. It may sound like a throwback to a bygone age of deference, but at least the children get to learn without disruption.
Additional reporting: Sian Griffiths
