With Tony Blair in town and possibly only two months to go before a general election, the last thing Jack McConnell needed was another grim headline on the state of Scotland’s schools. Perhaps that’s why he looked so uncomfortable during first minister’s questions last week when challenged on the discipline crisis in our classrooms, a crisis which has come to light despite his executive’s best efforts to conceal the truth.
According to a report by HM Inspectorate of Education, more than half of the country’s schools have a discipline problem and 8% have a serious problem. The number of violent incidents against staff, including verbal and physical abuse and aggressive or threatening behaviour, has increased, and a fifth of Scottish teachers said pupils did not give them enough respect.
Last week this paper, using the Freedom of Information Act, obtained a breakdown of assaults on teachers. Now we discover that so bad is the disruption, of both the low-level and the off-the-Richter-scale variety, that Graham Donaldson, the senior chief inspector of schools, admitted that children were being prevented from learning and reaching their full potential.
It was McConnell himself, when he was education minister, who launched the Better Behaviour, Better Learning initiative to halt the descent into classroom chaos. But his policy of including pupils with behavioural problems in mainstream education, even setting targets to reduce the number of exclusions, has backfired. Head teachers are wary of banning trouble makers and, consequently, their autonomy has come under fire from the schools inspector. “There was scope for improvement in leadership in more than half the primary and secondary schools inspected, with important weaknesses in about 15% of them,” said the report.
This is all a shocking indictment of more than five years of a devolved Labour administration which promised to put education at the top of its agenda. Yet the first minister, instead of expressing his outrage at the escalating anarchy, has chosen the path of political expediency, otherwise known as denial. His minister over at education, Peter Peacock, had his full support and he was proud, he said, that Labour’s policies in Scotland were “making a difference”.
It is disappointing because only a week ago McConnell seemed to be accepting liability for Scotland’s educational failures, blaming the left-wing culture that permeated the system, a culture of anti-competitiveness and antipathy to uniforms and prize-givings which had had a “devastating” effect on two generations of Scottish children.
As he was a teacher himself in the 1980s he even seemed, rather bravely, to be shouldering some personal responsibility. But it must have been an aberration. This week he was back to accusing 18 years of Tory rule for creating the problems that exist in our schools today.
It is fair to say that the Tories washed their hands of education in Scotland and allowed the Labour-run councils to do their worst. But it is ridiculous to try to pass off the comprehensive experiment, the liberalisation of traditional educational standards and the social engineering of the past few decades on the Tories. Labour local authorities were in charge of education for the bulk of the 1980s and 1990s and the Labour party has been in power at Westminster since 1997.
You only have to listen to contemporary, unreconstructed Labour behemoths such as Ewan Aitken, education spokesman for the local authority union COSLA, or Ronnie Smith, general secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland, who stands by the discredited policy of keeping unruly children in the classroom on the grounds of social inclusion, to appreciate that the experiment is still ongoing, despite the fact that the results are already obvious.
But Labour in Scotland is in the business of burying bad news. Last September, when the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration (SCRA) told the executive that the number of persistent young offenders had risen to 1,200, ministers disputed the figures because they were embarrassing and didn’t meet their targets. Of course the statistics turned out to be accurate but the row left a bitter taste and the SCRA’s respected chief reporter resigned in February.
In education, too, the executive has become adept at moving goal posts and covering up.
So frightened is it of exposing the real extent of indiscipline in schools that Peacock has stopped publishing annual statistics on classroom violence. We do know that incidents rose from 1,000 in 2000 to 7,000 in 2004, and that every 12 minutes a teacher in Scotland suffered some level of abuse from a pupil. But from now on, we will have to rely on anecdotal evidence, HM Inspectorate reports, and maybe the Freedom of Information Act, to keep us abreast of the facts.
It is typical of the “crisis, what crisis?” complacency we have come to expect from the education minister, who has also abolished academic league tables in case they bring more bad news. In response to the latest damning findings, Peacock said: “Tackling indiscipline in Scotland’s classrooms is a top priority for me and this report shows good progress is being made.”
No wonder the Conservative leader David McLetchie felt moved to quip: “We don’t have a peacock running education, we have an ostrich.”
Now Peacock’s department, having failed to marshal its own considerable resources to improve schools, is shifting the onus onto parents. New legislation has been tabled to get parents more involved in their children’s schooling. So far, £40,000 has been spent on pamphlets instructing apparently brainless mothers and fathers how to conduct themselves at parents’ nights, how to “ask the teacher questions and share information about your child” and then to “discuss the teacher’s comments with your child”.
The Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Bill, unveiled last week, proposes to scrap school boards, which have statutory powers to make heads accountable, and replace them with toothless “parent forums” in another effort to interest parents in their children’s education. But these measures are patronising and, presumably, aimed at those parents who would never go to a parents’ meeting or dream of participating in a school event, let alone put themselves forward for a school governing body.
Most parents are already engaged in their children’s education, or as much as they can be given the executive’s strategy of withholding information from them about their schools’ performance.
Parents have a specific role to play. It is well documented that children whose homework and attendance is supervised do better. It is the education system that is letting them down.
McConnell said this week that head teachers should “do their job”, but will they be empowered to do so? They should be. Like their counterparts in England, they should be allowed to lead, to minimise the influence of their local authority, and be given control over their budgets and a free rein to introduce zero tolerance on indiscipline.
None of this will happen, though, until McConnell and Peacock lift their heads from the sand.
