Badly behaved? Not the kids I saw
- From: "GWhyte" <gwhyte3003@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 19:23:30 -0500
Badly behaved? Not the kids I saw
Britain's classrooms are often portrayed as a lawless realm where bullies
rule and lessons are little more than a farce. But when Fran Abrams spent a
year at an urban comprehensive, she discovered a very different world
Sunday November 20, 2005
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1646767,00.html
It is 9.40am at Seven Kings high school in Ilford, and a teacher is
struggling to get a class of 16-year-olds to pay attention. 'Jamil,' she
says, 'I asked you to stop talking.'
Jamil doesn't respond. He's slouching in his chair, not meeting her eyes.
'Move it,' she says, pointing to a seat on the far side of the room away
from his friends. Jamil looks up, defiant. 'I wasn't talking, man!' 'Move,
Jamil!' she says, keeping her voice low. Slowly he stands up. Pushes back
his chair, which falls over with a clatter. He doesn't stoop to pick it up
and ambles to the seat she's indicated. A few minutes later he's writing,
head down.
In almost a year of following the life of an urban comprehensive school,
this is the worst piece of behaviour I witnessed - the only incident in
which a pupil showed open, angry resistance to a teacher's command.
Two years ago in Prospect ('Bollocks to that, sir,' September 2003) a former
teacher, James McLeod, described a world in which pupils were often out of
control and in which teachers shrank from confrontations. It is a sharp
contrast with the warm, safe, ordered environment in which I have spent a
lot of time in the last academic year.
McLeod's article would not have surprised anyone who has read recent
newspaper articles or watched television exposés such as Channel 4's
Dispatches programme, with its filmed scenes of chaos. In a recent survey of
2,500 teachers commissioned by the National Union of Teachers, almost a
third of respondents said they suffered some form of physical assault at
least once a year. A further third reported being threatened by pupils; a
quarter said they received threats from parents.
BAD BEHAVIOUR in schools is politically sensitive. To be soft on it is a
vote-loser. The only answer is zero tolerance. The tearaways must be
stopped. Something must be done. And in May this year, something was indeed
done. So concerned was the government by the chorus of complaint that it set
up a working group on the subject. Education Secretary Ruth Kelly appointed
Alan Steer, the head-teacher of Seven Kings high school, as its chairman. By
chance, Steer's school is the one that I have been observing. His report was
published at the end of October and the government promised to implement its
proposal to clarify the law to help teachers to deal with unruly pupils.
The British crime survey's most recent findings suggest that the rate of
violence against teachers has dropped by more than 40 per cent in the past
eight years. Drawing on its results, Home Office researchers discovered
that, in 2002 and 2003, 1 per cent of teachers were physically attacked at
work. Between 1994 and 1998 the level of assaults on teachers was almost
twice as high, running at 1.8 per cent. Verbal threats against teachers have
also fallen, the survey found; 2 per cent of teachers reported the problem
each year between 1994 and 1998, but by 2002-03 that figure had dropped to
1.2 per cent.
This will come as no surprise to Alan Steer, the Seven Kings' headmaster,
known in the press as the 'behaviour tsar'. His is an outer London school
with an intake of average academic ability and mixed ethnicity. Outside the
school, pupils encounter crime, gangs, mugging: the evils of urban living.
Inside, there is an air of calm purposefulness that looks effortless but is
not. 'I would say behaviour standards here are immeasurably higher than when
I came in 1985,' he says. 'There is less fighting, less aggression, less
acceptance of aggression. I'm not saying I think Ilford has changed for the
better. But I think the success of this school is in keeping street culture
outside.'
There is a view in the school that violence and aggression are not the way
to solve disputes. Usually, the pupils at Seven Kings subscribe to it, as do
most of their parents. Steer says: 'I think schools are much kinder places
than they used to be. But what unfortunately has also happened is that
society has changed and schools are having to meet different challenges. I
think there are issues about parenting. If you asked, you might well find
the kids here rarely if ever sit down with their parents to eat a meal, for
example... But I fundamentally believe schools can make a difference. Kids
live up to certain expectations.'
Steer does not feel he experienced, during his own teaching career, the
golden age of deference and strict discipline in which so many politicians
believe.
Nor do I. The school I attended in the 1970s - a big, largely middle-class,
successful comprehensive which had until recently been a grammar school -
still had corporal punishment, which was meted out for quite minor offences
from unruly behaviour to smoking. There was a workaday level of violence in
my school that would not be acceptable today. Disputes were often settled
with pre-arranged fisticuffs. The teachers were only marginally more humane.
I can recall on one occasion a shy boy being reduced to tears by a sadist of
a history master who made him stand for a long period on a chair in the
middle of his class as retribution for a perceived bit of minor rudeness. I
myself was less traumatised by the hour I spent locked in a windowless
stockroom after being cheeky to a teacher. Does anyone want a return to this
brutality?
Better, surely, to do what good schools do now, and to try to keep the
corridors and classrooms calm through high expectations, constantly
reinforced. Arrive at Seven Kings at 8.30 any morning and you will find one
of the senior teachers on the gates, greeting pupils as they arrive:
'Morning, Mohammed! Good result in the football last night! Hello, Donna!
How's your sister getting on? Sanjay, tuck your shirt in! Thank you...' This
reinforcement of little things like uniform rules, coupled with a sense that
the staff like the kids, keeps the big things at bay.
In a single week at his school in East Anglia, James McLeod encountered
several instances of verbal abuse and aggression. Are children in East
Anglia worse behaved than those in Ilford? It seems unlikely. McLeod said
that his school had recently failed an Ofsted inspection. That's a clue to
where the problem lay. At Seven Kings, a range of strategies is employed to
ensure that behaviour is under control. Pupils queue outside classrooms
before lessons, for example, entering only when the teacher tells them to -
so the chaotic scenes before 'sir' or 'miss' arrives are a thing of the
past. All classes are seated according to a plan devised by their teacher,
so that the most unruly pupils do not sit together.
There is a well-developed pastoral system, so classroom teachers never feel
they are alone in dealing with a difficult child. Year heads are on hand to
deal with incidents, and if they are serious the child is sent home until
the parents come in to talk about his or her behaviour.
There is an acceptance that children will be children. Steer is relaxed when
I tell him about Jamil and his chair-kicking. 'It was bad,' he says. 'But it
isn't an assault. It's a kid losing his temper. It's easier to relate to
pupils if you remember they're children. Sometimes children don't behave
rationally.' He wouldn't want to suggest that Seven Kings' pupils are all
paragons. There are a number whose behaviour causes serious concern. They
are watched closely, their 'temperature' taken several times a day.
Seven Kings' head of pastoral support is Doug Harrison, who arrived in 1975
when the school, formerly Beal girls' grammar, merged with Downshall boys'
secondary modern.
He has seen changes, not all for the better. Peer pressure is stronger now,
he says. 'Kids on their own are one thing. Kids with their mates are
different. How you deal with that is important. You have to get them away
from their immediate surroundings, you ask them to come for a chat.
Discipline is about investing time in kids.'
Another of Harrison's jobs is to support new teachers. McLeod complained
that he had had hardly any guidance on how to manage pupils' behaviour
before he was put in front of a class. So his experience illustrates what
can go wrong when a school does not have a strategy to deal with bad
behaviour.
Recent surveys of newly qualified teachers by the Training and Development
Agency for Schools show that about one-third of respondents feel their
training in this area is only adequate or less than adequate. However,
two-thirds feel it is good or very good - and that figure has been rising.
The agency's assistant director of initial teacher training, Jacquie Nunn,
says the agency has launched a project to support teachers, entitled
Behaviour4Learning, and more than 100,000 items have been downloaded from
its website in under a year.
in a report on managing behaviour earlier this year the schools'
inspectorate Ofsted commented that more needed to be done to make newly
qualified teachers feel confident in the classroom. The one or two sessions
during their initial training were not enough, it felt.
Philip Garner, head of postgraduate teacher education at University College
Northampton and director of Behaviour4Learning, says teachers not confident
enough to deal with bad behaviour can let their whole school down. 'If a
teacher walks past trouble, goes in the other direction, the kids notice.
They know who those teachers are and they don't respect them. Staff know who
they are as well, and have utter disdain for them because they don't support
the whole enterprise of trying to establish an environment which has shape
and order.'
Nationally, the number of permanent exclusions has been rising once more
after falling for several years. Nearly 10,000 pupils were removed from
schools in 2003-04, which was 6 per cent more than the previous year but
still 20 per cent less than in 1997-98.
So are things getting much worse thanks to the decline of home life and the
pervasiveness of a transgressive popular culture? Or are pupils just as much
trouble as they always were and a lot less trouble where schools get the
behaviour strategy right? The experiences of Seven Kings suggest there are
few problems that cannot be overcome with good leadership and hard work.
The recent report of Steer's group on behaviour acknowledges this.'It is
often the case,' it says, 'that for pupils, school is a calm place in a
disorderly world.'
Education: the good news
Violence: In a recent survey of 2,500 teachers commissioned by the NUT,
almost a third of respondents said they suffered some form of physical
assault at least once a year. The British Crime Survey, however, said the
rate of violence against teachers has dropped by more than 40 per cent in
the past eight years.
Literacy:Literacy is at its highest for 15 years, according to a study by
Cambridge Assessment, which found teenagers have superior writing abilities,
a wider vocabulary and more accurate spelling, punctuation and sentence
structures than their predecessors.
.
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