Parties get tough on unruly pupils

This is a fascinating piece from the three parties about school discipline. I have seen school discipline and it can be a mess.

There are only two quotes that I really agree with on this. One is the Lib Dem spokesman who says: "Labour has had nearly eight years to tackle school discipline and this latest piece of empty rhetoric will do little to solve the problem". The other is Michael Howard saying: "Our whole education system lacks ambition."

The fact is that much of the rhetoric of Government is about control and bullying...."We will remove disruptive pupils and put them in local authority controlled centres....We will enforce parenting orders...." The fact is that were schools to be given the flexibility and the freedom to engage pupils and interest them in learning then they might have a better chance. Yes, you need to enforce discipline and have control over disruptive pupils but whacking them on the head and chucking them out of the class does not always help. (NB I stress "not always")

Surely it is better to make the school responsible for those that are disruptive. Surely it is better to give the school the control to decide who remains and who is helped, not some bureaucrat in the town hall. Why not give the schools the tools to control and eradicate their behaviour by using CCTV and if you need them drugs tests and metal detectors. At least these tools will remove the weapons and the instigators of bad behaviour. I accept that parents have a role to play in this but, as ever with this Government, they believe that another piece of bureaucracy will sort the problem out. We all know that "parenting orders" will require a "parenting orders" co-ordinator. There are 150 Local Education Authorities in England; in one stroke we have added 150 more bureaucrats and £4.5m of spending!!

So Labour policy is: more bureaucrats, more bureaucracy, smack the parents around the head and who cares for the child.
Conservative policy: no more bureaucrats, give the school control and let them decide how best to deal with the child and parents.

Where are the Liberals? They are arguing for smaller class sizes, reducing teacher workload and improvements to the secondary curriculum. Good vote winning stuff except that:

Smaller class sizes are now proven not to improve educational attainment. Not me saying it but a leading University from a study they have done. In fact they have proven that at year 6 pupils in larger class sizes did better than those in small class sizes. What this proved is that poverty has a more direct link to attainment than anything else. This study is also on the Department for Education website.

Reducing teacher workload? Of course they do not spell out what they mean. If this is a matter of freeing teacher time to spend more time teaching disruptive pupils then I am not sure teachers would thank them. In any case work force reforms have been started under Labour.

Improvements to the curriculum? Not sure anybody is arguing there should not be changes so nothing distinctive here!

Anyway this is a big issue. With truancy reaching 1,000,000 pupils action needs to be taken.