State schools are operating in a moral vacuum where teachers and senior staff refuse to take responsibility for discipline, a whistleblowing teacher has warned
6:30PM BST 08 Oct 2012
Children are routinely being allowed to get away with bad behaviour as schools desperately avoid being seen to “preach” to pupils, it was claimed.
In a provocative article, Matthew Hunter said that schools regularly resorted to using rewards to bribe unruly pupils instead of imposing proper boundaries.
He warned that only misbehaviour of an “extraordinarily extreme nature” – such as a physical assault on staff – was met with full consequences.
It was claimed that many head teachers and deputy heads were seen as administrators rather than schools’ “ultimate moral arbiters” and assemblies were simply used to read out notices or play games.
The comments – in an article published in Standpoint magazine – come amid continuing concerns over standards of behaviour in schools.
A survey published earlier this year found that discipline had worsened in the last five years, with pupils regularly kicking, punching, pushing and shoving school staff.
The Association of Teachers and Lecturers warned that a minority of children had a “total disregard of school rules”, with education leaders claiming that indulgent parents often failed to impose proper boundaries.
But Mr Hunter, a newly-qualified history teacher who works in a struggling inner-city comprehensive, claimed that a decline in standards could be traced to the shift towards “progressive” education in the 1960s and 70s.
The teacher – understood to have been working in the state system since September 2011 – has started his own blog to lift the lid on the problems facing the education system.
Writing under a pseudonym, he said many schools now failed to instil children with traditional values because of the dominance of the “teach, don’t preach” doctrine.
“Rules exist, but are broken on such a regular basis that it would probably be better not to have them at all,” he said.
“Pupils know that their school is chaotic and that most of their misbehaviour will go unpunished. Thus, on a routine basis, justice is not seen to be done.
“Personal responsibility is never developed among the pupils, as they are so rarely held to account for their actions. Only misbehaviour of an extraordinarily extreme nature (such as hitting a member of staff) is sure to be met with definite consequences.
“The idea that senior staff will deal with the most serious infringements does not exist. Far from being the school’s ultimate moral arbiters, senior members of staff perceive themselves as administrators, often unknown to the pupils.
“Similarly, events such as school assemblies are not seen as an opportunity for moral inspiration, but instead a convenient time to read out school notices and play the occasional game.”
Mr Hunter, who launched his education blog in February and also writes for Standpoint on the subject, claimed that “many schools, in both affluent and deprived areas, are actively amoral in their notion of how to nurture children”.
He said that the “saddiest thing” about working in a secondary school was watching the “deterioration of the 11-year-old pupils”.
The teacher told how one unruly pupil at his own school, who repeatedly swears at staff and bullies classmates, was rewarded during an end-of-year prize-giving ceremony.
“He had collected one of the largest amounts of ‘reward stickers’ in year seven, and was due to collect a prize,” he said. “Many teachers, it turned out, had taken to bribing him with these stickers in a desperate attempt to appease his unruliness.
“As the school applauded his name, I thought of the dozens of his classmates who had had a year of learning ruined by this one pupil. Such is the moral condition of many of today’s state schools.”
A Department for Education spokesman said: “The majority of pupils are well-behaved and want others to behave well too.
“Whilst our recent survey of teachers shows encouraging effects of the Government’s reforms with teachers feeling more positive about behaviour, schools need to continue with their relentless focus on behaviour.
“The Government is committed to maintaining our relentless focus on raising standards of behaviour in schools until every school is a safe and happy place in which pupils can excel academically.”
HSFC Careers: Teaching 