Labour must keep strict school punishments – naughtiness is not a mental health condition.
The Government’s attempts to placate naughty children with softer punishments should not be at the expense of the majority
CELIA WALDEN22 July 2024 • 7:00pm
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Imagine looking at a bunch of unruly children and deciding that the problem was… too many rules. That’s what Labour have just done. That’s where their little grey cells have taken them. Faced with alarming new data showing school suspensions reached a record high in 2022/23 – with nearly 10,000 students permanently kicked out of UK classrooms and 786,961 suspensions on record – they’ve decided that the answer is to “phase out strict school punishments,” according to a report on Sunday, “including suspensions and isolation booths, [in order] to keep vulnerable children in school.”
My knee-jerk responses to this ranged from the flip “let me know how that works out for you?” to the more salient, “has anyone in our new, enlightened government ever met a child?” They don’t just need rules and boundaries, they crave them. Look at a child’s face when they point out that they have “another two minutes and thirty seconds left” on the iPad. Listen to the earnest tone they use to remind you, when an exemption is made, that “you said I wasn’t allowed sweet things before bed”. Not just earnest, but reproving. Because these rules we’ve made up in our heads are written in stone for them, a moral and behavioural scaffold that helps keep them stable. Take away punishments or “consequences”, as we prefer to call them now, and they’re left in freefall.
Only we’re talking about “vulnerable” children here, aren’t we? They’re the ones exhibiting “persistent disruptive behaviour” in the classroom. They’re the ones skewing the statistics. And for them, Labour believe that a different approach is needed. According to education leaders the changes being proposed would help teachers establish whether pupils’ misbehaviour may be due to problems at home, mental health issues, undiagnosed special needs, ADHD or autism, and allow children to be treated with the compassion they deserve.
To interrupt my Miss Trunchbull rant, a second: every child who has lived through the pandemic deserves compassion. We’re only starting to assess the damage of school closures on a whole generation. But what we do know for sure is that low-income households were the worst hit, and that troubled children with absent parents or undiagnosed special needs – children for whom school was the only thing preventing them from going into freefall – never stood a chance. The shocking figures above reflect that, and Education Minister Stephen Morgan is right to call them “a wake-up call”, just as he is right to say that “every pupil deserves to learn in a safe, calm classroom.” But compassion isn’t going to fix the problem, and refusing to punish a minority will only punish the majority.
Any serious discussion on this subject needs to work from the basis that several things can be true at once. Yes, the pandemic both prompted and massively exacerbated behavioural problems in children. Yes, many of the most unruly will have problems at home or undiagnosed conditions and for them suspension or expulsion will only worsen their plight. But here are a few more truths: there has been a massive expansion in special needs awareness, provision and staffing in UK schools over the past decade. Naughtiness is not a mental health condition (at least, not yet), and naughty children do exist. Pupils will misbehave more if they think they can get away with it. Parents – more permissive than ever – are a big part of the behavioural problem. Oh, and if Labour do go ahead and phase out the stricter punishments that schools can impose on their pupils, they can expect a wave of teacher resignations.
If the government really wants to help the most dysfunctional, violent children, it needs to massively increase the funding for special educational needs schools, where very small classes and appropriately trained teachers will allow those children to get the help they need. If it wants to help the occasional misbehavers – the naughty, bored and lazy – it will keep the “behaviour hubs” the Tories introduced to support schools struggling with poor discipline, and the punishments, when they’re due.
Katharine Birbalsingh – the high-profile head of Michaela Community School and former chair of the Social Mobility Commission – was one of the first to speak out against the government’s plans to soften punishments in schools. “If Labour do what they say they will do to schools,” she wrote on X, “disadvantaged kids will pay the price. The politicians will feel good about themselves and all the gains that have helped poorer kids over the last decade will be eradicated.” But the most caustic reaction came from a teacher friend, who described Labour’s proposal as “the kind of thing a university student with no experience of working in a school would come up with.”
It’s all very well being “inclusive” – until that inclusivity excludes every child from, as Morgan says, being able to “learn in a safe, calm classroom.”
