Children are powerless in schools. We have a duty as adults not to exploit that

A look at how nostalgia, bigotry and ideology are driving the regimented approach to children that's spreading through England's schools

For my piece on ultra-strict schools for New Humanist, I interviewed one parent who said: ‘Michaela has a lot to answer for’.

It was said off-handedly but it was a good point. Katherine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School is renowned for its extreme approach to behaviour. But while it was an outlier at first, schools across England are now using very similar tactics.

Our education system is perversely data-driven, so the grades Michaela boasts is certainly playing a part in this trend, but what else?

Why are my generation of parents being asked to accept that our state-school education 20 years ago was ‘progressive’ and a failure, and that our own kids need to be on a tighter rein if they want to succeed?

This time last year, I discussed this with Andy West, author of The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Learning to Be Free and teacher across various schools via The Philosophy Foundation.

And it was fascinating: ideology, nostalgia, bigotry have all combined to get us to this point, argues Andy, creating a short-sighted and performative approach to education that does little to prepare children for adulthood.

Thanks for reading.

There’s a false antithesis at the moment that if your children don't go to a school like Michaela they're going to be caught up in gang crime

And teachers are going to have their car windows smashed in. But there’s actually a very significant excluded ‘middle’ between these two possibilities and the Katherine Birbalsingh approach is ideological more than anything.

It harks back to Victorian virtues of temperance and discipline and it’s turning education into a culture war

And what kind of jobs and workforce are we actually educating children for? If you look at the world we live, it’s one that understands and appreciates mental health much more. And certainly in the UK, our economy actually relies on creativity and things like that. So this approach just seems so outdated and short term.

But it's hard to overstate how nostalgic the UK is at the moment

The ‘present’ is incredibly scary, there's a lot of uncertainties and young people represent a certain mindset; that fear that today’s youth are wild and scarier than they've ever been, and have less respect than they had.

And so I think a lot of what drives this movement isn’t what's effective as such, it’s more that this old-fashioned approach is familiar to a lot of people, and Birbalsingh puts a modern face on that.

Katherine Birbalsingh also talks about the ‘bigotry of low expectations’

I.e, to let kids off for bad behaviour because they haven't had breakfast or they just come from adverse circumstances is actually patronising; that child deserves and can be held to the same standards as everyone else. And that’s a common right-wing narrative: to not punish people is to be unfair to them somehow. There’s some incredible mental acrobatics you need to take to get there…

But I think it’s the hyper-disciplinary approach that reveals a bigotry, because it supposes that children are a bit like dogs, they need this Pavlovian treatment. And you have to wonder what elements of classism and perhaps racism are in there as well.

An extreme disciplinary model creates a dependency, it doesn't create independence and autonomy

It’s a short-term fix to behaviour problems. I’ve taught in prisons and have had plenty of family members spend time in prison - the ultimate disciplinary institution - and they could keep to a routine and structure inside that they could never then replicate outside.

I taught for a couple of years at a fee-paying special needs school, that had very small classes and a lot of adults

If a child was naughty, they would often be guided in a reflection about it. So it would be de-escalated, maybe taking the child out of the classroom, then there would be a kind of ‘scan’: ‘What are you feeling right now? Are you angry? Are you sad?’ A way to get to know yourself, which is the first part of self-control and self determination. And you can grow and you can learn from this.

Whereas this hyper-discipline method just seems to be isolation, stigma, humiliation, and if you don't learn from that then: goodbye

And even if you do learn from it, at what cost? It just means we're going to have another generation of children that learn that you communicate through power exchange. But after 10 years of teaching it’s still remarkable to me how powerless children are in schools. We have a duty as adults not to exploit that.

You can see a real lack of classroom habits in children around the age of seven and under right now: that generation of kids who grew up in lockdown and didn't have a lot of structure

And there’s a lot of suspected ADHD or distraction or just bafflement in classrooms, but there's ways of dealing with that. One is that you can go nuclear and keep them in detention, or you can use the carrot and stick method.

So I've got a group of year twos at the moment and they’re cosmic and all over the place, and I just put a tally of three minutes on the board, and say: ‘This is our game time that we're going to have at the end of the lesson. And if we listen to each other then we'll add minutes, but if we shout out over each other, I'll take minutes away.’

And when you add a minute, there’s absolute euphoria and when you take a minute away, there’s low mood, so you follow it up: ‘Let’s see if we can get a minute back’. So it's about using scale to your advantage to make the small things become very significant.

Whereas, the idea that you'll get a detention for not bringing in your pencil, that's just an inversion of that approach; you’re making something trivial very significant

Someone leaning back in their chair doesn't necessarily mean they’re not interested in maths. And sometimes the only form of power that's available to you is protest, through non-engagement and apathy. I wouldn't have lasted two weeks in a school like this, I would have been too oppositional or clownish or overwhelmed or something.

One thing Birbalsingh champions is respect for teachers and I wonder if that papers over the cracks for the Conservatives?

Because a teacher's salary - when you look at the hours that they do and the incredible personal and moral responsibility they take on - strongly suggests that we don't respect teachers as much as say, other Western European countries. But the Tories can say. ‘Well in this school children don't answer back,’ and that offers a nice kind of ‘shopfront’ of respect. But actually, across the system, the government have failed to support teachers.