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December 14, 2024 - 8:00am
The SNP’s record on education in Scotland is showing no sign of improving. New figures this week reveal that more than 40% of the country’s secondary pupils are still persistently absent from school, meaning that they miss more than 10% of lessons over the academic year. According to the annual Scottish Household Survey, public satisfaction with schools in Scotland has hit a record low, while the proportion of pupils who are severely absent, meaning that they miss more than 50% of lessons, is at an all-time high.
There are many potential reasons for pupils missing school: mental health problems, special educational needs, poverty exacerbated by the cost-of-living crisis, unauthorised holidays. However, these are all challenges faced by English pupils as well, and therefore do not explain why the proportion of persistently absent pupils is almost double in Scotland what it is in England.
Another reason to blame, though, which is more particular to Scotland, is what the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association calls the “aggression epidemic”. The sector is facing a crisis of poor behaviour, with a survey of almost 900 schools last year finding that two-thirds reported violent and aggressive incidents taking place on a daily basis. Another report from 2023 found that within the last week 67% of teachers had encountered verbal abuse between pupils, 59% had dealt with physical aggression, 43% had experienced physical violence, and 24% reported abuse towards special educational needs students. On the flip side, in 2022 school exclusions reached their lowest level since records began, while only 60% of teachers claim to use detentions at least “sometimes”.
Many are quick to claim that this deterioration in pupil behaviour is yet another hangover from Covid, but it is also the result of the disastrous “restorative justice” policy that has been in place since 2016. Education Scotland claims punishing pupils who misbehave “can be ineffective, dangerous, breed resentment and make situations worse”, and so has instead advised teachers to use constructive conversations and encourage pupils “to hear about and face up to the harm and distress they have caused”.
A relationships-based, non-punitive approach to behaviour management may sound compassionate, but in reality teachers do not have the training or time to implement this “conferencing” properly, and feel unable to set effective boundaries. Students quickly learn that there are no real consequences to their disruptive behaviour, and this has led to a situation in which half of Scottish parents now say they do not feel their child is safe in school.
Compare this to the “zero tolerance” approaches to behaviour at English institutions such as Michaela Community School, dubbed the “strictest school in Britain”, or King Solomon Academy. Both have persistent absence levels well below national proportions, despite also having disproportionately high numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. If the SNP wants to see attendance levels in schools improve, then it has to ensure students feel safe in the classroom. Pupils must be able to trust schools to provide them with a calm, orderly, positive environment that they may not get elsewhere. This will never happen unless Education Scotland changes its approach to behaviour, and stops sacrificing the educational experience of the majority in order to protect the disruptive minority.
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SubscribeOur kids school isn’t especially right-on but they introduced a form of restorative justice a few years back. If I’m being charitable I will say that it was a well-meaning attempt to deal constructively with persistent behaviour problems post-covid.
Whatever their motivations, the outcome was a farcical but helpful insight into how progressive education policies destroy everything in their path, except their proponents demands for more of them.
What struck me most as wrong with the approach is how much the designated responsible teachers get invested in the kids causing all the trouble. To the point where it’s almost inevitable that addressing any incidents becomes for them a matter of finding ways of excusing that child’s behaviour.
So you get the usual performative silliness, like the bullied child has to agree to a behaviour contract as well as the bully, even though they’ve done nothing wrong. Otherwise it’s might be seen to be stigmatising the bully.
Of course these kids causing the problems often come from backgrounds well practised in exploiting the desperate empathy of officialdom. They and their families know the angles.
Needless to say at the end of all this behaviour doesn’t improve, well behaved kids lose faith in the disciplinary system, and kids who want to learn still have to do so despite the constant disruptions of the troublemakers. But nobody in the teaching profession – except Katharine Birbalsingh – has the courage to stand up and say the obvious: the Emporer of progressive education has no clothes. They’re all too invested in their teachers pensions and scared of the activists.
A good summary of the problem. Although I’m not sure it is pension self-interest that drives the teachers.
Teachers are overwhelmingly female and females (my intersectional diversity training tells me!) are far more likely to conform to social pressures and submit to group consensus. Teachers are now all graduates too (a recent change) and entirely institutionalised within the education system, primed to simply copy and regurgitate learning to get rewards. Combined together we have a group conditioned and ready to submit to groupthink. Chuck in some highly motivated activists into this group and the groupthink orthodoxy will quickly resemble whatever those activists are pushing.
I’m not sure how, but the Russians must have done it. If you disagree, you are a Putin supporter!
Pretty much every current idea in education is terrible. My wife worked in child care for over 20 years. Every year she was restricted further in how she could deal with poor behaviour and every year she was given more pointless crap to type into a computer in the name of accountability but in reality in the event of litigation. And every year she had less time to spend with the children as a result.
She was loved by parents, children and her bosses. Everyone said how her kids were the best behaved, the most polite, the most ready to learn. That was because much of what she did was on the “Michaela” end of the scale rather than the “gentle parenting” end of the scale.
Kids will be off school in part because they don’t feel safe, part because they can’t learn with knackers ruining every class and partly because parents don’t want their kids turned into radical progressives.
The statistics make no sense. How can you have 80% of the people satisfied with their school, and 50% where children feel unsafe?
Also, it is not clear whether in the Scottish Household Survey they are polling only people with children in school, or who have recently left, or the whole of the population.
The statistics make perfect sense. Bad behaviour in schools is normalised. It is expected and rationalised. It has for many stopped being a differentiator of satisfaction and disatisfaction. As things deteriorate, we adjust our expectations. It is amazing how quick this acceptance is, and explains how entire organisations, nations and even civilisations can go down the pan not due to any existential external threats but internal decay and decadence. And what more decadent can you get than restorative justice, where aggressors are excused and victims are made to sign behaviour contracts.