I joined Twitter because I wrote a book and my publisher asked me to; I didn’t really intend to ever make much of it, but, as with many people, I’m now sort of addicted, even if the sweet little blue bird has gone and been replaced by a big black X. Twitter (for I will always call it that) does afford the opportunity for the small fishes in the world of education like me to see what the whales, sharks and octopi are saying.

The conversations, well, arguments, tend to be very polarised. Currently, two main recurring threads are about going to the toilet – with one side saying, “all young people should be allowed to go to the toilet whenever they want” (ludicrous, some classrooms would be permanently half empty) and the other side saying “toilets should be locked except at breaks” (also ludicrous, and very bad for the environment of the school playground). The other is about exclusion from school.

There was a great deal of comment after Maureen McKenna, the former director of education at Glasgow City Council, was appointed by Sadiq Khan to London’s Violence Reduction Unit as an education consultant with the intention of developing its ‘inclusion charter’. Ms McKenna, while in Glasgow, “slashed” school exclusions by 90 per cent.

To some of the Twitterati, she is a great hero, to others a pie-in-the-sky liberal idealist. There is much shrieking on both sides. Of course, the real question is this: what was the effect of this astonishing reduction in exclusions on a, the young people who would previously have been excluded and now weren’t; b, all the other young people; and c, teachers and teaching?

The problem is that so many issues in schools are presented as binary choices when they are, in fact, a great deal more individualised and nuanced. Of course, the vast majority of young people who find themselves excluded from school have real problems – many of them reinforced by poverty, poor mental health, inappropriate parenting etc.

While Mr Whackem calls it “bad behaviour”, and wants them out, preferably forever, Miss Lovely, the head of well-being, calls it “distressed behaviour” and wants to give them a metaphorical cuddle. These are the attitudes towards behaviour championed by BBC school drama Waterloo Road: neglected kids who take out their angst by acts of violence, vandalism, arson.

I personally take the view that a lot of the situations which lead to exclusion are ‘distressed, bad behaviour’, and that in dealing – as far as is reasonably possible for a school – with the distress, there does need to be a sanction. This, after all, is what happens out there in real life, whether you are six, 16 or 60. We can be shocked by aggression and destruction while at the same time understanding that individuals can be under intolerable pressures.

The classroom teacher is often in the middle of this, trying to do a job which might be, for example, teaching a class of 35 eight-year-olds to divide or 16-year-olds in a class of 28 about the First World War. Something happens, and all that teaching, that schooling, that educating, suddenly stops. Other people, more senior, intervene; parents become involved, maybe external agencies – social workers, the police. Some poor child is excluded; that doesn’t much help the other poor child they’ve hit, or the teacher they’ve attacked, or the class who can’t divide or tell you who won the war.

The real question isn’t whether we should ever exclude young people from school; it’s what we do with them when they are excluded. Really we should concentrate on the idea that we are sending a young, troubled person away from the school they attend for a bit, and sending them somewhere which gives them a structured breathing space, and an opportunity to talk to sympathetic trained professionals about whatever it is they have done. What we don’t need to be doing is sending them home, because it is very difficult to conceive that that can do them any good. Very often home is part of the problem.

So we require a network of places that young people, when they are excluded, even for a couple of days, have to go to for the length of the school day. Yes, yes, I know that’s expensive, but we also know the long-term outcomes for young people who are excluded from school are frighteningly bad and we are, for example, living in a nation now notorious for its drug deaths. Some long-term investment in dealing with the most troubled young people we have in Scotland would reap dividends in the long run; whether politicians, with their eyes on the cycle of elections, can actually deal with that remains to be seen.

Like all issues emanating from real classrooms in real schools, this is about individuals and how we treat them. It is a highly charged problem that’s costly in all sorts of ways, not least in the stream of highly trained professional teachers who are leaving the profession because they are fed up with the day-to-day difficulties of trying to run a classroom environment where actual learning can take place. It is possible for Mr Whackem and Miss Lovely to work together; indeed, as in Waterloo Road, maybe they can get together and produce some Lovely-Whackems.

Cameron Wyllie is a former headteacher. He writes a blog called A House in Joppa, and his book, Is There A Pigeon in the Room? My Life in Schools, is published by Birlinn

Scottish education must provide a place for excluded children to talk about what they've done with sympathetic professionals – Cameron Wyllie

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