Lindsay McIntosh: Are our children trapped?

Published on Wednesday 30 July 2008 22:19

Experts warn behaviour in schools is getting worse, but is it true or just a generational scare story?

FROM lofty heights accessible only by virtue of age, the authoritative voices of experience have long bemoaned the "youth of today". "In my day, they were better behaved," they have boomed, wringing their collective hands at the lack of respect and the inevitable ensuing implosion of polite society.

With each generation, through moral panics and cultural and political shifts, their voices have been replaced by fresh spokesmen and the cycle has continued – but, this time, could the harbingers of doom actually be right?

The general-secretary of Voice, the union for education professionals, yesterday warned that discipline in the classroom is worsening because children are no longer learning moral values at home.

Schools are taking on the mantle of providing pupils with a stable upbringing because the skills of parents are declining, according to Philip Parkin.

He believes that there has been a "downward spiral" in the quality of parenting that is likely to continue.

Although he was speaking with reference to England and Wales, the statistics north of the Border bear out his claims.

The number of pupils excluded for physical assaults rose by 14 per cent to more than 7,300 in the past year, according to the latest government figures.

In the same period, the overall number of youngsters suspended or expelled from school rose by 4 per cent.

Union leaders say their members also back up the findings. Jim Docherty, the general-secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association union, said: "There is no doubt bad behaviour is getting worse in schools.

"Any attempt by anyone to say it is not is someone deliberately lying or flying in the face of the evidence."

Teachers are facing verbal and physical abuse in the classroom from pupils as young as five as they battle to educate them.

Mr Parkin, a former primary schoolteacher, said: "There is a problem with low-level disruption; it can disturb lessons and disturb the education of other pupils. There is cheek in the classroom and a lack of a sense of importance of education, which many children now come to school with."

He said that it was down to a shift in focus from the community to the individual, as well as the disintegration of the traditional family structure.

However, the Edinburgh-based educationalist Sue Palmer, author of Detoxing Childhood, said: "I would not blame parents for this. Parents don't bring up children in a vacuum, but a culture; this is a cultural problem.

"I think it's not helpful for teachers to see parents as the enemy, or vice versa. They are the two groups with children's interests at heart. They really care about the children. It's important that parents and teachers look at this together."

She said that parents had fallen victim to a "highly competitive consumer culture", which encouraged them to overindulge and overprotect their children.

Aggressive marketing aimed at youngsters had made them highly acquisitive and instilled them with "pester power" over their parents.

In turn, parents have also been getting the message that providing such things for their children is important.

And all this flies in the face of the established research, which states that parents – and teachers – "have to be warm, but firm with their children and set boundaries".

Mrs Palmer said: "Parents and teachers have to share those values, but the culture is to be overindulgent and overprotective and that often sets parents and teachers against each other.

"Instead of bringing your child up to be resilient and accept responsibility for its actions, you should protect it and keep it inside.

"All these things mean people become more and more concerned about self-interest and self-realisation and teachers, of course, cannot deal with that. They have to keep the general good going."

Judith Gillespie, a development manager at the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, agreed that there had been a societal shift, but this was not necessarily a bad thing.

She said there had been a move away from an unbending moral code, which persecuted the lower classes and was circumvented by the higher echelons. The result was – in some respects – a more tolerant and understanding society.

However, she said that, as a consequence, "children aren't given such a good steer as to what is right or wrong and are not checked as much as they used to be.

"I think, to an extent, the pendulum has perhaps swung too far in that parents are told they have to be their children's friends rather than their parents. They have lost the confidence to set parameters."

Nonetheless, schools are outperforming standards set by the outside world, Ms Gillespie added.

"Schools are much more moral and well-behaved than society often is," she said. "But schools still work within the framework of society and can't go into a Victorian 'children should be seen and not heard' kind of environment if the whole of the rest of society is behaving in a different way. Children are only at school for a small proportion of their year and aren't immune to everything else happening in society the rest of the time."

While potential causes of the problem can be suggested, it is solutions which are necessary to silence the voices of doom calling from above. Mr Parkin himself admits that he does not have the answers to "break this downward spiral of parenting skills".

He said one option might be to build parenting skills into the secondary curriculum – but it was already packed. Compulsory pre-natal classes could be mooted – but he doubted they were realistic.

Mrs Palmer said: "It can be solved, but it has to be the people with children's best interests at heart and that's the parents and teachers, but also the local community, who have a vested interest in having well-brought up children."

Mr Docherty said: "If the parents do not know what is going on in schools, it's difficult to blame them, and there are a huge number of cases where parents aren't called in until too late and are shocked. The answer is to call parents in at an earlier stage."

Greg Dempster, the general-secretary of the Association of Heads and Deputes in Scotland, said there was no "magic bullet" and that parents and schools both had a role to play in educating children.

However, he warned against "overstating" the problem, as "there are a lot more children who don't engage in bad behaviour than do".