There needs to be a louder public conversation about the ways in which the media perpetuates political myths about children and young people. 'Problem families' are currently a common target; Louise Casey, head of the government's troubled families unit, was reported in the Telegraph recently as suggesting that '(m)others in large problem families should be "ashamed" of the damage they are doing to society and stop having children'. The riots of Summer 2011 were blamed by Prime Minister David Cameron on young people's 'pure criminality', denying any link to poverty. And children in schools are constantly blamed for failings in the schooling system.
The Guardian on Wednesday published a piece entitled 'Number of primary school suspensions for assaults rises', reporting on yesterday's Statistical First Release of 'Permanent and fixed period exclusions from schools and exclusion appeals in England, 2010/11'.
The Department for Education report breaks down the data by gender, free school meals, age, special educational need, and ethnicity. But the report instead focusses on the small number of primary-aged pupils who lose their temper and lash out at a teacher.
This kind of article was probably pushed out quickly in response to a press release. But by choosing this focus, it demonstrates a consistent lack of understanding regarding who exactly is responsible for running schools. The DfE report shows that 'Pupils of Black Caribbean ethnic origin are nearly three times more likely to be permanently excluded than the school population as a whole' and that '(t)he fixed period exclusion rate for pupils of Black Caribbean ethnic origin is twice that for the school population as a whole.' And yet the Press Association prefers to highlight the 'racist abuse' for which some pupils were excluded. This is of course important: but it focusses on what Slavoj Zizek calls 'subjective violence', forgetting the 'objective violence' of the institutions which have created the conditions under which such abuse might be perpetrated.
Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teachers' union, claims in the article that 'parents must understand that their responsibility for their child's behaviour does not end at the school gate'. The chief executive of Barnardo's, Anne Marie Carrie, was slightly more charitable, pointing out that children on free school meals are more likely to be excluded, and asking that deprived families receive support themselves.
Many schools are particularly good at collaborating with parents. But until we start collecting exclusion data which includes reference to schools' approaches, for example, to working with parents, or tackling racism, it seems extremely unfair to lay the blame at the feet of the least powerful (and, let's face it, in primary schools, the physically smallest) agents in the whole system. But changing this is going to be tricky. Placing all the focus on a child's behaviour is a really effective method of taking responsibility off the school.
There are plenty of parents who understand that school is actually not a very good place for some children. In January, Jenn Ashworth wrote in the Guardian about her own experiences of school refusal. She asked, "(w)ho wants to be locked into a room with 30 people dressed just like them, to be startled by a bell every 35 minutes, to queue for lunch for 40 minutes and be made to stand outside in the cold twice a day?" The overwhelming sense is of irrelevance and disrespect.
If pupils had a meaningful, tangible stake in their own learning, then persistent disruptive behaviour would be much less of a problem. I once interviewed some young people at the marvellous Fight for Peace Academy in North Woolwich about religious education lessons. Why, I wanted to know, were those the classes which tended to generate the highest number of referrals for persistent disruptive behaviour?
Perhaps naively, I expected them to tell me that religious education was irrelevant; a waste of time. But instead, these young people, most of whom were members of evangelist or 7th Day Adventist churches, said that the version of Christianity their teachers talked about was not the one they knew. It contradicted their family and cultural understanding of spirituality, and it made them feel uneasy and unsafe.
This sense of irrelevance and sensitivity is spread throughout the curriculum and the age groups. Michael Rosen, the former children's laureate, is spearheading a campaign to challenge the government's focus on synthetic phonics as the only way to teach reading in primary school. Many children are failing the tests, misreading pretend words because they simply do not make sense, mispronouncing 'strom' as 'storm', for example. Is there any surprise that some children become frustrated?
What can be done? It might seem obvious, but I would suggest that persistent disruptive behaviour becomes less evident when school classrooms are places where pupils learn things which are relevant and taught in an engaging way, by teachers who understand that mutual respect is key to collaborative relationships. Respect is important in adult workplaces: schools have in our times become a place to produce future workers. The DfE's 2010 White Paper proposed to bring marks for spelling into GCSE grading precisely because it was felt that this was more conducive for preparation for a life in work. So mutual respect should not be too far a leap for most policy makers.
Charlie Taylor, government advisor for behaviour and from September 2012 Chief Executive of the Teaching Agency, recognises that the issue is systemic. The Teaching Agency is supporting Initial Teacher Training providers to develop responses that could change the whole picture of behaviour management in schools over the next few years.
At Goldsmiths, we are interested in supporting future mainstream school teachers to develop the skills they need to be relevant, engaging, and collaborative with the children and young people they teach. So we have developed a teacher training partnership with a Pupil Referral Unit, and will be integrating the expertise developed by the staff there throughout our programmes in the coming months. They provide an education to young people with some seriously difficult issues to deal with. But they have a high rate of success. Key to their approach is the idea that teachers have the ability to create a positive, mutually respectful learning environment in the classroom. Is that so radical?