Monday, May 28, 2018

If Damian Hinds really wants to reverse the teacher staffing crisis, here's what he needs to do

The bell finally goes. I dismiss the class; breathe a sigh of relief and slump into my chair, exhausted, head in hands, ruminating on the events of the school day. I’ve had to break up a fight; deal with the fallout from an earlier assault upon a Year 7 pupil; phone the home of a notoriously surly parent who – surprise, surprise – spat venomous abuse at me for having the audacity to question her daughter’s behaviour and, lest I forget, taught four lessons, as well.
I now have to gather myself before attending two back-to-back meetings with concerned parents. When will I get the chance to mark books and plan lessons? I worry, before angrily considering Damian Hinds’ latest pronouncements.


According to our Education Secretary, his top priority is the staffing crisis in our schools. He’s concerned that we’re failing to recruit and retain enough teachers. He isn’t wrong. In my school, for example, we have an acute staffing problem. Nobody wants to work here. And if you think we’re unrepresentative of the country at large, you can think again. I’ve worked in lots of different schools over a 15-year career. They’re all the same.
But why? I hear you ask. Why is there a recruitment and retention crisis? Well, where do I begin? Our workload is unmanageable. To paraphrase our Vice Principal, each teacher is doing the equivalent of two jobs, that’s how stretched we are. I am a Head of Year – a position in which one would expect to teach fewer lessons. Not a bit of it. I have a full timetable and teach thirteen separate classes, seven of which I share with different colleagues. I now teach more lessons than I did before my promotion.
In addition, the behaviour of our pupils is atrocious – a factor that immeasurably adds to everyone’s workload and general stress levels. We spend a huge amount of time dealing with feral children when we should be marking books, planning lessons and, yes, spending time with our more respectful, hard-working kids.
Misguided school leaders have spent decades encouraging their staff to view children – even those with criminality etched into their souls – as infallible. This Rousseauian philosophy conspired with the social and moral revolutionary movements of the 1960s to challenge and erode the authority of the teacher. Children were not to blame for their misdeeds – they’re pure and innocent – it was society, controlled by corruptible and corrupting adults, that was at fault. This philosophy still endures, as is demonstrated by my school, day-in, day-out.
Violent children are never excluded. It’s never their fault, you see. They’ve been corrupted. The result: chaos, a Hobbesian nightmare as children fight for their survival, the bullied recoil in fear and us teachers, bereft of authority, suffer physical and verbal abuse on a daily basis.
So, Mr Hinds, you want to reverse the staffing crisis? Then deal with the above. Force Ofsted to scrutinise school behaviour policies, encourage schools to protect their teachers, even urge them to permanently exclude violent pupils if necessary. And crucially, penalise them if they don’t.
Extend the Free School policy to encourage the birth of new units for violent and psychologically disturbed children, thereby reversing Blunkett’s cruel inclusion policy and relieving the pressure on mainstream schools and educators. These kids need to be helped by specialists. Lastly, and again through Ofsted, penalise senior leaders who create unnecessary work for their teaching staff. That should make trigger-happy head teachers, all too prepared to pile task upon task, think twice.
Sorry if I appear cynical, Mr Hinds, but this could and should have been done years ago.
First published on The Telegraph website on 11th May

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Divorce is responsible for our crime epidemic

Violent crime is up. Police numbers are down. There must be an inverse correlation between the two, surely. It stands to reason. Cressida Dick, the metropolitan police commissioner, certainly thinks so, as does Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor. 

We’re in the midst of a crime epidemic, nominally due to the Government’s - and, in particular, Theresa May’s - short-sighted cuts to the policing budget - a decision that’s unavoidably led to a reduction in police numbers. Indeed, the number of police officers in England and Wales has fallen by over 20,000 since 2010. In the year ending in December 2017, moreover, ostensibly as a result of these cuts, there was a 22 percent increase in knife crime and an 11 percent increase in offences involving firearms. Violent crime’s certainly on the up. Since the beginning of the year, London has even seen more homicides than New York. No mean feat, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But is it really caused by a reduction in police numbers? I have my doubts. According to Home Office data, there are now more police officers per capita than during the 1960s. There are 462 people for every officer in contrast to 807 in 1961. One could be excused for thinking that, based on this measure - and based on the intuitive assumptions of negative correlation espoused by such luminaries as Cressida Dick and Sadiq Khan -, crime must have decreased during this period. After all, both proportionately and in terms of total numbers, there are now more police officers on the streets than there were back in 1961, right? Wrong. 

Crime has risen exponentially. In 1961 there were only 806,000 recorded crimes compared to 5.2 million in 2017. When one considers both the statistical and anecdotal evidence - in which people old enough to know recall going out and leaving their front doors unlocked - the general trend of rising crime since the late 1950s is irrefutable. On average, there were 1 million recorded crimes committed annually throughout the 1960s, rising to 2 million in the 1970s and 3.5 million in the Eighties. Even if we allow for the more rigorous recording of crime as a partial explanation for these statistical differences, the general trend is hard to ignore.

For homicides, moreover, a crime for which recording methods have not drastically altered, the growth in cases is clear, despite an increase in the number of police officers. If indeed there is a negative correlation between the number of police officers and the volume of crimes committed in England and Wales, we haven’t seen the evidence to support it yet.

So, if it isn’t the evil Tories and their inhumane, vindictive cuts, what is responsible for the recent spike in crime? 

In my view, this question is a distraction - a distraction used by liberal-leftists to score cheap political points and divert attention from the real causes of soaring crime rates over the last 50-60 years. How can we possibly draw meaningful conclusions from a recent development that could be an aberration? Such conclusions invariably lead to misguided responses that do more harm than good, after all. 

No, we need to look at longer term trends in an effort to get a fuller, more accurate picture - trends that show, notwithstanding a relative decrease during the late Nineties and Noughties, an increase in crime over the last 50-odd years. 

As mentioned above, this is not the result of having fewer police officers - numbers have actually risen. Neither is it the malign consequence of increased poverty levels. Both relative- and absolute-poverty have declined since the 1950s. 

It seems to be, all things considered, the unique product of an increase in family breakdown, a concomitant rise in drug misuse and the stubborn refusal of our betters to adequately punish and deter offenders. 

Seven out of 10 prison inmates come from broken homes. According to a recent study, moreover, children from such homes are nine times more likely to end up in prison and significantly more likely to abuse illegal drugs. It is therefore no surprise that since the Sixties, as the number of broken homes has inexorably risen, so too has the number of recorded crimes. 

In addition, prison - when eventually offenders do get there - has ceased to be an adequate deterrent. Inmates have televisions, games consoles and relatively short sentences. They have unfettered access to illegal drugs, too. In short, they are treated as victims rather than criminals - that’s why our reoffending rates are so high.

These causal factors are the progeny of the irreverent, subversive Sixties - a decade that challenged conservative attitudes, traditional values and the rigid social boundaries that accompanied them. Moral and cultural certainty was replaced by the creed of non-judgementalism, through which different ways of living were deemed equally valid. Christianity became an anachronism, abortion was legalised and divorce, that enemy of societal stability, was made more accessible and acceptable for unhappy couples. 

In addition, anarchic, nihilistic rock-stars encouraged drug misuse as an act of rebellion against old, crusty fuddy-duddies and their suffocating conventionality. And our justice system, in the vice-like grip of a revolutionary ideology that still endures today, endeavoured to stop judging criminals by normal standards of behaviour. Henceforth, they would be seen as unwitting victims of their unique socio-cultural and economic circumstances. They are casualties of an unjust society, driven to criminality by desperation and despair. As a consequence, only in the most extreme cases would long prison sentences served in austere conditions be fair.  

Some of these developments were undoubtedly liberating. For example, single parents and women who had chosen to have abortions were no longer harangued and insulted for their choices. However, there was an altogether darker side to them. As divorce rates increased, so too did childhood angst, adolescent drug abuse - promoted by influential celebrities, remember? - and criminal activity before, ultimately, incarceration at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Non-judgementalism and soft-sentencing encouraged further criminality, as well. It was a radical social and cultural shift, driven, aided and abetted by leftist hardliners like Jeremy Corbyn.

Not that you would know. With the help of the mainstream media, such individuals have hidden these inconvenient truths and constructed a new, fanciful narrative in which crime was under control until the Tory Government’s reckless cuts to the police budget. To fit this ahistorical claptrap, they focus on a short term relative spike in crime, from which it’s impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions concerning causation. It’s one great big red herring.

In the real world, crime has been on the increase since the 1960s, despite a significant rise in police numbers. Furthermore, it has increased because of the liberal non-judgementalism espoused by people like Corbyn and the right’s craven surrender to their intimidatory wailing. When will a Tory politician stick his or her head above the parapet and say so?

Monday, May 7, 2018

I suspect that powerful interests have covered up the circumstances surrounding Ann Maguire’s death

Ann Maguire was a dedicated teacher, utterly devoted to the children in her care. She had worked in the teaching profession for over four decades, had a loving husband, two grown-up daughters and, after the death of her sister 30 years earlier, selflessly raised her two nephews as her own. She was a good person who clearly cared about others. But tragically, back in 2014, she was brutally murdered by a disturbed and deranged pupil. She was attacked and stabbed seven times in her classroom, as she marked another pupil’s work.
Since then, disgracefully, her bereaved husband’s attempts to find out about the circumstances surrounding her death have been met by a wall of silence. A secretive internal report was followed by an inquest in which the coroner refused to interview the killer’s friends and classmates – quite an omission when investigating, among other things, whether the murderer had evinced any signs of what was to come in the weeks and months leading up to the crime, I would suggest. 
Needless to say, both concluded that the school was not to blame in any way for Mrs Maguire’s tragic death; it had not failed in its statutory duty to protect her welfare at work; in short, there’s nothing to see here, guv. 
This, I’m almost certain, is utter hogwash. Over my 15-year teaching career, I’ve worked in lots of different schools, and, without exception, in every single one of them, senior leaders and school governors have failed in their duty to protect their staff. Teachers are assaulted with impunity. Sometimes we’re even blamed for the assaults we suffer, as though we’ve somehow aggravated and antagonised our attackers. 
In the real world, you’d be forgiven for assuming that violent pupils are permanently excluded in an effort to protect their peers and, of course, us teachers – we’re humans too! But you would be very much mistaken. Pupils who attack their peers and teachers are rarely permanently excluded. They may experience a week in isolation or, in some schools, a brief suspension, but they are, as I say, rarely permanently excluded.
So teachers and pupils are expected to run the gauntlet, day-in, day-out, anxiously awaiting the next outburst from our more violent charges, with not so much as a whisper of protest. If we do, we risk attracting the opprobrium of our senior leaders and, in my case, our CEO.
I currently work in a school that refuses to exclude pupils, no matter how violent. Indeed, our most severe punishment is a brief spell in isolation. The result: anarchy and chaos, a brutish Hobbesian nightmare as children, unprotected and fearful, fight for their survival. 
Others simply leave, hoping that their next school will be different. Last week, a pupil was forced to leave after being attacked a second time by an unrepentant thug. His parents, understandably, chose to move him. The alternative was to throw him to the wolves. The trouble is, his new school will probably be no different – at least we’re honest about our no-exclusion policy. As a head of year, since September, I’ve admitted several new pupils desperate to escape violence and bullying in their previous schools. To my shame, I am prohibited from telling them that our school is no different. If anything, it’s probably worse.
One of my colleagues, moreover, has been absent for the last seven days. He was attacked by a pupil who repeatedly slammed a door into his back. Astonishingly, the pupil was back in school the very next day. Another deeply disturbed boy has physically attacked his peers and two of my colleagues. He also keeps threatening to stab us. He really is a tragedy waiting to happen. God forbid, if the worst should happen, and he was to maim, hospitalise or even kill someone, the school would be responsible. It could not honestly say that the warning signs weren’t there, could it?
I suspect that Ann Maguire’s school had a number of warning signs before her tragic end, too. That’s why they’ve seemingly done everything to obstruct a thorough, transparent investigation – an investigation that would not only expose the school’s failings but start a nationwide conversation about the abject failure, no refusal, of schools to protect their staff and pupils from violent thugs. 
Such a conversation would reveal the widespread incompetence of senior leaders and education trusts – in thrall to discredited progressive ideas that proscribe the punishment of poorly behaved pupils – the inadequate nature of our organisational structures (in short, we need more special schools for violent and emotionally disturbed children), the failure of the unions to protect their members and the egregious state of Ofsted’s inspection regime. 
When you consider these myriad failings and the vested interests that their exposure would harm, a cover-up seems eminently preferable for everyone involved – everyone, that is, except Ann Maguire’s family.
First published on The Spectator Coffee House Blog on 10th May 2018