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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SubscribeThe 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.
Are you saying we learn to accept things like armed police officers at Christmas markets, machete fights in streets etc. Surely not!
Our 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 Emperor 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.
The underlying problem for many teachers is that they are confused about what constitutes truly loving care of children. Often, love is only truly caring when it is honest and tough. This is right; that is wrong. We (the adults) approve of this; we disapprove of that. You may behave like this at home, with our disapproval; here you do not. You may think solely of yourself at home, with our disapproval; here, you think of others first. You may get away with this at home; here, you will be reprimanded and possibly punished. Your parents may spoil you for that is their prerogative; we will treat you fairly but consistently firmly. Your home may be a castle; here we are a community caring for one another. You may believe we are intolerant; we are! of poor behaviour.
“Of course these kids causing the problems often come from backgrounds well practised in exploiting the desperate empathy of officialdom.”
In other words, they play the race and religion card mostly?
Not what I was referring to.
Most of the kids making most of the trouble come from families who are subject to multiple interventions by the state.
When your families lifestyle involves navigating the landscape of benefits, housing offices, social workers etc, you learn how to work your relationships with the state and it’s well-meaning but ineffectual officers to your own advantage.
I wasn’t attacking you – just trying to understand the euphemisms. It’s ok to point t fingers at racist minorities who play their skin privilege card. I suppose white poor can also do this but it’s no where near as effective.
This makes for depressing reading. Restorative justice is nothing more than prolonging the injustices perpetuated against the victim. Why should a bullied kid have sit down with their tormentor and engage in a negotiation? Maybe the Borstal system was brutal but at least it got all the basket cases away from other kids and stopped them from ruining everyone else’s education.
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.
My lodger’s best friend withdrew her kids from school because of woke and is home schooling them. Her 7 year old is a polite good-humoured young man with the makings of a chess prodigy, who is very kind towards his agreeably cheeky 3 year old sister, who is just beginning to learn to read.
The progressive left, which generally carries the liberal elite with it, is anything BUT progressive! Were they genuinely wanting to see vast improvements in outcomes for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds they would vehemently support schools such as Michaela. Of course, they hate it. The reason is that they don’t really want better educational outcomes; what they are after is better (meaning ‘like me’) political (meaning ‘sixth-form eyewash like me’) activist (meaning ‘anti-everything except me’) individuals (meaning ‘clones of me’). That doesn’t mean everything in education is rubbish! Far from it! It just means we need to correct the current imbalance.
Much of the education blob seems actively to WANT children NOT to learn anything. When I describe my formative experiences as a child half a century ago – starting Latin and French at 8, learning all the dates of the English monarchs from 1066 onwards, etc – these people always become defensive and disparaging. I’ve met a history postgrad who didn’t know whether the French Revolution happened before or after the American Civil War, an English teacher who couldn’t define a sonnet or a heroic couplet, and another whose pupils had never heard of let alone read Dickens. I wish I understood this mentality, but I really really don’t.
It’s hard to read behind these statistics. Is this a wave of aggression, or just behaviours which would have been considered pretty normal years ago.
Not so long ago, verbal abuse and physical fights would have been discouraged and broken up, but at the same time would have been considered entirely normal between children and adolescents. And there would have been no particularly heavy justice meted out by staff.
Im not saying this was good, and there was a failure to act on genuine cases of bullying, but it was not considered a matter for national concern.
The Left does not want to accept that humans are fundamentally driven by incentives. It is in our DNA. Ignoring this is to ignore gravity… Self indulgent spineless fools…
For decades schoolchildren have been taught to disrespect authority and have ever laxer standards of discipline in the classroom. Teachers are routinely told to “F— off!” if they remonstrate with disobedient or disruptive pupils; and they (the teachers) receive little or no support from overpaid heads and deputy heads so they have no choice but to tolerate such appalling behaviour (which would have resulted in summary expulsion in my day). The absence of discipline in the classroom is mirrored in the home and in society at large. The exponential growth of the Woke agenda in the last 5-10 years has further taught British schoolchildren to be ashamed of their history and heritage and to value alien cultures while vilifying their own. The classroom environment that abhors Shakespeare and deems mathematics to be a white, racist construct is what our offspring are faced with. Couple all that with a learning environment dominated by women teachers dripping misandry and hatred of the patriarchy over their charges, and it is little wonder that we wring our hands about the wider self-destructive ills that are now the hallmarks of our failed society.