What happened after Scottish 12-year-old's foul, anti-English abuse of his teacher will shock you
In Scotland’s schools, both teachers and badly behaved children are being let down by the lack of genuine discipline
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Fifty years ago, I worked in a department store selling records. It was a very happy job; I was one of only two males working there, and the other was the manager. I was, it’s fair to say, spoiled by the ladies, young and old, who mainly wanted to fatten me up.
One woman who was not a fan was the store detective, but then she didn’t seem to like anybody. She was an imposingly large presence and I found it hard to believe that even the most cretinous shoplifter wouldn’t immediately rumble her. But she had a fair share of success; with grim determination, she wrestled people of all ages and genders back into the store to make them suffer.
One day, she caught a boy – he was 12, he later bawled – stealing a chocolate bar. I remember it was a Topic. I never much cared for Topics, so I thought it was a bit of a pity that this child had been caught for that. She dragged him into the back of the shop and sat him down, then came to get me while she phoned his parents.
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His fate was sealed
The store detective had already told him that the police were on their way, and that he would most certainly be jailed and he was very, very upset. Back she came, crowing with the news that his mum was devastated by his behaviour and had wept down the phone. Then she asked him what school he was at, and left me alone with him again while she phoned the head teacher.
It was a Catholic school, she noticed, so next she asked him the name of his priest, then left to phone him. This child didn’t have a chance. I thought it likely he would throw up whatever part of the Topic he had ingested, and I was fairly nice to him when she wasn’t there, but I wouldn’t have dared to intervene.
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His fate was sealed – the power of the parent, the state, the education system and even the Church, all were ranged against him, and all for, yeuch, a Topic. I mean, it could have been a Bounty. Or some Rolos.
I don’t know whether she did, in fact, phone anyone except his mother, who eventually arrived in a terrible state and swept up what remained of him and I haven’t thought about him much since. But he came to mind last week, just at the start of the new school year…
New boy nerves?
X is a wonderful place for teachers to clipe, to whistle blow, to tell the world (or at least their fellow edu-Twitterers) about the things going on in their schools. So it was that the story reached my eyes of another 12-year-old, this time in a classroom in one of our big cities, no doubt fresh and enthused at the prospect of Senior One. At last the big school, maybe a wee bit nervous, but eager to learn and eager to please.
Yeah, yeah. This is Scotland and this is 2025. So he’s in French (in my experience rarely the highlight of the day for 12-year-old boys) and his teacher, a woman, asked him to do something, or more likely stop doing something, and this is what he said: “F*** off, you English c***.”
Consider what would have happened to you, at 12, if you had said that to a teacher. In this case, the teacher reported it to a depute head, the depute saw the child and reported back to the teacher that the child had some difficulties with his step-parent, who was English, and the depute thought that the teacher’s English accent had triggered the response.
The child was back in French the very next day. Yes, this actually happened in a school in Scotland two days into the new school year.
Pastoral care and discipline
The worst part of me wants to see the video of that boy talking to my store detective. But, truth to tell, he would probably just have told her to “f*** off” too. And you know, neither of them – my store detective, probably long dead, or the school depute – was right. They were both wrong.
Looking after young people is a mix of two things – pastoral care and discipline. They are two sides of the same coin and, in ideal circumstances, the person who delivers one should deliver the other, whether it be a harried school depute or a parent or even a store detective.
Parents discipline their children because they love them, and while it might be a stretch to assume that the depute even personally knew that child on day two, he has not done the bairn any favours by letting him off. We understand young people may be traumatised, and we understand they may act out at school, but, God in Heaven, what chance does that boy have if a senior teacher isn’t sanctioning him sufficiently for swearing so horribly (and racially) at a teacher he has just met?
Mr Topic. I wonder if he ever stole again. I wonder if he had nightmares about that detective. Mr F***. I wonder if someday he’ll get angry with a big lad with a knife. Or with his employer. Or with his wife. Or with himself.
All this trauma-led, ‘restorative justice’ isn’t anything new; good teachers have been doing it for decades, if not centuries, but it was accompanied, where necessary by sanctions, by discipline. I think about that French teacher. How many times will she be called a “c***” by a kid, before she jacks it all in and becomes a store detective.
Cameron Wyllie is a former head teacher. He writes a blog called A House in Joppa and is the author of a book called Is There A Pigeon in the Room? My Life in Schools
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