Why disability must not be confused with disobedience

The government’s expert adviser on behaviour Charlie Taylor, in giving evidence to MPs at the Education Select Committee this summer, advised that some pupils “show very extreme behaviour”. The published response to this from Barnardo’s - who know a thing or two about troubled and troubling children and families - was that a teacher’s job is not an easy one and they must look behind the behaviour and see the child. Such pupils may be acting out, not just acting up.

Returning to this depressingly familiar conceptual battle ground reminds us of Gore Vidal’s much used expression. This late acerbic and brilliant commentator coined the phrase ‘the United States of Amnesia’ and in public policy terms at least, we seem to have caught this particular American ailment. We have developed an unerring capacity for forgetting all we have learnt since the Curtis Report - which lead to the 1948 Children Act - about children, behaviour, parenting, violence in childhood and what to do about it.