This is a rewritten version of an entry that has appeared previously but is no longer available. Apologies if you have read it before.

… If a healthy body is a good in itself, why is not a healthy intellect? and if a College of Physicians is a useful institution, because it contemplates bodily health, why is not an Academical Body, though it were simply and solely engaged in imparting vigour and beauty and grasp to the intellectual portion of our nature?

Newman (1873)

Most public services have a clear aim in mind. The police are meant to deal with crime and protect the public. The health service is meant to treat the ill and improve public health. The fire brigade are meant to put out fires. However the education system lacks a clearly defined aim. Yes, we know we are meant to educate the young, but there isn’t a consensus on what “educating” is and how we can tell when it’s been done. In particular the purpose of education is disputed. According to Brouillette (1996) there are four main schools of thought as to the purpose of education:

1. Humanist. From this point of view the ends of education are cultural and education is a process by which we gain the skills and knowledge to be informed and rational citizens of our culture.
2. Social Efficiency. This is where education equips us for gainful employment and therefore serves the economic interests of society.
3. Developmentalist. Here, education develops our potential as individuals, those attributes that are desirable to possess regardless of culture and employment prospects. The ends of education are therefore largely personal.
4. Social Meliorist. This approach highlights the social benefits of education. A Social Meliorist seeks to improve society, in particular to make it more just, through education.

What these approaches require in practice allows for a remarkable amount of overlap. I would argue that it is possible to define aims for learning that go a long way to meeting several of these purposes at once. A literate, numerate individual capable of self-control is required for both the Humanist and Social Efficiency approach. Any likely dispute between those two approaches is going to be over the point at which the skills and knowledge a student learns are to be specifically vocational rather than academic.

If students from the most deprived backgrounds are to be included among those educated to the point of being literate, numerate individuals capable of self control then many Social Meliorist aims would also be met. After all there are clear links between poverty and educational failure. However, while I am happy to see social improvement as being about ending poverty and the existence of an underclass plenty of people involved in education don’t. Philosophically, I’m a “Rawlsian” here and see social justice in the sense used by Rawls (1973) as improving the condition of the worst off (”levelling up”). A lot of the people with influence over education have a “levelling down” view of social justice where it is not enough to improve the lot of the worst off but it is also necessary to worsen the conditions of the better off, often by closing any school seen as offering an “unfair advantage”. However, I would argue that it is not the purpose of education to make any social group less advantaged in terms of learning anymore than it should be the purpose of the health service to make any social group less healthy.

That leaves the Developmentalist approach. Of course it could be argued that the aim of creating literate, numerate individuals capable of self-control meets the aim of helping individuals reach their potential. In practice most Developmentalist approaches would go further – defining potential by reference to a particular ideological view of human development. Some of these viewpoints can, like the more extreme Social Meliorist approaches, be dismissed as inappropriate for an education system aiming to serve all sectors of society including those that don’t share a particular ideology. However, there is still a large amount of room for debating the finer points of the question “what type of human being should education produce?”

I suggested before that if students were to leave school literate, numerate and capable of self-control then much of the purposes of education would be met. The question regarding what academic and vocational knowledge is required remain unanswered, as does the question of what other attributes we would want from the educated. However, if we look at the tough schools I have been talking about in in this blog we shouldn’t have to concern ourselves with these issues, because the schools are failing to meet even the minimum standards. We don’t need to consider whether French is more important than Latin, or whether biology is better for children than history for it to be possible to identify a failure in education where large number of those leaving the system are unable to read, write or behave like civilised human beings. It is from that point of view that I suggest our current education system is a failure, and discuss why that should be so and what can be done about it.

References:

Brouillette, Liane. A Geology of School Reform, SUNY, 1996
Newman, John Henry, The Idea of a University, University of Notre Dame, 1982 (1873)
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, Oxford, 1973

This is another one for the “if you have never taught in a bad school you might think this is trivial” file. The problem I’m about to go over probably happens in all schools, what makes it significant is entirely the scale of it in my day-to-day teaching life.

The problem is this: Kids throw things at each other.

Now this is a problem because it is constant, not because every child does it but because a significant number of students do it, and a small minority do it continually. You can punish when you see it, but for some students if they have something to throw they will wait until the teacher looks away and then throw at every opportunity. (I mean that literally, so potentially every two minutes for an entire day). Looking at it from the point of view of another student, just imagine what it is like to be in a classroom where at any moment you can have something thrown at you.

Some teachers set a detention whenever they see it happen. In a bad school the worst offenders are in the detention immune category and will not be deterred. You have little choice but to accept the inclination to throw as an inevitable fact of life, or teach in a way where you never look at a book or an individual but constantly survey the whole class.

So what do we do about the problem?

Well, it comes down to controlling the ammunition. Students collect a variety of things to throw:

1. Plant-life. This is among the worse, berries, twigs and general detritus. Students are too lazy to bend down so they won’t usually collect stones, except to throw immediately, but they will strip hedges and trees of potential projectiles. All you can do is watch out for students stood next to hedges and trees and force them to drop their ammunition before they get to the classroom.
2. Stationery and equipment. Fortunately in a tough school no student ever brings in their own stationary so teachers can control this one. Teachers must be careful never to lend out certain items except under close supervision. Staplers can be stripped of staples, glue-sticks can have their glue picked out, erasers can be thrown as a whole or broken to pieces first. Pencils with erasers on the end should be avoided, as should pens with lids or smaller parts. Activities that involve using small objects are avoided (so very few experiments in science are allowed, and no dice or coin-throwing in maths). Rulers, protractors, compasses and calculators must be as robust as possible. Colouring pencils and pens are never lent out (all shading is to be done in pencil).
3. Paper. This is a very common one as it is in no short supply in schools. There has to be a very firm set of rules regarding it. Punishments must be given for tearing paper out of books or for passing notes. Worksheets must be kept to a minimum and always have names written on them as soon as they are handed out. Paper is often very unsatisfactory as ammunition, you need quite a lot of it to create a paper ball big enough to be noticed. The usual tactic to compensate for this is to chew it and fire it through a pen that has been adapted for the purpose. (The removed parts of the pen can then be used for throwing too).
4. Food and sweets. In classrooms food and sweets have to be banned. Outside, it must be tightly regulated. It is entirely unremarkable to see students buy a cake from the school canteen and go into the playground and without taking one bite break off pieces and throw them until there is no cake left. Problems with gulls and rats are quite common in school playgrounds.
5. Classroom Items. Teachers have to make their classrooms as bare as possible. No spare sheets of paper left out, no interesting tactile objects, no equipment left out in a tray. Drawing pins cannot be used for display work and blu-tack can only be used on posters high up on the walls. No classroom feature, such as blinds or heaters can have breakable parts.

All this seems like it might be overkill. I wish it was. The simple fact is there are kids in schools for whom this behaviour is habit. You know you have established your authority in the school when you can turn your back on kids without being hit with a missile.

Until you are truly feared then, student or staff, you can expect to be a target. If you’re lucky it will be a ball of paper or a berry. If you are unlucky it will be a calculator or a rock.

I am writing to inform any PE teachers reading this about a great new innovation in PE teaching. In the old days teachers tended to assume that the only way to learn football was to play it, and the only way to develop as a sprinter would be to do some running. Now we know that this is not how people learn.

Just as other subjects were changed by the discovery of Multiple Intelligences and the development of different Learning Styles, we can now make similar changes to PE teaching.

Scientists have discovered that there is no such thing as physical fitness. It turns out that instead of some people being fitter than others we all have Multiple Fitnesses. The Theory of Multiple Fitnesses has shown that people are better at some physical activities than others, which is something that nobody ever knew before. So for instance, a child may have one of eight fitnesses:

• Running-Really-Fast Fitness
• Lifting-Heavy-Things Fitness
• Jumping Fitness
• Ball-Games Fitness
• Running-Long-Distances fitness
• Dancing Fitness
• Swimming Fitness
• Playing-Darts Fitness

There may also be other fitnesses that can soon be added to the list once sports scientists have adequately researched them, such as Ass-Whooping Fitness and Drinking-Ten-Pints-And-Not-Throwing-Up Fitness.

We can assume that each of these Fitnesses has a corresponding learning style. So for instance a child with Running-Really-Fast Fitness will learn best by running away from their PE teacher screaming, a child with Lifting-Things Fitness will learn most if they are holding a 40kg weight, and a child with Dancing Fitness will learn more if they are wearing tights. As PE teachers we need to adjust our lesson planning each child’s individual learning style.

First we must identify their learning style. The most effective way to discover what physical abilities somebody has (a method we hope the Olympic selectors will switch to in the near future) is to give them a multiple-choice questionnaire about what they like doing, and then getting them to colour in a bar-chart. We can then split them into different classes based on their learning styles.

So for instance, in the old unscientific days we would have taught children to run the hundred metres by using the traditional method of getting them all to run for a hundred metres. Now we know better and can get them to run one hundred metres in a way suited to their individual learning style:

Students with a Running-Really-Fast Learning Style: These students will run from one end of the track to the other in the traditional fashion.

Students with a Lifting-Heavy-Things Learning Style: These will be expected to grunt heavily while running and have to carry a medicine ball.

Students with a Jumping Learning Style: students with this learning style will be expected to leap from one end of the track to the other.

Students with a Ball-Games Learning Style: These will be expected to dribble a ball while they are running, and will be encouraged to go faster by the other students running up behind them and making sliding tackles.

Students with a Running-Long-Distances Learning Style: These students should mainly follow the traditional method, but the track will be located three miles away from the school.

Students with a Dancing Learning Style: They will be expected to run with a backing of Salsa music and will be expected to pirouette on the starting block.

Students with a Swimming Learning Style: This is a difficult one to organise, but we hope to be able to flood the athletics track before they run it.

Students with a Playing-Darts Learning Style: This is close to the traditional method, but the students will drink three pints of lager and eat a packet of pork-scratchings before they start.

Once these innovations have been followed by all schools across the country I confidently predict Britain will have unprecedented Olympic success. Our only worry is that they may be unsympathetic to the Dosing-Yourself-With-Anabolic-Steroids Learning Style our experts are currently researching.

This is a rewritten version of an entry that has appeared previously but is no longer available. Apologies if you have read it before.

Most countries manage to keep a lid on the behaviour in their schools. We can tell this from the shocked faces of staff and students who arrive from overseas as they see what British education is actually like. (A friend of mine worked with refugees and discovered that more than one family left Britain to face persecution and possible torture in their homeland rather than put their children through the British education system). A few generations back we also managed to stay short of the current anarchy. To excuse the situation we are in now it takes a certain amount of deceit. The following lies are the ones I’ve encountered most often.

Lie Number 1:“If your lessons are good enough you won’t have any discipline problems.”
Who’s told me this lie: PGCE lecturers, OFSTED, LEA consultants, teachers from posh schools.
The Truth: Pupils don’t misbehave because you haven’t met their high pedagogical standards. The kind of kids that cause most disruption would consider any lesson where they can’t adjust their make-up, discuss their sex lives, and try and make one of the shyer kids cry as unsatisfactory. In fact one of the things most likely to make them kick off is seeing the rest of the class learning. The worst kids are a problem before you’ve even tried to teach them. They don’t care about the lesson and they don’t have a reason for misbehaving. They misbehave because they can.

Lie Number 2: “Discipline is all about relationships.”
Who’s told me this lie: Senior managers in schools where senior managers don’t do anything about discipline.
The Truth: A relationship is not one way. Students choose whether they have a good relationship with an adult. If the discipline system isn’t tough enough they will take every opportunity to have bad relationships. In tough schools you get hassle from kids you’ve never met. Complete strangers will yell abuse or throw things at you. There is no relationship there to be a problem. Moreover they will look for easy targets – the people management won’t support. In some schools that’s new staff, in some schools that’s particular departments. When I worked in the Woodrow Wilson School and SMT had fallen out with my department, they declared that all the teachers in it had problems forming relationships with the kids. It was considered more plausible that ten teachers all had the same failing, than that the consistent efforts of SMT to undermine the department might actually have had an effect on the kids’ behaviour.

Lie Number 3: “I’m sorry.”
Who’s told me this lie: Kids (usually accompanied by somebody more senior than myself.)
The Truth: When they say “I’m sorry” they actually mean “I’m not sorry at all, but somehow you’ve actually managed to get me into trouble with one of the few people with any power in this school. While they are here I will apologise but the moment they are gone I will make it entirely clear that it was your fault that I am in trouble and that I take no responsibility for my own actions. Moreover I reserve the right to do the action I am apologising for again, along with far worse behaviour, at the very next opportunity”. At Stafford Grove School one of the kids who apologised for his “uncharacteristic” poor behaviour when accompanied by the Head (“David’s not so bad”) was arrested later in the year for burgling the school and was last seen by me sneaking onto school grounds with a can of beer in his hand, accompanied by several other students no longer on the school roll, no doubt looking for chocolate and valuables to steal.

Lie Number 4: “We can’t do anything with him/her at home either”
Who’s told me this lie: Parents of obnoxious brats who I have foolishly phoned looking for help.
The Truth: Of course you can do something. You could stop paying for their mobile phone until they stop using it in lessons. You could cancel their Christmas presents. You could take that TV set out of their bedroom and lock the Playstation in the cupboard. Parents have a hundred times more punishments available than teachers. That said, parents have more to put up with too, so maybe the problem actually lies with the idea that teachers (the professionals) should rely on parents (amateurs) when trying to get schoolchildren to do what they’re told.

Lie Number 5: “Well we can’t expect too much. They are just kids.”
Who’s told me this lie: Teachers making excuses for the anarchy around them.
The Truth: No, they are not “just kids”. In many cultures they’d be considered adults by now. Many of them are as big as adults. Unless they suffer from a severe form of mental illness they should be able to be quiet. They should be able to listen for ten minutes. They should be able to avoid hitting others or verbally abusing them. Children of the same age in many other cultures manage it. Children of the same age in our culture used to be able to manage it. The problem is this has been thrown away due to the belief that controlling others is wrong and that even self-control is wrong. This lie is made twice as bad when the politics of class are brought into it. Not only are children too immature to behave like human beings, they are too poor. I’m not going to pretend that deprived areas don’t have their own problems, but having one or two kids from single parent families does not mean that you are in the ghetto. Woodrow Wilson school had supportive parents who would (both) come in on parents evening and tell you how puzzled they were that their child had started behaving badly since they started at the school. Many of them were Asian but a fair few were white middle class too as you would expect in the suburbs. Yet to hear the school’s SMT talk you’d think we were in The Hood. “You have to understand” said Gary (the school’s third head since I got there) “these aren’t middle class parents we’re dealing with” when one of the non-attenders at parents’ evening tried to blame me for their son not doing his coursework. I didn’t think to ask him “If they are not middle class parents why are they all living in houses twice the size of mine?”

This is a rewritten version of an entry that has appeared previously but is no longer available. Apologies if you have read it before.

To quote from the BBC:

One third of employers have to give their staff remedial lessons in basic English and maths, a survey suggests. Managers said staff needed to be able to use correct spelling and grammar and should be competent in simple mental arithmetic without a calculator. One in five employers said non-graduate recruits of all ages struggled with literacy or numeracy.

And similarly from the Guardian:

Universities are dismayed by the poor levels of literacy and numeracy among school leavers who arrive in higher education expecting to be “spoon-fed”, according to a new study. Tutors at 16 universities - including Oxford and Cambridge - complained that many school leavers lacked a good grip of grammar and had a “fear of numbers”.

And also from the BBC:

Britain is in danger of becoming a nation fearful of its young people, a report has claimed …… British adults were more likely than their other European counterparts to say that young people were predominantly responsible for anti-social behaviour, and cite “lack of discipline as the root cause of anti-social behaviour”. The Britons who were unwilling to get involved claimed they feared being physically attacked or verbally abused - or that they would be the victim of subsequent reprisals.

None is this will come as a surprise to the average teacher. For many teachers what we see in schools is pupils who haven’t learnt, won’t learn and won’t behave. The idea that schools leavers will lack basic skills and that many young people are acting like thugs is taken for granted.

Teachers do differ in what they believe the causes are. The parents, modern society and the media are often blamed. For teachers who went to grammar schools themselves the children seem so different from those they remember when they were at school that only a change in society could explain the spawning of a generation of uncooperative sociopaths. However, for those of us that went to “bog standard comprehensives” (or worse), today’s young don’t seem any more cruel, lazy or ignorant than our own generation.

What has changed is that behaviour we remember from the playground now takes place in the classroom, not only in front of teachers but sometimes with teachers as the victims. What has changed is that the unwillingness to learn has become blatant and public, and is most often manifested by a complete refusal to comply with anything a teacher asks a child to do. What has changed is that the swearing, fighting and bullying that once would have happened in those areas of the school hidden from the prying eyes of teachers (for instance the toilets or the bike sheds) now happens out in the open. When I was at school, kids used to hide from the teachers. Now, I more often see teachers hiding from the kids.

In this new environment it is no wonder that students can choose to go through school without learning. Faced with the worst forms of behaviour many teachers have long since ceased requiring all students to work or even to listen. I’m sure I’m not the only teacher who has been told by pupils who are unused to the act of learning “You don’t teach us properly, you just tell us what we need to know”. Some children will react with shock and anger at being presented with new material to learn. Some children are amazed that listening is expected, or reading, or writing. In fact for many children it is a huge surprise if anything happens in the classroom which prevents them from continuing the conversations they started at break. This isn’t a change in society. This is a change in schools. Somehow we have a culture in many schools where pupils are not expected to learn, not expected to behave, and not expected to exercise responsibility for themselves.

I don’t believe this is a result of social change. I don’t believe this is a fact of nature. I believe this is a result of the education system we have. I believe it’s time that system was changed.

“How lucky you English are to find the toilet so amusing. For us, it is a mundane and functional item. For you, the basis of an entire culture.”

Von Richthoven (Adrian Edmondson), Blackadder Goes Forth, 1989

Simple, insignificant things become complicated at tough schools. You are constantly supervising dozens of students who have no social or moral restraint when it comes to causing harm to others or thwarting the purposes of the school. Something as insignificant as allowing a student out of the classroom to go to the toilet becomes a potential threat to learning which has to be evaluated, dealt with and, more often than not, justified.

There are several reasons why teachers can’t just let students answer the call of nature:

• There is often a problem of internal truancy. Students who should be in lessons stay in the corridors. Sometimes they play games or attempt to intimidate passers-by. Every so often they disrupt lessons by running in to classrooms or reaching in and switching off the lights. Often they write graffiti or look for things to break. Any student allowed out of lessons risks swelling their ranks.
• There are students who will ask to go to the loo every single lesson. This is not an exaggeration. At my school students have to ask at an office for a key to let them into the toilets. One of the women working in the office reported seeing the same girl five times during the average school day. (And no the girl didn’t have a medical complaint other than a severe allergy to school work).
• There are classes where up to half the students will ask to go to the loo. In some year groups asking to go to the toilet when they are presented with hard work has become an automatic response. Once one child has asked the many others will also ask. Sometimes many will have notes from their parents claiming a medical condition.
• There is an ongoing problem of toilets being vandalised. I mentioned before that school toilets are unpleasant. Much of this is down to vandalism or actions that have been taken to prevent vandalism (like removing all soap or paper towels).

For these reasons most schools advise teachers to refuse to let students out except in emergencies or where they have a medical note. Sure enough, most requests can be refused without a problem, as the child never really needed to go. However, there are always going to be children have a genuine need who may be at risk of “an accident” or who will be unable to work unless they do go. Inevitably teachers end up with a set of rules and regulations of their own invention to govern who does or doesn’t go which they explain to their class. (By “teachers” I mean people who are actually trying to teach. There are people employed as teachers who will often let large groups of students out of their lessons for half an hour or more without really caring). My rules are as follows:

• Students will wait until a part of the lesson of my choice. Partly this is so they don’t miss important explanations, but also students often lose interest in going after a few minutes.
• Each student will only get out once in every half-term. This really cuts down traffic. Many students are embarrassed to ask or fear the corridor dwellers and so it is often just a small proportion of students who will ask without first seeing anybody else let out, so after the first couple of weeks you hardly have to let anybody out.
• Only one student is allowed out of the room at a time for any reason. This is common sense but ignored surprisingly often. I make sure to apply it even if the student already out of the room is outside for another reason (like they walked out in a tantrum).
• If there is a medical reason I expect to see a letter signed by the child’s form tutor and if it occurs more than once then I will report it to the child’s year head. Amazingly some medical complaints vanish when faced with this obstacle.
• The child must have been working properly before they leave. It is telling that this sometimes works as a good incentive to get students learning.
• Students are never allowed out in the first or last ten minutes of the lesson. This is when the largest number of students will be out and about in the corridor and when they are most likely to disrupt other lessons.

Now this is just an example of how teachers have to plan in order to function as teachers. Equally complex concerns and routines affect every aspect of classroom life from lending equipment to setting homework. This kind of intellectual development should be advertised as a reason to go into teaching. No wonder the Teacher Development Agency has adopted the slogan: “Use your head, teach”. Of course, the possibility exists that years of having to treat a trip to the loo like it was a potential crime against humanity has not made me use my head but has actually made me lose my mind. Perhaps the next time Jade asks if she can go to the toilet ten minutes after the end of break then I will use my head as something to bang on the wall until I pass out.

This is a rewritten version of an entry that has appeared previously but is no longer available. Apologies if you have read it before.

The worst news in teaching seems to arrive at the most inconvenient times. Friday afternoon, while preparing for an imminent lesson with bottom set year ten, is not a good time for anything. But that was when my Head Of Department at Stafford Grove School, Mertha, decided to tell me I was changing classrooms. This meant:

• I would have to spend hours moving.
• All the preparation of my own room that I had already done was a waste of time.
• I would have to use a room with an incredibly inconvenient lay-out.

If I thought I’d had a choice I would have refused point-blank. It turns out another member of the department had refused and threatened to leave rather than move down the corridor. As ever, I accepted my lot.

I knew the corridor through the department was unruly. I’d raised it at the very first department meeting of the year. In particular I’d pointed out that:

• The “one-way system” in the corridor was never obeyed or enforced.
• The lights were constantly being switched off.
• The corridor was being used by approximately half the school population during lesson change-overs.

Of course my comments were ignored by Mertha and by Claire, the Deputy Head, who was also at the meeting.

It was only after I’d moved to the middle of the corridor that I learnt just how bad the situation was. Right away I discovered that my year 11 classes had no intention of going the correct way down the corridor and that at the end of the school day children would congregate outside my classroom in front of the fire escape. A few weeks later, I discovered that the fire escape was the main method of entrance to the building for students skipping classes and ex-students sneaking on to the site for purposes of petty theft. I discovered this when another teacher left my door unlocked and I returned to find my desk had been kicked in and every item of value removed from the drawers (admittedly that consisted only of chocolate bars and gel pens I’d been storing as bribes …. I mean prizes for my form). As a result I also learnt that although there were CCTV cameras at both ends of the corridor, there were none on my room or the fire exit next to it. In a similar way, I would later learn that bolting the fire exit to stop students breaking the rules by coming into the building through it was a violation of health and safety rules. Because different year groups had lunch at different times this guaranteed that during any lesson taught for one year group during another year group’s lunchtime ten or twenty kids would accumulate loudly in the corridor outside my classroom, waiting for whichever lessons would follow mine.

However, the repeated disruption and the many incidents of theft and vandalism that my classroom was subjected were not the worst part of being in the middle classroom in the Corridor of Death. The many inconveniences of the classroom itself, such as the seating arrangements that prevented students from being clearly visible, or the Interactive Whiteboard that didn’t actually work were also not the worst part. The true threat from the corridor was a more simple one: violence. Not long after moving rooms I saw a couple of the most emotionally disturbed students attempting to go the wrong way down the corridor when it was at its most crowded. In the resulting scrimmage a couple of more experienced members of staff actually took part in the physical restraining of the two students (to the shouts of “you can’t do that” from Lunatic A and Lunatic B). A few weeks later my own efforts to convince my year 11s from taking a short cut by going the wrong way down the corridor soon established that other people’s year 11s would just push past me. As the weeks went on I realised pushing and shoving of teachers was commonplace in the corridor. One tall male pupil pushed a female teacher up against the wall and held her there. Teachers began hiding in their classrooms.

As ever in teaching the first rule of behaviour management applied: “Whatever is normal is acceptable”. The corridor became the place to cause chaos. At the bottom of the corridor there was a door to the roof, and before too long it was broken open and it started to became my duty to remove students from the roof. The violence became so normal that I looked up the rules on using physical restraint and began weighing in, physically pushing kids out of the fire exit when safety and order required it (as ever to the cry of “you can’t do that”). One year ten boy started turning up after school, standing outside my classroom and pushing and shoving to get in. After the third incident in which he assaulted me I managed to get him suspended. It turned out that nothing had been done about the previous two incidents – I’d foolishly reported them using the school discipline system.

The assaults from this boy were a key part of my decision to leave the school. Once I’d got a job elsewhere I felt far happier to ignore the chaos outside my room. The school’s Senior Management Team (SMT) didn’t care – I’d seen the Head let kids walk the wrong way down the corridor – so why should I enforce the rules there? However it was only a matter of time before SMT would notice the violence in the corridor and look for teachers to blame. I was eating my lunch in the department office when the Assistant Head turned up to say the noise in the corridor was interrupting his lesson. He suggested that two colleagues and I give up our lunch to take shifts patrolling the corridor. I pointed out that:

• It was not our job.
• We had lessons to prepare.
• None of us were being paid to organise lunch duties.
• Every person who was paid to manage the department was safely hidden on the other side of the school as they were every lunch break.

He left, and the following day Claire called me in to her office to complain about my lack of cooperation. I pointed out that I’d raised the problem of the corridor at the start of the year. I pointed out that nobody patrolled it during my lessons. I pointed out that I was not being paid to organise lunch duties. Somehow, her efforts to tell me off ended up with her agreeing to raise the issue of supervision of the corridor at the next SMT meeting. Of course, nothing will ever actually be done. But with me long gone the Corridor of Death becomes the responsibility of the next generation of teachers in the department at Stafford Grove School. Curiously they mainly seem to be supply teachers on temporary contracts.

I can’t imagine why they can’t retain permanent staff.

It is somewhat debatable as to whether detentions have much effect. However, where they are ineffective it often has more to do with wider issues about the school.

Non-Attendance. This is one of the biggest problems with detentions. Bad schools have bad detention systems. Teachers often have no way of getting kids to turn up and no support when they don’t turn up. With a centralised system, detentions are often cancelled for arbitrary reasons or due to parental interference. It’s an every day event for a teacher to be told, on giving a detention, “I won’t be doing it”.

Students Who Don’t Care About Detentions. In all discussion of punishment (even when referring back to the days of corporal punishment) somebody will claim there are pupils who continue to misbehave regardless of how much they are punished. Every school I’ve ever worked in has had students who would get detentions every day. However, contrary to the claims that they have “got used to detentions so it isn’t a deterrent any more” very, very few of those students actually turn up and do those detentions. In tough schools there are large numbers of “outlaws” who owe thirty or more detentions and simply never do them. This comes down to SMT not doing their job, failing to exclude or isolate students who simply cannot behave in a learning environment. The number of students who actually attend detentions every day for a month is miniscule.

Lack of support from Management. It’s a fact of life in tough schools that teachers who set lots of detentions will be put under pressure to stop. Of course SMT never put it that bluntly, they never say “What are you doing enforcing school rules? Don’t you realise that we don’t care what kids are doing?” it’s usually far more patronising: “Have you tried other strategies for behaviour management?” or the quiet word with a line manager: “There seem to be a lot of detentions in your department”. Of course, SMT’s hostility to teachers setting detentions is mainly to do with the fact that it creates work for them, either in overseeing a centralised detention system, or dealing with referrals for students who refuse to attend, or who tell teachers who give them detentions to “Fuck off”. The best technique for dealing with managers who interfere with your detention-setting is to create extra work for them in response. Asking if they can observe your lessons, requesting to speak to them at length about the discipline policy (with your union rep present), offering to co-operate with anything they suggest but not actually changing what you are doing in the process, tend to work best. At the very least if you admit that you are in need of further help with classroom management you might get a couple of days off for a training course.

Lack of Time. In a lot of schools it would be physically impossible to give out the number of detentions indicated by the discipline policy. Even a smaller number aimed at enforcing a fairly minimal standard of good behaviour may still be impractical. The usual problems are teachers having to organise detentions themselves, lack of places in the school to hold the detentions (which won’t be repeatedly interrupted by other students), after-school meetings and problems with behaviour in detentions that make it difficult to have more than one student in detention at a time.

So with all these problems it can be difficult to see the point of setting detentions. But the pay-off is never with the insane kids, it’s never with your worst classes, it’s never with management. It’s with the troublesome, but not actually insane kids, the disruptive but not actually abusive classes, and it’s with the parents who actually want their children to learn and are willing to tell the school they want their child in your class because that’s where they will get to learn. There’s few things more satisfying in teaching than having a gang of kids back away from whatever act of destruction or intimidation they are engaged in when you get out your notebook, or having somebody else’s Class From Hell go silent when you have them for a cover, simply because even kids you don’t recognise know exactly where they stand with you.

(Oh and the one thing that is even more satisfying than having the above happen is when it happens in front of the member of SMT who told you your large number of detentions must show you are having trouble with behaviour management.)

Hello. This is the new location for the Scenes From The Battleground blog. Due to the demise of the INFET website I have had to find a new home here on edublogs.org

I am currently busy publicising this new location and sorting out the entries, some have suffered a little in the transfer (for instance some have changed my name to “James”) particularly where they were linked to other pages on INFET, but I will hope to get back to regular blogging ASAP. A small number of the older posts haven’t been transferred and I will be looking to revise and represent them. Apologies to anybody who had posted a comment that has now been lost due to the loss of INFET.

If you are new to this blog then allow me to reintroduce it:

It is intended to be an honest description of what is going on in secondary education in this country. The title of this blog indicates that I genuinely believe that education has become a battleground, or more accurately several different battlegrounds. Students who don’t want to study, managers who don’t want to manage, and even teachers who don’t want to teach are all too common obstructions for anyone that actually believes children should be learning in our schools. These everyday obstacles are combined with an entire education system that at every level doesn’t seem designed for education. For that reason it is often a fight to get to the point where the kind of teaching and learning, which would have been taken for granted less than a generation ago, can even take place.

This blog will detail both my personal experience of fighting the battle to teach and also my take on the system that has turned our schools into battlegrounds. I plan to include different types of writing throughout the blog. As well as those detailing my experiences as a secondary school teacher and will share opinions and advice related to this experience, other entries will discuss and comment on bigger issues relating to education, often in several parts under more general titles such as “Bad Ideas for Dealing with the Behaviour Crisis” and “The Laws Of Behaviour Management”.

I intend to rewrite and update the entries about the big issues (and this introduction) as I go. This is because over time I intend that they should form one single coherent viewpoint about the state of education today, and so as I develop my arguments further I may need to review what I have already written in light of further thoughts, and comments and discussion made about the content. I will bring any major redrafting to your attention when it happens.

The posts relating to personal experience I don’t intend to rewrite in any major way, although I will be grateful for any corrections to spelling and grammar. Please be aware that unlike most blogs these will not be in chronological order and wll not reflect the most recent events in my life as a teacher. They will mainly come from two different schools, the first is Woodrow Wilson School, a large city comprehensive with a very mixed intake where I taught immediately after I qualified. It went through a series of management changes and my time there was marked by infighting between Senior Management and the department I was working in, based on consistent efforts by Senior Management to blame all problems in the day to day running of the school on classroom teachers – the “culture of blame”. The second is Stafford Grove School, a school with a much more challenging intake but which had strong results when I joined. Over the time I was there I saw results tumble and my department fall apart and learnt first hand how complacency over discipline could create a disaster even in a school with a long history of effectiveness,

Finally I will be encouraging debate and discussion on the issues raised in my blog as I go. As well as the “comment” facility on the blog itself, I also intend to encourage discussion on the teacher forums I post to, particularly Opinion and Behaviour on TES. I look forward to reading your feedback.

Thank you.