London’s schools are about to become less safe. The city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has decided to appoint Maureen McKenna to join its violence reduction unit (VRU), with a view to reducing crime by ‘driving down exclusions in schools’ while ‘increasing a sense of students’ belonging’.
The VRU has equally noble aims: ‘we believe violence is preventable, not inevitable’, they state. Lib Peck, its director, launched a scheme last year to reduce knife crime by preventing some of the 900 school exclusions a year across London. Glasgow, it was claimed, had seen a 48 per cent reduction in violence across the city since it also decided to reduce exclusions, to almost zero. The person behind this miracle? Maureen McKenna.
Only in education can failure be repackaged as success and rewarded
Who could argue with such success, and Khan’s eagerness to emulate it? Well, anyone who understands challenging schools, research, and the reality of exclusions. Or what actually happened in Glasgow.
Exclusions have undeniably fallen in Glasgow (and Scotland more broadly). Permanent exclusions were at an astonishing low last year (one), down from three a few years ago. And knife and youth crime undoubtedly fell sharply in the last ten years.
But anyone with a cursory understanding of causation and correlation will grasp that these two things are not the same. Especially when you consider that violence and youth crime fell in a similar way throughout Scotland, not only in Glasgow, where Maureen McKenna was its director of education in that period.
Moreover, crime fell by an even greater amount in England, despite an absence of the policies that McKenna espoused. We should probably be asking what the rest of Britain did so well, not Glasgow. Exclusions certainly fell dramatically in Glasgow, but only because exclusions have been made taboo for school leaders, who are under enormous pressure to never exclude.
I talk to Scottish teachers and leaders on a daily basis. The story they tell is monotonous, repetitive, and sad: behaviour is often terrible, and there is little they can do about it.
Unions routinely report that members are buried under a mountain of behaviour-related misery. Teachers have to strike because no one is supporting them with rising violence in schools, fuelled by fanciful strategies as the no-exclusion policy. Boundaries of student conduct are impossible to maintain because they are told to see all behaviour as ‘a form of communication’ or a manifestation of an ‘unmet need’, which are both educational dogma, and as unproveable and unevidenced as a catechism.
Teachers are asked, in effect, to treat misbehaviour as a sign of trauma, and to diagnose and prescribe pastoral responses. No one knows quite what that looks like. But it seems to mean a great deal of pointless, time-consumings conversation with unrepentant students who cannot believe their luck that the adults notionally in charge of them seem to have no power to do anything other than ask them not to misbehave.
This rise of therapeutic approaches in school behaviour management is an international phenomenon. It manifests itself perfectly in Scotland, where teachers are given all the responsibility but none of the authority to maintain classrooms of safety, calm and dignity.
What can a teacher do in Glasgow with a student who tells them to ‘f*** off’? Use ‘restorative practice’, a strategy rooted in the progressive tradition whereby rather than sanctioning a student who misbehaves, they are encouraged to discuss the impact of their actions on themselves and others. This would be lovely if it actually worked at scale, but sadly has never been proven to do so beyond small case studies. But who cares about evidence?
Lots of students simply aren’t as amenable to talking cures as we would like. This is essentially why traffic wardens don’t hand out restorative conversation tickets or try to ‘understand why the driver felt the need to park there’. Boundaries need consequences, or a small percentage of people won’t see it as a boundary. But school leaders are told not to exclude, and teachers are told not to sanction.
But surely Glasgow must have demonstrated some kind of success beyond the spurious claim to have reduced violence, for McKenna to be hailed in the Evening Standard and by Khan as a kind of expert in this matter? Sadly not.
Glasgow does not record data on school behaviour at that level, which is convenient. It must be delightful to be able to launch a strategy and then claim the strategy to be a success simply because it has been launched. Would that we could all mark our own homework like that.
Exclusions have plummeted in Glasgow because exclusions were effectively simply stopped. Seeing this as a success is like a child closing its eyes and believing the world has vanished. We could solve hospital waiting times in similar way if we simply stopped timing things. Hoorah!
Exclusions are a necessary part of running a school. They need to be a last resort, when all else has failed, but without them schools cannot be safe. Activist groups like No More Exclusions clamour to abolish all exclusions – even in the case of alleged sexual attacks, which would mean a child who has been abused potentially having to share the school with their abuser.
There are many in politics who share this ambition, who see abolishing exclusions as an easy answer to a complex problem. It also ticks the inclusion box lazily. But there are valid, important reasons to exclude children. Department for Education guidance explicitly upholds the right to do so. If we do not exclude when we have to, then we cannot keep children safe, learning is harrowed and students and staff exist in chaotic cultures where no one can thrive.
The national exclusion rate is incredibly low: 0.08 per cent – as low as it has been in over 11 years. The rate in London is even lower than that. Exclusions are incredibly rare, as they should be. But when they are necessary, they are necessary. It’s easy to pronounce against them when a) you’ve never had to manage a challenging school environment and b) your children will never have to suffer in a chaotic classroom.
For many who do face these circumstances, Khan’s appointment is a ghastly goof. Only in education can failure be repackaged as success and rewarded. This appointment is a victory of domain elites over domain experts.
It’s a good thing that education is not a devolved power of the mayoralty, or this unit might actually do some real damage. But damage will come anyway, in the form of a barrage of persecution for school leaders who are trying their best to run schools, only to be told by people who don’t that they should listen to their armchair ideology.
Meanwhile, as the adults feel good about themselves, children will suffer. But that’s a small price to pay when someone else is paying.
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