Analysis: Education - From battleground to playground

Trawl the newspaper archives for articles on young people's behaviour and you can be pretty certain the descriptions "antisocial", "worst in Europe" and "problem" won't be far away.

The Ministry of Defence is already involved in an initiative to encourage ex-military workers to enter teaching. Now, in an explicit bid to instil discipline and improve behaviour, the government is being urged to adopt a US-style programme to train former military personnel as teachers in inner-city schools.

Tom Burkhard, author of the Troops to Teachers report for the Centre for Policy Studies (see Research Centre, p28), says the scheme is necessary. "Ex-servicemen are not intimidated by adrenaline-fuelled adolescents - they have been there before," he says. "Their job is to transform raw recruits into young people capable of doing difficult and dangerous jobs."

Attention seeking

The Conservative Party is backing the idea, which it says would provide much-needed order and discipline. Shadow schools minister Nick Gibb thinks schools need to get tougher. "We have to acknowledge there is a problem," he says. "There is a huge contrast between behaviour standards in better schools and those at the bottom of the league table."

Gibb puts the responsibility for tackling behaviour firmly with the school. "Too many people are too quick to say it's the intake or the children are from bad homes," he says. "But I have been to schools with a very challenging intake who have effective systems to ensure good behaviour."

But might a crackdown on poor behaviour run the risk of overlooking the root of the problem? Margaret Morrisey, spokeswoman for the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, thinks so.

"A lot of bad behaviour is children seeking attention," she says. "It is important to find out the underlying reasons for that behaviour. The vast majority of children conform to rules and teachers do have control. With the minority that don't, we need to pay attention to the real cause and deal with that."

However, she agrees programmes like Troops to Teachers could provide children with much-needed role models.

The charity SkillForce already employs ex-servicemen to work closely with hard-to-reach children, although mostly outside the classroom. The charity's director of business development marketing, Jonny Gritt, says young people respond well.

"Someone that has been in the forces has had a different life experience to most teachers," he says. "Many will come from a similar background to the young people they are working with so they tend to be interested and pay attention."

But Kathy Evans, policy director at the Children's Society, thinks levels of bad behaviour among young people have been exaggerated. "We are over-reacting and it is counter-productive," she says. "The idea has developed that children are behaving worse than ever and this is sending panic waves through society."

While Evans recognises that there have been some serious cases of gun and knife crime recently, she firmly believes that proposals like Troops to Teachers represent a knee-jerk reaction and are a step backwards. "The programme sounds like it is designed to appeal to people who want to go back to the days when physical discipline was used in schools and children were frightened," she says.

Bureaucratic constraints

In the past year, the government has taken a hard line on discipline in schools, introducing new powers for headteachers, applying for parenting orders and supporting the use of exclusions for pupils who misbehave.

Last year's statistics showed a fall in the number of permanent school exclusions for serious misbehaviour, coupled with an increase in shorter suspensions. Schools minister Jim Knight welcomed the figures, which he said reflected the fact that schools were using short suspensions to clamp down on lower level misdemeanours.

However, many headteachers believe there is too much bureaucracy to apply the new powers usefully. Martin Ward, deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, says there is a misapprehension that schools need a tougher approach.

"My experience of teaching staff is that they apply the rules with a great deal of vigour," he says. "Schools have adequate powers but they are constrained by bureaucracy. Employing a different type of teacher won't make any difference."

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Headteachers, agrees. "It's not that there are weak people in schools who are not enforcing discipline, but there is a problem of how to do so without having to apply a whole bureaucratic rigamarole," he says. "That can be very self-defeating."

GETTING TOUGH ON BEHAVIOUR IN SCHOOLS

- April 2007: Schools are given new disciplinary powers, including the right to confiscate mobile phones and use physical force to stop fights

- September 2007: Headteachers given new powers and parents made responsible for keeping excluded children off the streets

- January 2008: Home Secretary Jacqui Smith backs the use of metal detectors in schools, later included in the Violent Crime Action Plan

- February 2008: Troops to Teachers proposes that retiring servicemen are retrained as teachers to improve classroom behaviour.