Fine parents who cannot be bothered to control their children
Dear Ed Balls,
There is something unbelievably cheeky about yesterday’s release of a government report by Sir Alan Steer into the appalling standards of behaviour in our schools, seeing as Labour have ignored the issue for a decade. The number of children excluded more than 10 times in a single year went up from 310 in 2004 to 837 in 2007. Permanent exclusions i.e. expulsions have been falling over recent years and 8,680 pupils were excluded in this way in 2006-07, but fixed-term exclusions i.e. suspensions have risen from 288,040 in 2003-04 to 363,270 by the end of 2007 for secondary school pupils. The question is what should a government do about it?
There were numerous recommendations coming out of the government’s review. Teams of behaviour experts will be sent into schools where behaviour is only rated as “satisfactory” by OFSTED (currently just under 30% of schools). You said that the government supports headteachers where they need to permanently exclude pupils if one or two short suspensions don’t do the trick. The review stated that no new legal powers to discipline pupils were needed, but awareness of them needed to be raised. For example, Sir Alan recommended the use of “withdrawal rooms” for internal exclusions to remove a disruptive child from class until behaviour improves, in addition to detentions, suspensions, confiscating mobile phones and lunchtime curfews. ‘Parenting contracts’ are perhaps the most eyecatching plan in the report, which can be applied for through the Courts to require mothers and fathers of wayward pupils to take parenting classes with fines of up to £1,000 if they fail to attend. Under laws first announced in legislation in 2007, parents can also be hit with penalties of £50 if their children are found in a public place without justification in the first five days of an exclusion (rising to £100 if unpaid after 28 days). Parents must also be interviewed by headteachers before their child is allowed back into school, outlining the standards expected of pupils.
Will any of this help? Maybe. Making teachers more aware of what powers they have is clearly a good idea. However, some of the other measures threaten to spectacularly backfire. Telling headteachers that you support them excluding children is all well and good, but when schools lose their funding for each pupil that they expel – with the threat of additional fines from the government – what incentive do they have to boot them out? Sir Alan’s review said there was much evidence that behaviour in schools was good and improving, but some teachers strongly disagree (and so does anyone who has set foot in a school recently) as some children want to be kicked out of class. Jules Donaldson, a teacher from Sandwell, said: “They’re supping their cups of tea and toast. At some schools they’re queuing up to get into the withdrawal rooms.” Reward cultures, as we have recently seen with smoking and pregnancy, are also infuriating and wasteful. Jules Donaldson claimed some headteachers were handing out prizes if children behave instead of setting proper boundaries. Last year, it emerged some of the Government’s new academies were operating reward schemes in which pupils can win plasma screen TVs, iPods and Nintendo Wii’s. Parenting contracts are without doubt the most encouraging step, as too often parents are allowed to ignore the situation or even defend their children’s behaviour and refuse to get involved. If you don’t force parents to take responsibility, the sad reality is that many of them won’t. I’d love to believe that every parent cared enough about their children to want the best for them and want them to succeed in school, but that is so far removed from the truth.
The phrase ‘better late than never’ sprung to mind when you announced that “children can’t learn if classes are disrupted by bad behaviour” and some of the review’s recommendations are reasonable, but your failure to take responsibility for problems in our education system is already verging on legendary. Sadly, some of this review reads more like a press release than a serious attempt to sort out bad behaviour. Admittedly, schools often pick up problems long after they began in childhood so early interventions for children from disadvantaged backgrounds is the best way to start turning all this around, but parents simply must not be allowed to abdicate themselves of responsibility for their children regardless of who they are and where they come from.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
Sadly, I think it’s far, far too late to change the attitudes inculcated in teachers and parents who’ve come up through the comprehensive school system.
The Righteous destroyed a good, proven socialisation method. Can’t put the genie back in the bottle now…
I agree that sorting this out will be about as easy as doing a brisk three point turn with an oil tanker, but it’s getting worse and at the very least someone has to stop the rot.
And yet, we have entrusted this task to someone who went on national radio to announce that he “does not consider it satisfactory when a school is assessed as being merely ’satisfactory’”. Can he not think of a different word to use?
The man is an idiot. At least we need not fear any rebuttal; he probably could not get past the spam protection.
I agree that sorting this out will be about as easy as doing a brisk three point turn with an oil tanker, but it’s getting worse and at the very least someone has to stop the rot.
Tragically this statement could have been made by politicians of any stripe at any point over the past 30 years and worse still, it would almost certainly still have been correct.
I spent a number of years as Chairman of a Exclusion Appeals Panel. Invariably, the LEA had tried all the measures available to them, and the child had a record of behavioural problems over several years. The parents who appealed were caring parents from all walks of life who were frantic with worry over their child’s repeated delinquent behaviour. The point a somewhat sanctimonious LFAT is ignoring is that whilst in school the parent has no control over the child’s behaviour, which is in the hands of the school authorities.
At the heart of the matter was the decision,in the 80’s/90’s, by the Dept. of Education, which has long been in the gift of the left-wing establishment, to abandon special schools for disobedient pupils. This decision was ostensibly on grounds of cost, (highlighting Tory “cuts”) but was actually idealistic in nature and against the advice of the majority of school heads and governing bodies.
The costs of this policy are now obvious to us all. Any money saved is now lost in the waste of teachers’ time in dealing with unco-operative pupils and the degradation of the teaching environment. Pupils who want to learn will find some way of learning. The vast majority, who, like the rest of the population, are not self-starters, will drift on the wind which is too often set by the bad pupils.
I believe that until schools capable of attending to the needs of badly behaved pupils are set up and operating nationally, there will be no substantial change in educational attainment.
Patently, it was a brilliant quote, wasn’t it.
Shaun, point taken, but the solutions fit very closely with the Conservative agenda of fixing a broken society because you have to catch these problems early and sort them out.
GOM, I don’t agree that parents have no influence over their children at school. They set the tone at home, they raise these children, they can teach them about authority, behaviour, standards and moral if they choose to – and that has huge implications for how they act at school. The fact that Labour have closed down so many ’special schools’ for children with physical and psychological difficulties almost deserves a letter in itself.
“The point a somewhat sanctimonious LFAT is ignoring is that whilst in school the parent has no control over the child’s behaviour…”
Agree wholeheartedly with your point re: closing down of special schools (along with ‘Care in the Community’, one of the worst decisions made by the Tory government) but let’s not forget that the prime socialisation responsibility falls to the parents.
If they do their job right, the school environment will find it a lot harder to ‘corrupt’ their children.
With education, it’s hard to know where to start – as grumpy old man has said, some pupils with special needs are being forced into mainstream education causing immense difficulties for the teachers, and taking resources away from other pupils.
There are SEN schools, but a look at their funding tells you just where they lie in the DoE and local authorities priority list.
Wayward pupils need taking out of the classroom, although Labour are now trying to force them into education ’til they’re 18. Which is just going to make other pupils lives hell, and make colleges as feral as some of our schools. Oh joy.
I would suggest re-setting school leaving to 14, on the proviso they have found employment or training, and setting up military cadet style secure units for persistent troublemakers, as well as separating all special needs from the mainstream classrooms.
@JuliaM If they do their job right, the school environment will find it a lot harder to ‘corrupt’ their children.
Harder, but far from impossible, and it’s difficult for parents to do parenting these days. Many parents are little other than badly brought up children themselves, simply propagating the problem.
And those that do can find themselves in trouble with the law – a father slapped his daughter on the backside a couple of years back, for misbehaving in the Trafford Centre, was promptly arrested and stopped from seeing his family until it went to court. Nuts.
Parenting is fast becoming a lost art.
“Many parents are little other than badly brought up children themselves, simply propagating the problem.”
Indeed. I suspect that’s not a bug, though. It’s a feature…
The sixties have a lot to answer for.
“The sixties have a lot to answer for.”
Especially those really short football shorts – still make me feel ill.
Many parents need help as they simply did not have a stable, happy childhood themselves. This is where early intervention comes in – targetted help for families in deprived areas with children under the age of 3. The long-term savings massively outweigh this short-term investment.
Maybe slightly contentious but if we found some mind numbing employment for the brain dead moronic pupils who want nothing better than to disrupt classes then why not provide some way to do this. Instead billions of punds are wasted on attempting to teach kids that are unlikely to ever use that education and so standards fall behind as the brighter pupils get no support and are never pushed to achieve.
It’s time to bring back the word failure and accept that not everone has to get to certain standards of literacy. There are plenty of hands on jobs where that don’t require an english degree.
Of course parents are responsible and saying that some are no more mature than kids themselves is a failure of the state in allocating incentives and support in the wrong place.
Julia, I agree the 60s do have a lot to answer for. We need to get away from trying to make everyone equal and accept differences – people are not equal and it only wastes economic resources to attempt this equality sham.
Thanks LFAT for making me visualise those shorts!! eek….
Many of our schools have become a dumping ground for the nations future inadequate benefit claimants, criminals and street gangs, brought into this world with not a second thought or an idea of what rearing a child entails. Like their parents they will just exist on benefits, do nothing and expect everything. A great many children in our schools have no role models of any kind, indeed I feel that the parents of some of these children put more thought into having a new mobile phone, plasma TV or shell suit than they do in having a child let alone rearing it beyond the cute and cuddly first year.
The parents will allow them to run rampant until the age of five when they will expect the schools and teachers to try and undo the damage the parents have casued by not teaching their children values, rules and limits. It may work at schools but once at home the children will see their slovenly parents doing nothing and they will come to think of them as the role models they should aspire too.
Maybe society should take the babies off of the already proven inadequate parents and let couple that wish to adopt a baby, have them who will then love, teach and nurture the child. That way we could break the cycle of the out of control child/teenager/parent/child that will just keep going on and on with more money being wasted instead of using proper care for children that include taking babies away from known failed parents.
I can’t remember who said it recently, but I think a journalist remarked that the responsibility for parenting has been passed from the parents to the state in many people’s eyes. So true.
Or, we could consider the possibility that ccompulsory institutional schooling just isn’t the glorious thing it’s cracked up to be and, consider the idea that we should just let those who don’t want to be there leave and start living their lives. I just posted something similar in more detail on Tom Harris’s blog. I can think of several personal example from my own youth of people I was at school with who were disruptive, but went on to live perfectly respectable productive lives once they were freed from the madhouse. If you take a step back and look at schooling as it actually is, it’s at least worth considering that maybe expecting young people to respond in a universally positive manner to being locked in a regime that is effectively Stalinist may be hopeless. We may say it’s a lack of disciplinary tools at the schools’ disposal due to political correctness, but that still leaves us with the idea that effectively you can only make this thing work with violence. We treat free compulsory educaton as a “right” and a kind of gift from the State, but it’s a strange right, let alone gift, that has to be enforced on people who don’t want it.
I wasn’t disruptive, I was quite academic. Nonetheless, at school I always had this nagging feeling that most of what I was doing was a complete waste of time; an empty ritual rewarded by bits of paper. Mass compulsory education is a very recent idea, conjured up variously by religious and secular “progressives” in the hope of achieving grand social engineering goals, as a way of moulding young people into some kind of uniformity. It doesn’t seem to work very well at all. It may not be fixable, and we need to ask whether we should be trying to fix it, or if it’s time to admit it’s just not much of a good idea.
Ian, I think we really need to look carefully about what schooling is for, what is achieved by keeping everyone locked up until the age of 18 and why we have such atrocious options for pupils from age 14 onwards instead of giving people whatever skills they need – academic or otherwise – to contribute to society.
I’d like to pick up something you mentioned – that schools lose funding for any pupil they expel – and ask about its application to a school voucher scheme; something I must admit I like the sound of, along with making all schools independent.
If a school expels a pupil, then surely whatever’s left on that voucher for the rest of the academic year has to go with the pupil to whatever school chooses to accept him? Otherwise no school would be willing to take, in effect, an unfunded pupil.
Perhaps the voucher would need to be higher for ‘problem’ children, to encourage the provision of schools willing to take them. It seems such schools are as necessary as academies for geniuses or sporting prodigies.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Good question. In theory, we have per-pupil funding already, although it never works out like that in reality. No school should be forced to educate people without money, but the threat of losing money or even being fined by the government (which I didn’t realise what possible until yesterday) is clearly preventing kids from being booted out when they should have been.
No doubt this comes down to Labour squeezing the budgets for special schools and other specialist provision for children with behavioural problems while forcing mainstream schools to pick up the slack. Special schools cost considerably more for every pupil, so it’s much cheaper to force mainstream schools to keep the pupils in rather than take the bad ones out.
There are two sides to this:
1. Does expelling unruly pupils help the majority of kids who want to learn? Yes, definitely. And it’s these kids we should worry about first.
2. Does expelling unruly pupils particularly harm them? Ian B’s comment above suggests, no not really.
So that’s a no-brainer, then.
Which begs the question, what to do with The Underclass. That’s easy, either scrap welfare entirely, or my preferred option, replace it with a Citizen’s Income scheme, so no welfare trap etc.
” Special schools cost considerably more for every pupil…”
Ah, but how much do they save in the long run. Both directly, and indirectly?
”Special schools cost considerably more for every pupil…”
Ah, but how much do they save in the long run. Both directly, and indirectly?
And its about categories. Nobody, surely, begrudges extra resources for the learning-challenged (dyslexia etc), but then people equivocate for those with other mental impairments and then again over those with behavioural problems who’s behaviour could be diverted from an expensive life of crime. ‘Special’ covers a multitude of sins.