Give all pupils a chance

Published on Saturday 5 September 2009 19:54

MANY parents of school-age children will be familiar with the scenario. Their youngster's education is being held back by the presence in the classroom of one – or sometimes more – pupils who are hell-bent on disruption and who monopolise the attention and patience of the teacher.

As a result, the majority of the class suffers, both from lack of attention from the teacher and from the squandered time it takes to control and manage the misbehaviour. Such disruption poses a moral and practical dilemma: can you protect the schooling of the well-behaved majority without damaging the life chances of the disruptive minority?

Scotland's adherence to the comprehensive ideal in education has its roots in the national instinct for egalitarianism – it is part and parcel of our social outlook and political culture. In education, however, this instinct needs to be tempered by the need to get children to learn in the most effective way possible. And so even in our comprehensives we have "setting" in individual subjects that allows children of similar ability to work together and so progress at their own speed, without being held back by pupils who are taking longer to learn. Why, then, is it so hard to apply that same approach to other aspects of our children's schooling? The same principle that applies to ability should also apply to behaviour. The instinct – understandable in its intention – to keep difficult children in ordinary classrooms and to try to manage them alongside their better-behaved peers, is misplaced and needs to be re-examined.

Of course, we must recognise that many – although certainly not all – disruptive children come from chaotic homes, as a result of a family break-up or dysfunction, or parental addiction to drink or drugs. School is, for many of these children, the one part of their lives that has any kind of pattern or order.

Their inability to cope is in large part due to the fact they are ill-prepared for the routine and basic social co-operation required for classroom learning. To pull them out of that environment and send them home when they misbehave is simply to compound the problem. School is an opportunity to provide such children with – through a combination of firmness and patience – a route out of chaos.

The question is whether that can be provided in a mainstream classroom. The proposal we highlight in our news pages today, and in the column on the page opposite by Elizabeth Smith MSP, suggests this care should instead be provided elsewhere, in Second Chance Centres, letting the other kids get on with their work in peace. The lesson from similar projects abroad, as well as pilots in Scotland, attests to the ability of this approach to help both the problem children and their better-behaved classmates. One such scheme even features in the cult American TV series The Wire, set in gangland-ravaged Baltimore – the programme recently held up by a Tory MP as a comparator for the worst aspects of "broken Britain".

It must be acknowledged that there is an obvious risk in this approach. The message it could send to a child, and reinforce in that child's mind, is that he or she is a problem. Such a belief can easily become a self-fulfilling prophesy. But targeted action to challenge a child's behaviour is a better strategy than hoping burdened teachers will prevail and the child will muddle through in mainstream schooling at not too great a cost to the rest of the class. And Second Chance Centres are a much better option than simply sending a child home or throwing them out of school altogether. In this latter case, all that usually happens is that they enrol at another school and start the same destructive cycle of behaviour all over again.

The proposal for Second Chance Centres comes from the Scottish Conservatives and it is a commendable one – but it would be tragedy if this issue became a political football. No party has a monopoly of wisdom when it comes to how we should treat our young people, and this is precisely the kind of issue where cross-party co-operation should be exercised. Scottish Government ministers should examine the plan with an open mind and look at all the available evidence from home and abroad. Our children deserve no less.