July 22, 2024 - 3:30pm

Woe betide the silent majority of well-behaved children, who just lost any institutional support they had for learning in a quiet, safe and orderly environment. Labour education insiders have trailed a new slew of policies on behaviour, which look likely to replace the strict Tory school behaviour interventions with more cuddly ones focused on “inclusion” and tackling the “root causes” of disruption.

Opponents of policies such as silent corridors and “isolation” rooms argue that they are “cruel”, according to the Guardian, and fall most heavily on children who are poor, who have special educational needs, who come from chaotic homes, or are otherwise vulnerable. So instead of routine exclusion of disruptive pupils, Labour education minister Stephen Morgan has vowed to “get to grips with the causes of exclusions”.

It surely stands to reason that neurotypical children from happy, materially comfortable homes will be less likely to act up at school than those less fortunate. And from a progressive standpoint, policies that fall hardest on those already vulnerable are obviously bad. Who would disagree with wanting to include everyone?

Except the difficulty with this is that it assumes everyone can be included. And this is shaped by a progressive view of human nature that differs sharply from the conservative one. Are we a mix of good and bad instincts, capable of excellence but with flaws that need social management and sometimes to be kept in check by force? Or are we intrinsically good, with our true nature distorted only by an imperfect world of poverty, oppression, and injustice?

It’s ultimately a metaphysical question, with deep roots in religious tradition. Progressives, who view bad behaviour as a kind of mechanical byproduct of structural ills, will respond by focusing on trying to help those who they see as worst affected by impingements on their natural goodness. Conversely, the conservatives’ tragic view is that a capacity for mischief is baked into the human condition, which means that they will focus more on narrow measures that constrain it.

The reality is surely somewhere between the two. Any observant parent or teacher can see that children sometimes act up due to external factors, such as hunger, tiredness, or distress. But it’s also clear that children can act up for any number of other, less obviously structural reasons, such as a desire to test boundaries, to inflict suffering, or make their friends laugh. To claim that this never happens is to imply that children are mere automata.

And it’s not always easy to tell the difference. Given this, conservative efforts to constrain bad behaviour will invariably sometimes have the effect of “punishing” children for behaviour that is not, strictly speaking, their fault. But the progressive approach tends to respond with empathy, which will result in other, unacknowledged costs — in this case less on the individual than the rest of the group.

The progressive aim to remedy every structural ill would mean government intervention in every imaginable area of social life: an impossibly costly proposal even if guaranteed to work. Absent this, the usual effect of applying this model in schools is a presumption against coercive constraints on misbehaviour, underwritten by the school. Or, to put it more bluntly: a minority of unteachably chaotic children who monopolise school resources and wreck others’ learning, but can’t be expelled or even sent out of the classroom.

So we’d better hope that the £1 billion a year Labour hopes to raise by imposing VAT on private school fees is enough to pay for the limitless well of teaching assistants, youth workers, support programmes, parenting classes, and other state-sponsored structural remedies for misbehaviour, such that “vulnerable” children may be included in classrooms without negatively impacting learning for everyone else. Otherwise they will soon have a mutiny on their hands, among those middle-class parents who have suddenly found it 20% too expensive to vote with their feet.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

moveincircles