Scenes From The Battleground

Charlene was at The Metropolitan School long before I was. I met her in my first term here when she was in year 10. She came into my classroom, refused to sit where I asked, swore at me and walked out. I can’t remember what she said exactly as she has done this about fifteen times over the last year. I suppose that isn’t that many times, but as a perpetual internal truant (i.e. she’d be in school but wouldn’t attend lessons) she probably only attended twenty of my lessons in the four terms I was her teacher.

She is one of the first students to have had an incident recorded in the schools’ behaviour database. Most of what follows comes from that source.

In January of year 9 she was excluded for physical assault. Two months later she was excluded for refusal to follow rules. A month later she was excluded for further refusal plus a number of incidents of verbal abuse to both staff and students. The following month (still only in year 9) she was found in possession of drugs.

Unfortunately, all of this in five months of year 9 (plus whatever incidents had occurred before the current behaviour database started) was not enough to get a permanent exclusion and before she’d finished year 9 she’d had another exclusion for aggressive behaviour to another student.

I can only assume that efforts were made to find alternative provision at this point because there is nothing recorded for the first term of year 10. By February, she was back in school and getting excluded for having a frankly ridiculous number of detentions. A month later she was excluded for verbal abuse to staff and defiance. The same happened the following month. Her exclusions for the next two months (April and May if you haven’t been keeping count) were both for violent behaviour. There were no more exclusions in year 10. However, as we have now reached the point where I was teaching her I know it clearly wasn’t because her behaviour had improved.

She started year 11 with an exclusion for verbal abuse and truancy. I’d like to think that was connected to the abuse she threw at me. She thought I was a terrible teacher and loved to tell me that. And I smell too. By this point she was hardly in any lessons. This arrangement seemed to improve her behaviour but she was out again for verbal abuse and threats against members of staff in December and again in January.

At this point the database entries end. This is because within a month or two Charlene was sent on early study leave (a euphemism for being chucked out but told she could come back for exams). Now I cannot be sure about the details of the final incident that got her out. Communication is never good on these matters and everything I heard was second or third hand. What I do know is that one afternoon as I left school I saw a police car outside the school and several members of senior management. The following day it was announced that after an incident involving several members of her family she and one of her siblings were leaving the school. The word amongst the staff was that the incident had involved a fight with another family and knives were used. It had taken two years of incidents but she was out.

So why am I mentioning this now? Well partly the fact that her sibling (the one who was involved in this final incident) is back in school, but my main reason is this: I saw the register for the sixth form resit class for my subject. She’s been let back into the sixth form and is studying my subject.

Some people claim that the reason teenagers act as if their actions have no consequences is because they are young and impetuous. Consider the case of Charlene. She has committed what would be considered to be criminal offences in the adult world. Yet she is seen as a perfectly suitable candidate to learn a subject she has actively resisted learning for several years, in an institution she has continually harmed. It is not hard to see that in our education system the actions of teenagers genuinely don’t have consequences for them, only for those who want to learn and those who want to teach them.

Dan Willingham, the professor of psychology from the University of Virginia (and poor geographer), who created the video in this blog entry has also produced a video on another fad: Brain-based learning.

Again, apologies to those readers who can’t access youtube.

“Well then I think we are all agreed as to what a teacake is. What’s the next word, Jessop?”

“It’s ‘teach’, sir. In our last edition we defined it as `give systematic information to (a person) or about (a subject or skill)’. However, we define a `teacher’ as ‘somebody who teaches, especially in a school’ and, as I was a teacher before I became a lexicographer’s assistant, I can’t help but notice that, as a teacher, I was never expected to give systematic information”

“Were you not? Do teachers not do that these days?”

“Well, some do, sir, but generally speaking it’s frowned upon. Children aren’t really meant to be informed anymore, they should be finding things out for themselves and thinking about open ended questions. The general feeling is that they shouldn’t be bogged down with lots of useless knowledge that they could look up on the internet if they ever needed it.”

“Are they instructed in how to discover things for themselves? Could we say that teaching is `systematic instruction’?”

“Again, I’m sure some teachers do instruct but it is frowned upon. Students don’t really have to follow instructions any more. They are meant to be self-directed.”

“If teachers aren’t meant to give information and aren’t able to make students find out information for themselves, then what are they meant to do, how are they meant to learn?”

“The teacher is meant to entertain them.”

“But if a teacher can’t tell them entertaining information or make them do entertaining things, how is the teacher meant to entertain them?”

“Well by getting to know them, building a relationship.”

“This is all very vague, Jessop. They aren’t parenting the children, they aren’t instructing them. What sort of relationship is this?”

“One based on personality, I guess. Teachers are responsible for children’s emotional well-being”

“Emotional well-being?”

“Happiness. Teachers should be cheering children up. Making them smile.”

“Oh, I see. Humorous entertainment, Jessop. So could we say that to teach is to be systematically entertaining in a humorous way?”

“Teachers aren’t really meant to be systematic anymore. They are meant to fit their teaching to individual pupils instead of following a rigid style.”

“Could we say teaching is being humorously entertaining about a subject, then?”

“Actually, the last I heard was that teachers were meant to see themselves as teaching children not subjects. Traditional subjects are seen as artificial.”

“I see. So to `teach’ is to ‘humorously entertain children’?”

I guess so, sir.

“It all seems very odd to me. But I guess it will have to do. What’s the next word?”

“It’s `teacher`”

“So, Jessop, can we say a teacher is `a person employed to humorously entertain children?’”

“I think so. Hang on, sir, just one slight problem.”

“Yes, Jessop?”

“We’ve already used that as our definition of `clown’.”

Just in case you need to provide some INSET at the start of next term about how children learn, you might want to look at this (apologies to those readers who can’t access youtube):

The biggest, single policy mistake in education in the last twenty years, the one that has undermined everything else, has been the attempt to treat badly behaved children as if they had a right to be in classes with their victims. This has been labelled as “Inclusion” and is often presented as simply an extension of policies aimed at including the disabled in schools; to a true believer children with problems and children who cause problems are one and the same. As a result the very idea of Inclusion has become anathema to many mainstream classroom teachers. My point in this blog entry is simply to ask how this has happened and where the line was crossed from the worthy objective of including the disabled to the insane dogma of tolerating the badly behaved.

The starting point for inclusion, and the starting point for blame, is the Warnock Report from 1978. This report in many ways began the Inclusion agenda and led to the 1981 Education Act. However, it clearly stated that special schools would still be necessary for:

“those with severe emotional or behavioural disorders who have very great difficulty in forming relationships with others or whose behaviour is so extreme or unpredictable that it causes severe disruption in an ordinary school or inhibits the educational progress of other children;”

It is hard not to view this as a turning point, but it clearly isn’t where the idea that extreme poor behaviour was to be tolerated began. It is, however, when the bureaucracy associated with SEN became the mess it is today. For this reason Baroness Warnock has since disowned some of the recommendations of her own report.

A series of education acts throughout the 1980s and 90s continued the trend for greater inclusion. To many teachers the turning point seemed to be the 2001 Special Educational Needs and Disability Act. It is not uncommon to hear David Blunkett, the Education Secretary who saw the bill passed, blamed as the architect of inclusion, with his own blindness given as evidence that he must have been a whole hearted advocate of all forms of inclusion. However, like the 1996 Education Act before it, the 2001 Act contained the following exception to who should be “included” in a mainstream school:

“unless that is incompatible with … the provision of efficient education for other children.“

Section 316(3)

Just in case there was any confusion as to what this means the Explanatory Notes for the Act stated:

“In practice, incompatibility with the efficient education of others is likely to be where pupils present severe challenging behaviour that would significantly disrupt the learning of other pupils or place their safety at risk.”

Again, it seems that there is nothing here to explain why inclusion should require that schools tolerate poor behaviour. However, education in Britain is not run by legislation, nor is it run by government ministers. It is run by a bureaucracy and several months after the Act was passed Blunkett moved on and was replaced with Estelle Morris, a minister who later resigned, apparently on the grounds of her own incompetence. The guidance that went out from the bureaucracy on her watch (specifically the Special Educational Needs Code Of Practice from November 2001) contained no mention of the fact that poor behaviour was what was referred to in the efficient education clause. In fact it is treated throughout as a form of SEN and bad behaviour is simply grounds to review the help given to the student:

“Where a school identifies a pupil with a statement of special educational needs who is at serious risk of disaffection or exclusion, an interim or early review should be called. It will then be possible to consider the pupil’s changing needs and recommend amendments to the statement, as an alternative to the pupil being excluded.”

And so without any legislation it suddenly became official advice that badly behaved students simply needed adjustments of their SEN provision rather than to be removed from mainstream schools. The balance doesn’t seem to have changed much since then, despite a succession of different education secretaries, none of who have lasted very long or had much of an impact.

However, before I blame Estelle Morris and leave it at that, a major part of the problem of having children incapable of behaving in mainstream schools must stem from the advice given on exclusions which says:

“Other than in the most exceptional circumstances, schools should avoid permanently excluding pupils with statements. They should also make every effort to avoid excluding pupils who are being supported at School Action or School Action Plus under the Special Educational Needs Code of Practice, including those at School Action Plus who are being assessed for a statement. In most cases, the headteacher will be aware that the school is having difficulty managing a pupil’s behaviour well before the situation has escalated. Schools should try every practicable means to maintain the pupil in school, including seeking LA and other professional advice and support at School Action Plus or, where appropriate, asking the LA to consider carrying out a statutory assessment. For a pupil with a statement, the school should liaise with their LA about initiating an interim review of the pupil’s statement.”

Although this is quoted from the most recent version of the guidelines (from September 2007) the advice itself appears to go back to DfEE Circular 10/99. This time David Blunkett is responsible, although yet again it is guidance given from the education bureaucracy (this time in central government), not the law of the land, which is the problem.

References:

Warnock, H.M (chair), Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1978

“Some teachers just have ‘it’. They go into a room and everybody is quiet, they open their mouths and all the pupils are listening and looking at them even if they are talking rubbish. They never have to shout or repeat instructions. It is nothing to do with experience or age, some of the young NQTs have it.”

Poster on TES website

When you train to be a teacher you are often told about the teachers who have It: a mystical, indefinable, personal quality that makes even the toughest classes behave perfectly as if by magic. In your first year of teaching the existence of It is reinforced some more when you hear about the teachers who are great at dealing with behaviour within your school. Sometimes you actually see students who disrupt your lesson being well-behaved for somebody else and it seems like the teacher must be a wizard or a hypnotist to have achieved this. Also you are told the story of the supply teacher the school had two years ago that no child would play up for because one disapproving look from her was enough to scare them straight. The case for the existence of It is seemingly undeniable for the first few years of teaching. Gradually, however, you begin to doubt.

Firstly, you start to see inside the classes of some of the teachers known for their great behaviour management. Not all of them, but a significant proportion of them, turn out to be appeasers. You learn that the reason Kieran “behaves” for them and not for you is actually because everything Kieran does is fine according to them. Their “great relationship” with Kieran, (and no doubt with the other badly behaved kids in the school) is based on spoiling him rotten and letting him get away with mistreatment of other kids. The behaviour and learning in their lessons is simply not what you would aspire to, and the only It they have is low expectations and the capacity to sound off about how well they are doing.

Secondly, you get more established yourself and you start to realise how much your own classroom management relies on expectations. If the kids think you are somebody they will have to behave for, then they will behave for you. This isn’t some mysterious It, this is simply reputation, and because of the fact that if you haven’t been driven out of the school previously the kids doubt that they are going to be able to drive you out now. Sometimes it does seem incredible that where once students would have argued with you over expectations, or accused you of being mad for asking them even to listen to you, they now think that you must have a point in what you are asking for and at the very least they are obliged to acknowledge those expectations even if they don’t always live up to them. Those teachers you saw, who genuinely could get good behaviour out of kids who would act up for you, stop being so mysterious in their methods. They are simply well-established and the longer you stay at the school the more confident you can be that you have joined their ranks.

This just leaves the case of the mythical supply teacher who could control year 11 boys with a disapproving glance.. If you work in tough schools for any length of time you get to meet a lot of supply teachers, some good, some bad, many terrible. The best ones, usually very experienced, can adopt suitable behaviour strategies quite fast and effectively and, not always without a fight, they do manage to establish themselves and their expectations. None of them actually manage the mythical feats of the unnamed supply teacher of legend. But “we had a supply teacher two years ago who was quite good” isn’t much of a story. “We has a supply teacher two years ago who performed incomprehensible wonders” is. Gradually you begin to realise that these stories are too fanciful to be solid evidence for the existence of It.

Now it is still the case that some teachers are more charismatic than others, some teachers teach more enjoyable lessons than others and some teachers manage behaviour better than others. In a school that’s fairly easy-going anyway the better staff might make classroom management look easy. In a tough school, though, the teacher with It simply doesn’t exist. Every teacher with well-behaved classes and enjoyable lessons has worked hard to get there, following up incidents, establishing routines, getting to know the students over several years. And if you could see their year 11 lesson last thing on a Friday, it would become quite clear that there are limits even to their talents and enthusiasm.

Being an open-minded sort of person I can often see things from more than one perspective. For instance the following “personality clash” between myself and Lemuel can be seen quite differently depending on whether you are myself, Lemuel, or Miss Rush, Lemuel’s head of year, a Special Needs teacher who wasn’t actually in the room.

My Point Of View

“In you come, Lemuel, I’m afraid you’re late. Please sit down. The work’s on the board.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

*

“We’re now 15 minutes into the lesson, can you please start the work, Lemuel?”

“I’ve only just come in”

“You’ve had five minutes now, some people have almost finished. Well done, girls. If you don’t start you are choosing to get a warning”

*

“Okay, Lemuel, I’m giving you your first warning. Can you stop drawing that picture of a car and get on with the work, please?”

“How was I meant to know I was meant to do that?”

“Please, just put that picture away, or I’ll have to give you your next warning”

*

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you your second warning, now, Lemuel. We’ve had twenty minutes and most people have finished. And I need to start the main part of the lesson. If I could just have quiet please everyone. Thank you very much. Today we are going to be doing …”

“I never done nuffink. You gave me a second warning for nuffink.”

“Please don’t talk while I’m talking to the class, Lemuel, I will have to give you your third warning and a detention.”

“This is gay”

“I’m afraid you’ve chosen to get you third warning. Now please stop talking so I can start the lesson or you will be choosing to get sent out.”

“I don’t care”.

“Sshhh! If I can just have quiet again. Thank you very much everyone. Today we will be …”

“I hate this fucking crap”.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the room now.”

Lemuel’s Point Of View

“In you come, Lemuel, just go over there and talk to you friends, we’ll do some work later.”

“Yes, thank you.”

*

“We’re now 15 minutes into the lesson, can you get on with your picture of a car please, Lemuel? I’ll tell you later if there’s going to be any work to do.”

“Yes, sir”

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well done, girls. Blah, blah, blah”

*

“Blah, blah,blah, blah. Can you just finish off your picture of the car in the next five minutes or so and get on with the boring work, please?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t realise there was any work.”

“Please, just do your best drawing, and don’t worry about the work.”

*

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you your second warning, now, Lemuel. We’ve had twenty minutes and most people have finished. And I need to start the main part of the lesson. Don’t worry, Lemuel, I’ll just talk over your conversation. Today we are going to be doing …”

“Sorry Sir I haven’t done anything, why did I get a second warning?”

“Please don’t talk while I’m talking to the class, Lemuel, I will have to give you third warning and a detention.”

“I’m not entirely sure this is fair, sir”

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now please stop talking or I will have to send you out for nothing.”

“That seems fair, sir. I’ll be quiet now.”.

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah,blah blah, blah, blah.”

“Sir, can I ask a question”.

“That’s it, I’m sending you out for absolutely no reason.“

Miss Rush’s Point of View

“In you come, you little bastard. Sit down, now. The work’s on the board and you’ll be in trouble if you don’t do it. I don’t care about all your special needs.”

“Yes, sir, Mr Old. Please don’t hit me again, sir.”

*

“We’re now 15 seconds into the lesson, hand over your work, boy!”

“Here it is, Sir. And here’s my homework too. I spent three hours on it”

“You call this homework? I could piss this in my sleep. Have three detentions.”

*

“Okay, you spaz, your picture of a car is crap. You draw like a girl. Have another detention.”

“Please, sir, I can’t do another detention, my father’s seriously ill in hospital”

“Good, I hope he dies soon. Now get on with copying out of a textbook or I’ll come to your house and molest your sister.”

*

“Here, have another ten detentions, Lemuel, you retard. We’ve had two minutes and most people have finished. Now I need you to listen to me just for the sake of it. Anybody who so much as breathes will get a detention. Terrible, you’re all thick. Now does anybody have any questions?”

“Please, Mr Old, don’t hurt me but can I ask a question about the work?”

“No. I don’t want questions from a spacker. Have another detention.”

“Sorry, Mr Old, sir. I don’t know what I was thinking of. I think it’s because I haven’t eaten for a week.”

“I’m afraid I’ve chosen to give you another detention. Now please stop snivelling, I don’t ever want to look at your weasel face again.”

“Sorry, Mr Old”.

“Shut up, loser! God, I hate children. Anyway, today we will be discussing how Lemuel’s mother is a whore.”

“I’m sorry, sir I’m a bit upset about this. She only died last month”

“Piss off!”.

I suppose in a way, all these accounts of my personality clash with Lemuel are true to some extent. But in another, more literal way, only the first one is.

It is always suggested that it would be a good idea if students took part in some activities during a lesson in pairs or groups. Obviously this is often unavoidable in drama and PE (assuming you count a sports team as “a group”). The reasons given are usually something along the lines of claiming that it teaches them important social skills such as cooperation, or that you learn better in a group due to being able to talk with your peers.

Of course, this is nonsense. If you want to learn how to cooperate effectively with others, then the last place you’d start is in a group of teenagers being made to do school work. This is like saying the best way to learn how to make pork sausages is by being imprisoned in a pig farm with a half-dozen rabbis. Putting together people who are neither experienced at doing something, or particularly inclined to want to do it, is not how you learn to do that something. Of course, it would be useful to for a surly teenager to practice teamwork skills. Letting him or her join a team of adults who already know how to work in a team would be a great educational experiences. Forcing them into a group of other surly teenagers and letting them fight it out amongst themselves over who is to blame for getting nothing done is less constructive.

The first problem is even getting them into groups. Many students will not sit near each other or talk to each other. The second problem is to get them to agree to do the task at hand. Getting them to work can be tricky at the best of times, but by putting them together you have ensured that if you are going to punish them for not working then you’d have to punish all of them equally. It’s a pretty safe bet that no teacher will risk antagonising the remaining good kids in that way, not least because it would be hard to justify that to parents. This is made worse by those who feel that they should refuse to work in protest at being in a group with somebody they don’t like. Finally, even if it is accepted that the group will carry out the work, it will not be accepted that they should all contribute. Teenagers are naturally hierarchical. It will be assumed that the dominant child should do everything if the activity looks enjoyable, or nothing if it looks like hard work. If the task involves writing you can see this in action. If Her Ladyship enjoys writing she grabs the pen. If His Lordship doesn’t enjoy it, he will grab it anyway, only to pass it to one of the serfs. Whichever way round it is, only one child will do most of the work. Far from teaching them how to cooperate, all that’s happened is that they’ve had yet another chance to develop their dysfunctional patterns of non-cooperation.

Now we may consider the more specific claim that they might learn more from this farce. It is a bit of a no-brainer that studying is generally done more effectively individually, but with significant exceptions. The suggestion that they might learn in groups or pairs is entirely based on the idea that discussion between children is inherently educational. Now, it is impossible to deny that discussing how to answer a question with somebody is often helpful. The strange idea here is that discussing it with somebody who knows roughly as little as you do, is going to be more educational than discussing it with the graduate who has been explaining for years, and is employed to explain it to you, This is, of course, another one of those dumbing down ideas that is based on the fantasy that children have nothing to learn from experts. Naturally, discussing something with an idiot is mainly a way of sharing misconceptions and mistakes. It is the exact opposite of how we learn best, which is from authoritative sources. This is, of course, why teachers spend half their lives telling kids not to talk, not to cooperate, and not to pay attention to each others’ answers. It is also why teachers, even after all these years of “knit-your-own-yoghurt” methods are still called “teachers” and not “facilitators” or “learning consultants”.

However, even by making this argument I am naively assuming that if you put children together in a group and tell them to talk about something, they will. Why on earth would they do that? No matter what your subject, no matter how exciting, there are always going to be a hundred and one other things that are more interesting to talk about. With a large class, and normal secondary school age children, no teacher can control the direction of seven or eight simultaneous conversations. Teachers have a job on their hands at the best of times encouraging students to work rather than chat, it becomes impossible to do when the work itself involves chatting. Like so many other fashionable educational ideas, group-work is based on the belief that every child is basically the sort of willing, obedient individual (in fact the type of student that our school system so effectively marginalises when they do exist) rather than the uncooperative chav personality that they are, in practice, forced to become in order to survive.

As ever in teaching, these sorts of patterns of behaviour aren’t just instinctive, they will have been learned over many years of being made to work in groups by idiot teachers who didn’t really care about learning trying and failing to get some group-work done. They will have already learnt that group-work is effectively an extension of breaktime, in which you get to chat as much as you like and the teacher occasionally comes round and asks why nothing has been done (but not too often because none of the other groups will have done anything either, and the teacher will have spent five minutes trying to calm down the group whose members were trying to kill each other or the child that had a tantrum the moment they discovered who they would be working with). No teacher achieves anything much in group-work outside those areas mentioned earlier where they have had to get used to cooperating, like in drama or playing team sports. Even then you can see problems developing: kids will fight over who is to be in their group, and only experience enables the teachers of those subjects to manage the situation. Most (but not all) teachers dread getting a cover in those subjects.

As for every other subject, the pressure is always there to do get children to work in groups or pairs, for reasons of variety as much as anything else. As a conscientious professional who is full of confidence in anything that’s recommended by people who don’t even teach anymore, I incorporate some kind of group-work into all of my lessons. Those parts of the lesson where they have to sit in silence and listen to me, I consider to be a form of group-work. What’s particularly good about this type of group-work it is that they don’t even have to sit with their groups, or know who else is in their group, in order to do it. Another possibility is simply to ensure that all of you group-work is done in groups of one.

Back here I explained that the earliest record I could find of the sort of school I’ve been writing about was in Berg (1968), an account of life at Risinghill, one of the first 1960s mixed comprehensives. There were tough schools before then, there always will be tough schools, but, as far as I could tell they weren’t tough because of the rejection of discipline and academic expectations.

The following quotation acknowledging how tough some schools are, written before the Battleground Schools came into being is from a noted educational philosopher:

Some schools, of course, are in such a sorry state that there is little more that can be done than to have policeman in to stop riots, caretakers to keep the place clean, doctors and dentists to look after physical health, and psychiatrically trained teachers to care for the `mental health` of the inmates and to do something about providing the `socialization` which they are so obviously lacking. The conditions of schooling and the attitudes of the inmates make talk of `education` almost as out of place as a fashion parade on a dung-hill. Teaching in such `blackboard jungle` types of institutions requires special gifts and probably special training. It is more like a commando operation than an educational exercise; for the problem is basically that of establishing conditions for normal education to take place. Even so it is remarkable what can be achieved by sympathetic and hard-headed teachers in such circumstances. Education is so much a matter of confidence and enthusiasm; words like `tone` and `spirit` are necessary to convey the feeling of the contagious atmosphere in which it can take root and spread. But there are some environments which ensure the contagion will not spread very far.

Peters (1966)

This might suggest a reference to Battleground Schools if the author hadn’t provided a couple of references to books about the schools he had in mind. Both are incredibly revealing about education in tough schools in the early 1960s.

The school referred to in the comment about “environments” where the “contagion” of learning will not spread is from Partridge (1966). This book has a similar thesis to Berg’s, that selection and corporal punishment must end to usher in a new age of socially just and emotionally sensitive education, replacing the brutality of existing schools and the monstrous teachers within. However, whereas Berg wrote about a clearly terrible comprehensive with a weak headteacher as if it was a utopia, Partridge writes about a rather impressive and well-run boys’ Secondary Modern as if it was hell on earth. Partridge’s school might have been tough in his view but his complaints that the discipline is too harsh, that too much effort is spent on the high achievers, and the curriculum is too academic, indicates that he is not talking about a forerunner to today’s Battleground schools. His first description of the children includes the following passage:

One of the duty teachers blows long and hard on his whistle: every boy on the playground “freezes”. On the second short blast they move to form columns along the edge of the playground and facing the teachers who stand or walk up and down in front of them. When every boy is in his class line they file off in turn into the School by a door leading into a main classroom block. Prefects stand at the door and pull a boy out if they think he is misbehaving. The boys pour into school and make for their classrooms, where their form teachers will be waiting to call the roll and collect dinner money. This takes perhaps five minutes and then the boys troop down to the hall for morning assembly, herded down by the prefects and the teachers like so many sheep.

A picture further removed from the chaos in the corridors of today’s schools is harder to imagine.

Peters’ other reference, this time corresponding to his comment about the remarkable achievements of “sympathetic and hard-headed teachers”, is Farley (1960). This is a superb read, which fits Peters’ description (the full title inside the front cover is “Secondary Modern Discipline With Special Reference To The Difficult Adolescent In Socially Depressed Industrial Areas”). Much of it could have been written today, for instance, the descriptions of appalling and criminal behaviour outside of the classroom. It is also hard not be initially disheartened by the author’s frequent suggestions that it is best to try and build relationships with difficult students which sounds like the failed strategies of today. However, it soon becomes clear that, while the children of the underclass may be much the same outside of lessons, what you can expect from them in classrooms has changed massively. His description of the favoured behaviours of a class “playing up for a teacher” runs as follows:

1. Asking awkward questions – “Please, sir! What’s a harlot?”
2. Banging furniture about, squeaking chairs, etc.
3. Grinning insolently at the teacher.
4. Making unpleasant smells.
5. Making a noise by pretending to help – six boys dashing to pick up a book, knock over a desk and inkwell.
6. Muttering under the breath.
7. Making smart remarks.
8. Refusing to take the cane (on the increase).
9. Hiding equipment, chalk etc.
10. Raucous laughter, jeering, moaning.
11. Refusing to do work.
12. Arguing and interrupting.
13. Pulling faces.
14. Annoying other boys in range – pins, kicks etc.
15. Flicking pellets (a hardy annual).
16. Unco-operative attitude when asked to do something.
17. Threatening gestures and stances.

Now bear in mind that this is meant to be the worst behaviour a teacher might encounter, if they are new or really hated by the class. You may wish to compare it with my description of the equivalent situation today. Other advice also indicates the difference in expectations between now and then, such as a warning to watch out for “Insufficiency of rubbers [erasers] for drawing etc., necessitating communication between pupils”, or the suggestion that “If it is your bad luck to have a tough class, do not try and sit down and mark books, or lean on the radiator.”

As I said before, Farley’s repeated calls to understand and sympathise with troubled pupils might resemble some of today’s behaviour advisors. However, he makes it clear that his sympathy has limits, and these limits are narrowly drawn compared with today’s “anything goes” mentality of appeasement:

Talk to the class roughly on these lines: “Listen, lads, [he explains elsewhere in the book why mixed education is a bad idea] I’ve got a certain amount of work to get through and so have you. I’m not looking for trouble, neither am I going to avoid it. If you want to start irritating me, then you can hardly expect me to remain in a reasonably good mood. Don’t think that you’ve had a raw deal if you find yourself in a situation you don’t like. I’m not worrying you unless you force me to.” If after that “one of the boys” starts up again then say, “All right, Brown, go on, act like an infant and then when you’re treated like one you’ll start standing on your dignity and getting nasty. I don’t expect you to be an angel, or a statue, but if you can only learn the hard way, then that’s how it will have to be. Frankly I’d rather treat you like a growing man than a little school kid.” If he still continues, cane him good and hard! … Usually it won’t come to the level of caning Brown, but if you must cane him, do it, because if Brown gets away with it, the rest of the class, although probably liking you as a person, will not respect you as a teacher; in their eyes you are a weakling.

There is no escaping the conclusion that while students haven’t changed much in four decades, the expectations of schools and teachers have, and for the worse.

References

Berg, Leila, Risinghill:Death of a Comprehensive School, 1968, Penguin Books

Farley, Richard, Secondary Modern Discipline With Special Reference To The Difficult Adolescent, 1960, Adam and Charles Black

Partridge, John, Middle School, 1966, Victor Gollancz Ltd

Peters, R.S. Ethics and Education, 1966, Allen and Unwin

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