Education experts in Glasgow have come up with a brilliant idea: unruly and rude schoolchildren are to be taught good manners. In what is being described as a bold new initiative for Scottish schools, primary pupils will be told how to sit at a table to eat, how to share with others, how to say “please” and “thank you” and how to form basic relationships.
This sounds like old-fashioned common sense. Who would argue against elementary etiquette being taught at an early age? But what is remarkable about the “nurture class initiative” is that it is an initiative at all. It may shock people reared in kinder times, but schools nowadays do not routinely drum it into children to mind their Ps and Qs, open doors for others, listen to what is being said to them, not talk with their mouths full or not put their elbows on the table.
Neither do parents, which is why officials at Glasgow city council said they decided to launch the project. Someone has to teach children how to behave.
What they are really talking about here is not manners but discipline. They are hoping that “nurture classes” will help to combat abusive and disruptive behaviour. Already a pilot scheme introduced five years ago is being hailed a success, with 100 children out of a “nurture group” of 108 significantly changing for the better after the lessons.
While these results are encouraging, the whole notion does make one wonder what teachers in these schools have been putting up with — and why they have put up with it until now.
Teachers have a daily battle with indiscipline and in some areas it is so severe that they are afraid to go to work. They have to contend not just with rudeness but occasionally with physical aggression, too.
Probationary teachers find dealing with pupils’ behaviour the biggest hurdle to get over when they start work and Peter Peacock, the education minister, has just told teacher training colleges to give classroom management “a higher priority”.
However, teachers have been complaining about behaviour in the classroom for years and have been silenced — by this education minister in particular — with denials about the scale of the problem and palmed off with socially experimental non-exclusion targets.
Instilling discipline in children is difficult. It is a test of character for teachers, especially when the very children who are so beyond control often do not have what you or I might regard as parents.
Instead of being made to confront these children over their antisocial behaviour — making good behaviour a condition of their continued inclusion in the school — the schools they are helping to ruin are given money; to build a sports centre, perhaps, or to buy the services of a dedicated police officer. Or they are designated “schools of ambition” because they have a long way to go. But while they have as much right to public money as any school, money alone will not fulfil ambition.
Spending money in Scotland is easy because there is plenty of money to spend. But tackling unacceptable behaviour is a challenge too far. The nurture class initiative is at least trying to change behaviour. Unfortunately, it is doing so in a vacuum. As The Sunday Times highlighted last week, antisocial behaviour blights not only schools but also entire communities throughout Scotland, yet police chiefs are reluctant to deploy the powers at their disposal.
In one force, Fife, 100,000 complaints about antisocial behaviour were received between November 2003 and October 2004, most involving young people. But new legislation aimed at the under-16s, including antisocial behaviour orders (Asbos) and powers of dispersal, is barely used.
In Lothian and Borders, only 17 Asbos were served in 2004, which was a record. Meanwhile, there were 695 fixed penalties for littering and 345 fines for dog fouling. Clearly it is easier to tackle environmental offenders than street gangs and vandals (such as the ones who have been putting bricks through the windows at a centre for the blind in Joppa for the past six months without being troubled by the police).
It is no surprise, then, that in the same period petty assaults increased from 9,823 to 12,664 and breaches of the peace were up from 7,570 to 7,904. The route from antisocial behaviour to criminal behaviour is well charted. It is not through police incompetence that yob culture thrives so. Senior police have always made plain their antipathy towards Jack McConnell’s antisocial behaviour legislation. Asbos, they say, unfairly criminalise the young.
Tom Buchan, president of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents, said: “How do you change the behaviour of 15 to 16-year-olds who know nothing else than a lack of parental care, a lack of appreciation of society and civilised behaviour?” Well, a quick glance at the letters pages of newspapers provides some ready answers, “give the belt back to teachers and the boot back to police officers” and “bring back the cane” being among the gentler suggestions. The most frequent and reasonable demand, though, is “put police on the streets”.
But police chiefs seem intent on retreating from a public role, skulking into their offices to shuffle more paper and consider more alternatives. However they rationalise this tactic, the evidence is that unfamiliarity breeds contempt for the law.
Who has not witnessed the complete lack of respect shown by youths towards those rare policemen who have strayed into their paths? If police cannot command respect, teachers are too scared to and parents either don’t care or have given up, what is left? Certainly not the church, which most young people ignore and which also recoils from its traditional role in society. At the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland this week, ministers of the kirk exhorted their followers to support a protest march on July 2, a march which, incidentally, is the focus for anarchists. The minister who proposed the move said he got the idea from the director of the Friends of the Earth Scotland.
The kirk, once a beacon of moral certainty, is now swayed by the fashionable views of a politically motivated green pressure group.
How is it going to be possible to foster a sense of respect among the young, as Tony Blair has vowed to do in his third term in government, when all the conventional authorities have lost their clout? Teaching manners and consideration and reinforcing order in primary school is a start, but the lesson must not end in the classroom.
