SNP Justice Secretary is wrong. Scotland needs to get violent children OUT of classrooms

A young person who is violent towards a fellow pupil, teacher, or anyone on school premises should be excluded

I was having a fairly gentle morning on Monday, as befits a retired headmaster, when a friend, no doubt meaning well, sent me a newspaper article from a reputable source. This was the headline: “Best place for violent children is the classroom, says SNP minister.”

At first I thought it was an AI hoax; then I thought it was a typo of historic proportions – they had missed out the word ‘not’; but then I remembered I was in Scotland in 2025, and for the rest of the day I was raging. Raging for us all, but mainly for Scotland’s teachers.

The minister in question was Angela Constance, who is the Justice Secretary, and who, before landing at Holyrood, did the rather tougher job of being a social worker. I mention this because, rather than excusing her, it makes her astonishing position all the more repugnant.

Asked on the BBC’s Sunday Show about “violent children” in schools, she had said: “Exclusion does remain an option for schools but you have to remember children don't learn and children don't change if they are absent from schools or if they are not sighted by services.”

READ MORE: How bizarre theories about bullies are pushing Scotland's teachers to the brink

Children and teachers should feel safe at school and not have to worry about being assaulted (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell) | Getty Images

The last thing that’s good for them

This is someone who, it is reasonable to presume, knows something about violent children, someone who has, at some point, sniffed real life before retreating into the Holyrood bubble. I imagine she knows how frightening violent children can be.

Because, Angela, putting such children into classrooms in mainstream schools is the very last thing that’s good for them; or their parents; or the other children in the class at the time they kick off; or the parents of those children; or their teachers; or the senior managers of their schools; or for Scottish society when these violent children become violent adults and all the other children haven’t learned as much as they should at school.

Ms Constance’s stance makes no more sense than saying the ‘best place for alcoholics is in cocktail bars’ or the ‘best place for second-rate minds is in the Scottish Parliament’. (Oh, wait a minute…)

Now, you know, I don’t think of myself as a ‘lock ’em up and throw away the key’ type of guy, and I don’t think the kids I taught for 38 years would either. I understand perfectly well that most violent young people – say those who beat up their classmates in the toilets or throw around classroom furniture or punch pregnant teachers – are damaged children.

The right to a happy life

I further recognise that, as a society, we need to do everything we can to help mend them, both because every child has the right to a proper education and to a happy life, and because if we don’t we reap the consequences in the future – drug deaths, institutional unemployment, domestic abuse, and terrible stresses on our NHS.

These young people are not helped by long waiting lists for help from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, they are not helped by poverty, disadvantage and – often – dreadful neglect; and they are not helped by being placed in mainstream schools.

Of course, we also have a clear duty to protect and nurture all the other kids, to spend time helping them achieve their potential and go on to be the ‘responsible citizens’ demanded by Curriculum for Excellence. Not much chance of that if they are too frightened to go to school.

Missing lessons

So, get violent kids out of the classroom. Violence in schools is a pernicious cancer that is wearing down our teachers, and the SNP’s response is to tell us that they are “the best paid in the UK”.

Why then are so many of them quitting – some after decades of service – and why are so many schools hit so hard by the absence of teaching colleagues due to stress? Why are so many young people missing from their lessons?

Pay simply isn’t everything, and the SNP administration has utterly failed to take the necessary steps to get violent kids into the proper educational environments where they can be helped. Not – to be fair – that other political parties have as yet made this a central campaigning plank.

Children who are identified as presenting physical risks to other young people and teachers need to be in environments where they are looked after by properly trained and remunerated staff, with very low teacher-pupil ratios. They need psychological interventions and they need kindness.

This madness must end

Earlier this year, colleagues at Kirkintilloch High School took industrial action about violence in their classrooms. And there have also been separate claims that some head teachers cover up violent incidents because local authorities don’t like the stats, and, of course, don’t like exclusions.

It should be the case that any young person who is violent towards a fellow pupil, teacher, or anyone on the school premises should be excluded. For older pupils, the police should always be involved just as they would be if the young person did the same thing outside the school gate.

And yet the Justice Secretary, who has never taught a class, can breezily tell us where such children should be. Maybe we should cram a dozen of them into her office at Holyrood and let her lecture them.

Or maybe it’s time for the teaching unions in Scotland to step up and offer their members support against the policies of a government which has, in truth, never seen education as any kind of priority. And it is quite definitely time for teachers and parents of school-age children in Scotland to consider how they will vote in the 2026 Holyrood election, to end this madness.

Cameron Wyllie is a former head teacher. He writes a blog called A House in Joppa and is the author of Is There A Pigeon in the Room? My Life in Schools