As everyone knows, in order to do something you’re not sure that you want to do, you need incentive. At school as a student that incentive is that you will get to keep all your free time and be able to remain on role at that school.
Let’s be honest, if you had the choice, would you do homework or classwork? I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t, but I’m beyond school age, have a load of qualifications (many of which are of little use, but could be if I changed career) and have little desire to gain any more than I already have.
For children under the age of 16 in the UK, you have no choice: you have to go to school/gain an education. It’s been the law for a while now, so I’m not telling you anything new. There will always be some young people who seem to feel that school is not really relevant to them, but as the law makes them go and they don’t want to get their mum/dad/carer a fine (a fairly common excuse for people who don’t want to be at school but attend) they turn up and just ruin anyone else’s chances of gaining an education.
In previous eras these young people would have been either sent to a special school that would be able to cater for their individual needs or they would have be excluded and given another chance to prove their educational worth at another school, and perhaps eventually a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU).
For those that couldn’t toe the line, there was always the threat of them being ejected from that school althogether. Special schools have been closed on economic grounds, but under the umbrella of the “Inclusion Policy” by successive governments (it doesn’t matter what colour your rosette is, you are as bad as each other I’m afraid). PRUs are scarce and have very few places available.
From the next academic year (September 2011) though, very few schools will be able to afford to permanently exclude students because if they do, they will have to pay for that student’s education at a different establishment, which is extremely expensive, if not prohibitively so. So that removes the final real threat that any state funded school had, and schools will have to provide those students who cannot behave like a civilised human being with an alternative arrangement within that establishment, where they’ll still be able to see their mates and disrupt other student’s learning.
Do politicians lose all common sense upon election to parliament?
As an ordinary teacher, I can essentially do nothing. I can set a detention during school time, but they have to be allowed to have 5 minutes of a break to go to the toilet/at something/smoke a cigarette or whatever else they can think of that could be construed as an infringement of human rights (rightly or wrongly). If I want to keep someone after school for more than 30 minutes (although most schools work a 15 minute rule) then I have to get permission from the parent/carer normally 24 hours in advance. That’s all fine, but many of the students you’d like to detain won’t turn up, will walk out or have parents who hated school in the first place and won’t “allow” their child to be detained. I am not allowed to shout at them in case they feel “intimidated” (30 students aren’t intimidating at all, are they?) and obviously can’t manhandle them even if I wanted to, so that’s me pretty much out of options.
And so it moves up the food chain. Middle management can get a child internally excluded, in other words, put in a supervised area of the school away from all their mates, but the next day they will be back. And with the greatest respect to internal exclusion areas (the staff are great but have no real work to offer the students, because the students were sent with none in the first place), the students may not be able to socialise but they have little to do other than surf the internet in many cases, which isn’t a huge punishment. The internal exclusion facility is usually already full of nice kids who dyed their hair the wrong colour or wore the wrong type of socks that day anyway, depending upon what the senior management’s latest “crackdown” is.
An incident occasionally ends up at the top table, with assistant or deputy heads (headteachers rarely get involved in this stuff for whatever reason you can think of, but usually because they can’t be bothered or don’t have the bottle) who then had the power to externally exclude (send unruly students home for a period of days). This is the thing that has now been fiscally prohibited by those wonderful people in Whitehall.
What this new policy is essentially saying is this:
“Do what you like in school kids, because there’s pretty much nothing anyone can do to punish you for it.” And I’m sure they will.
Fortunately most young people can behave, but their school lives are blighted, increasingly so, by total idiots who should be locked in a secure room until they can learn to be civilised. Without the threat of external exclusion there are no real consequences for actions, and therefore the unruly students will never learn to be civilised.
Teaching really is becoming an untenable career.
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