Last Easter I left the special school for children with behaviour problems, where I had been head for six years, for a job advising on behaviour at the Department for Education. Recently, I went back to my school and bumped into a boy called Jack in the corridor. He looked at me for a few seconds as if trying to remember who I was and then said, ‘You were a useless head teacher,’ and walked off. A few of the children ran up and hugged me, but many of them barely acknowledged my presence. Our pupils have often been brought up in families where men come and go and each new one is a potential threat, so it can take them years to learn to trust adults. I had become another transient man who had come into their lives and then abandoned them.
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I went into the head’s office where my successor Colin was sitting nonchalantly at his desk while a ten-year-old boy threatened him with a stapler. ‘I’ll nail your hand to the desk,’ he shouted. ‘No you won’t, Liam,’ said Colin, gently removing the weapon from his hand. ‘I’ve got a lighter in my pocket and I’m probably going to burn the school down.’ ‘No you haven’t, Liam. Why don’t you show Mr Taylor the fishing magazine?’ ‘I hate him!’ ‘No you don’t, Liam.’ Liam’s mother was beaten up by his father while he was still in the womb. Stress hormones had crossed the placenta and he was born hyper-vigilant: he perceives threats everywhere and sometimes attacks children and adults without warning. His mother had recently had a baby son and Liam was often left caring for him when she went out drinking. We are in no doubt that both of them should be in care. He rummaged around Colin’s desk, ‘Where’s that ruler? I’m going to shank [stab] someone.’ ‘No you won’t, Liam.’
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Part of my new job has been advising on the Education Bill that has just received royal assent. It contains many sensible measures to allow teachers to deal with the bad behaviour so many of us put up with. Astonishingly Dr Patrick Roach, the deputy leader of the largest teaching union, NASUWT, described the bill as ‘a crime against humanity’: Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and … letting teachers search children for cigarettes or letting schools impose detentions on the same day as the offence. Hmmm.
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I am looking at what can be done to reduce truancy in schools. Last week I had a meeting with education welfare officers in the West Midlands. Their job is to chase up parents who don’t get their children into school. They start off advising and supporting the parents, but if nothing changes they prosecute them. One of them told me of her exasperation at how lenient the courts are: ‘When I see it is a particular district judge on duty I know that all the parents will be let off with a conditional discharge.’ Another told me about a parent whose child had missed over a year’s school: she was punished with ‘court detention’. This meant she had to sit in a cell for the rest of the day. When she said she had to collect her other child from school, the judge let her off. I met some magistrates who explained how easy it is for parents to work the system — plead not guilty, ring in and say you are sick and the case might be abandoned; if you get to court, burst into tears and beg for help. No one wants to see poor people being fined, but the legal system must have some teeth.
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Some parents become needlessly worried about what their children do in front of me because I am a ‘behaviour expert’. There must have been delight among the other parents when I had to cope with my five-year-old having a four-star meltdown outside the school gate last week. I spent years being measured and rational with my pupils, but when it comes to my own children things are more difficult. I had to be rescued by his class teacher, who took him by the hand and calmly led him off into the classroom.
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One of the joys of my new job was going to be swapping the rush hour A40 for a gentle Boris bike ride across the park to the DfE in Westminster. Most travellers in London share a camaraderie with their own kind, but all cyclists do is scowl. On my first day cycling round Hyde Park Corner, I committed the appalling faux pas of saying ‘good morning’ to a lycra-coated cyclist who pulled up next to me. He sneered back at me through his mean little sunglasses and then pretended to adjust his helmet. A combination of eco-self-righteousness, perpetual fear of dying under a lorry and a fantasy that they are competing in the last stage of the Tour de France has made cyclists the rudest road users in London.
Charlie Taylor is the government’s adviser on pupil behaviour.
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