Rushing to blame parents for disruptive pupils won’t work
Running the gauntlet of angry parents is never pleasant, but it’s something you have to get used to when your child is the disruptive one in class.
The one that made PE class come to an early end when they climbed up the bars and wouldn’t come down. The one whose behaviour on the school trip meant they had to leave early. The one dominating the teacher’s attention because they just couldn’t understand the lesson.
This week, a report from think tank the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) decreed that teachers should be given powers to compel parents of disruptive children to engage with them – tackling the “burgeoning crisis of behaviour” in British schools. It argues for educators to have the same legal powers they have over non-attendance to force parents to turn up to meetings with the school about badly behaved pupils and agree an action plan for their child. The report also adds that teachers should be able to escalate cases to the police, NHS and social services if parents do not comply.
Poor behaviour in class has been on the increase since the pandemic. Earlier this year, Patrick Roach, the general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said there was “no doubt” these worsening levels of behaviour have escalated into a crisis and warned that there could be worse to come.
I’m glad those days are long behind me (and my child) who is now in her early 20s, and I agree that bad behaviour in schools should not be tolerated. But as the parent of a once-disruptive child, I can tell you it’s not that easy.
I came to dread my mobile ringing while I was at work. “Hello, could you please come to the school, T has thrown her coat on the roof / hit someone who was whistling / tried to make a run for it through the gates…”
Those few years of attempting a “normal” education at a mainstream state primary school left scars.
Our child joined the school late after being adopted by us as a four-year-old, so we started with something of a disadvantage: the other parents, all pals since antenatal classes or nursery, didn’t know us or our backstory – all they saw and heard were the classroom horror stories.
What they also didn’t know is that I was battling to get my child an Education Health and Care Plan (an ‘EHC’ is what used to be called a Statement of Special Needs). She had had a brutal start to life with unbridgeable social and physical difficulties.
Of course I knew, just as much as the other parents and the staff, that a dedicated classroom assistant would make life so much easier for everyone involved – allowing the teacher to focus on a faster pace for the other children while my child got the support to concentrate, stay calm and learn at her own pace, strife-free. But “free” is not part of the equation: the EHC Plan costs local authorities a great deal of money if the child’s needs are complex and most will do everything it can (not necessarily malignantly) to fend them off.
But, in my experience, the alternative can be more expensive and no less difficult. My child went to a special needs secondary school which cost an amount not dissimilar to Eton, per annum. And it meant that they were in classes with children with even more complex needs. “Mum, B threw a chair through the window today” was the sort of catch-up we’d have.
We also had to have conversations about self-harm, Tourettes, domestic abuse and other difficult topics much earlier than I’d have liked.
Do I have the answer to this vexed situation? I don’t. I am sorry for everyone involved when there’s a disruptive child in a class but I know that blaming the child – or parents – as a matter of course is no place to start.
