When you arrive at the gates of Highcrest Community School in High Wycombe,
Buckinghamshire, there are few clues to why locals once called it “the
prison on the hill”. Pupils in smart blazers sit chatting quietly on the
grass verge, while others do last-minute revision in the shade of trees
during their lunch break.
After years as a notorious sink school, Hatters Lane School changed its name,
was turned into a specialist science and technology college and is now one
of the best schools in England for improving its pupils’ chances.
There is no sign now of the knives that once deterred trainee teachers from
visiting “for health and safety reasons” — although trouble can still recur.
Only the day before, a former pupil appeared at the gate with his Rottweiler
to taunt the teachers, and in the distance a couple of pupils appear to be
playing with catapults.
But Highcrest — or, rather, its successful head, Shena Moynihan — may once
again be in the Government’s sights after Ed Balls, the Education Secretary,
yesterday revived plans for highly paid “superheads” to strengthen the
country’s weakest schools by helping them to merge with top-performing
schools to form not-for-profit successful “chains”.
The new push to force the worst schools into mergers with their more
successful counterparts comes after the Government revealed last week that,
on average, 60,700 primary and secondary school pupils bunk off school every
day, with about 38,000 regularly playing truant once a week. What is more,
yesterday Ofsted revealed that children as young as 4 are being excluded
from school for biting, swearing, hitting or kicking staff or throwing
chairs. The schools watchdog appealed to primary schools, some of which had
excluded children aged between 4 and 7 ten times, not to expel them and
recommended instead that they make better use of mentoring and circle time.
With the Conservative campaigning for head teachers to be allowed to search
pupils and confiscate anything likely to cause disruption, school discipline
is again in the spotlight.
So how hard is it to turn around a failing school? Is it the impossible task
that many heads would have us imagine?
At Highcrest, Moynihan is keen to show off her charges. When she interrupts a
GCSE maths lesson, the teenagers spring to attention and chant in unison
“Good afternoon, Miss Moynihan” before sitting down again. The class members
are neatly dressed and sit in pairs. It is an orderly scene: the pupils, who
are sitting GCSE maths a year early, put up their hands to answer questions.
They are rebuked swiftly for fiddling with pens or not paying attention as
the teacher fires questions to test their knowledge. Moynihan tells them
that they will have three hours of supervised revision before their exam,
they must eat a good breakfast, bring in a banana and she will “kill them”
if they fail to revise. They laugh, even if she sounds pretty serious.
In each class it is the same. There is a sense of order, respect and quiet
industry, whether they are making a music box in woodwork, learning about
combustion in chemistry or doing maths equations. Moynihan knows every pupil
by name — so it is a surprise when she admits that her empire could crumble
overnight if expectations of teaching, behaviour or support were ever
allowed to slip.
“A school like this is two terms away from being Hatters Lane again,” she
says. “That may be an exaggeration but if we took away our high
expectations, support and good teaching and learning, and gave the pupils no
voice, it wouldn’t take long for it to become a failing school.
“Most of our pupils come from extremely socially challenged homes and,
although we are oversubscribed now, education is difficult for a large
percentage of our parents. In middle-class homes it’s a brave child who
doesn’t want to go to university. Here you have to be a brave child to want
to go to university.”
Highcrest has come a long way since Moynihan’s arrival. Hatters Lane had been
failed twice by Ofsted, trainee teachers were refusing to teach there after
one had to remove a knife from a pupil, and the buildings were in a
lamentable state: there were outdoor lavatories and the gym ceiling leaked
in several places.
Since then, some £7 million has been invested in Highcrest under the Fresh
Start initiative, a new gym and classroom block have been built and new
teachers employed. Teaching was “significantly improved”, with far fewer
supply teachers, and expectations of good behaviour — such as opening doors,
saying please and thank you and putting up hands in class — were made clear.
Boundaries were set and sanctions put in place.
At the same time, support systems were set up. These included learning
mentors, breakfast clubs and an “inclusion room” where misbehaving pupils
are removed from class, learn separately, are not allowed to meet friends at
breaktimes and work with outside agencies, such as charities and behavioural
specialists. Hoodies were banned, as were baseball caps, trainers, severe
haircuts and any “colours” that could be associated with gangs. An untucked
shirts meant staying behind after school for 15 minutes, and litter-picking
duties were implemented. School councils were created and all pupils were
told to do community work, such as helping in local primary schools.
The result is that pupils are proud to attend Highcrest. Sharni Lockwood, 17,
admits that her parents worried about sending her there at first. “It was my
first choice but it still had the stigma of Hatters Lane,” she says. “Now
it’s completely different and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
Other pupils approve of the strictness. Salman Hussein, 16, knows the
inclusion room — or “isolation unit” as the pupils call it — well. “Last
year I was getting into trouble a lot but I was challenged by the school,”
he says. “I was acting childishly and having fights. Being in the unit was
like going to jail because you see no one, you just work on your own. I went
a couple of times and it did work. I definitely don’t want to go there
again.”
After seven years, Moynihan, a former Ofsted inspector who also works with
other heads to improve their schools, dragged results up from 13 per cent of
pupils achieving five A*-C GCSEs in 2002 to 54 per cent achieving the same
grades last year, with 35 per cent getting five A*-Cs, including maths and
English.
It was no mean feat: 43 per cent of her pupils have special needs; 51 per cent
speak English as a second language; 32 languages are spoken in the school
and 42 per cent of pupils are listed as coming from the most deprived areas
in England. The local area, known for gangs and drugs, is one in which whole
families have antisocial behaviour orders slapped on them.
But Moynihan also learnt that there is no silver bullet for instilling good
behaviour. “If we had changed teaching and learning, we would still have had
riots,” she says. “If we had changed behaviour, we would have had all
sanctions; if pupils had just been given a voice, they would simply have
been louder and more abusive. So you have to keep up the pressure on all
three. Equally, while pupils have to show respect by listening, teachers
must treat them with respect, look smart, not shout at them and give
rewards.”
Last year, police officers had to deal with more than 7,000 violent incidents
in English schools, according to figures obtained by the Conservative Party
under the Freedom of Information Act. In the same period, the number of
children suspended from school for assaulting fellow pupils rose by almost
3,000 to more than 65,000 in a year.
And it is not restricted to England. In France, Sébastien Clerc wrote a book
entitled Au Secours! Sauvons notre École (Help! Save our school)
in which he exploded the myth of French discipline and described assaults to
which he has been subjected as a teacher.
The equally draining low-level disruption of constant chatter and answering
back were detailed in The Class, a documentary that won the Palme
d’Or last year for its depressing depiction of life in a lycée in a
poor Paris suburb.
Yet Sir Alan Steer, the Government’s “behaviour czar”, says that discipline is
not out of control in English schools — there is just a perception that it
is. In April, Sir Alan, a former head teacher, produced a long-awaited
report on how to restore good behaviour in schools. He made 47
recommendations but insisted that the basics had not changed: poor behaviour
cannot be tolerated; all schools can raise standards if they are consistent
in implementing good management, teaching and learning practices; pupils
must be given respect for these to be received; parents must be supported
and know their responsibilities; school leadership is critical.
Quoting Plato, Sir Alan claimed that our demands of children have changed
little since 4BC. “What is happening to our young people?” Plato asked.
“They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the
law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are
decaying. What is to become of them?” Our complaints are the same, Sir Alan
says — the problem is that we want total solutions.
He adds that children are no longer allowed to learn by their mistakes: “We
want to arrive at a world where kids don’t play up. But are we saying that
we have arrived only when children don’t misbehave? Get real. Growing up is
all about children learning to behave.”
It is incumbent on adults, Sir Alan says, to show them how to do that by
dressing tidily, not smoking outside the classroom and speaking to students
with respect, to name but three ways. In secondary schools, small things
such as consistent marking schemes and giving homework at the start of the
lesson, rather than the end, can also help to circumvent problems.
Above all, Sir Alan, the former head of Seven Kings High in Ilford, Essex,
believes that strong management, continuing teacher training and early
intervention are vital for good discipline in schools.
Simon Adams, an “advanced skills teacher” in West Sussex, agrees. He teaches
history in a secondary school but also spends time coaching trainee
teachers, and says that in the early years, a teacher’s confidence is vital
to maintaining good behaviour in the classroom. If the school takes too long
to address a problem, he says, it is very difficult for a teacher to restore
his or her classroom presence. “It’s like parenting,” he says. “The
principles laid down by Supernanny are the same as you would use for
secondary school kids. If you follow those basic rules, most kids will
follow you, but it takes self-belief and know-how and that takes time to
develop.”
The National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT)
fought a long campaign for the Government to grant teachers stronger powers
to deal with school disruption. But, in a recent survey of 10,000 teachers,
it found that 65 per cent were unaware of the legal changes made in 2006,
which had answered most of their concerns.
Chris Keates, the NASUWT general secretary, says that, while most schools are
not out of control, maintaining discipline is becoming harder. “The big
challenge is the low-level disruption — verbal abuse, not coming to school
prepared to learn and so on, and not stamping it out when it occurs,” he
says. “There must be zero tolerance on verbal abuse, for example, because
otherwise it escalates into physical abuse.”
According to Moynihan and Steer, there are 101 things that contribute to good
behaviour in a school but not one single issue — and it is not rocket
science.
One former teacher who recently revisited Holland Park school decades after
working there when it was a radical comprehensive was appalled by its
emphasis on discipline. The school has lost its soul, she complained, while
admitting that, along with the uniform and order, results were up. This new
discipline is not for everyone and can make schools seem regimented, but it
gives those who want to learn more chance if all pupils behave well.
According to Sir Alan, discipline is also key to preventing permanent
exclusions of children, who, if demonised, will simply create longer-term
problems for society. “Even if they are unpleasant, difficult and
challenging, they are children,” he says. “If we don’t act to change their
patterns of behaviour, they will simply turn into unpleasant adults.”
At Highcrest, that was not so long ago. Parents of current pupils, Moynihan
tells me, talk nostalgically of pushing teachers’ cars over the grass verge
at breaktimes for fun. Having given me a comprehensive tour, she asks if I
would not rather take a taxi back to the station. I insist on walking — but
pray silently that I won’t meet that former pupil stalking the streets with
his Rottweiler again.
The Class is out on DVD, released by Artificial Eye
