Shameful secrecy hiding terrifying toll of violence in classrooms
By Graham Grant
THE chair came crashing down yards away from the cowering librarian after missing her head by a few inches.
Taking cover behind a desk, she reached for the phone and called the school office, trying to keep a note of rising panic from her voice.
There was no answer as the snarling teenage thug circled his victim, who dialled another number, this time reaching a colleague who came to her aid.
This triggered a bout of yelling from the pupil who ranted: ‘You’re not a teacher! You can’t tell me what to do!’ The shouting alerted the deputy headteacher.
The child was dragged away, but the next day the librarian – still shaken from the ordeal – was shocked to find the boy walking in again, as if nothing had happened.
The incident was never logged in the records of the Stirlingshire secondary school, and there was no punishment for the child involved: he was allowed to carry on as normal.
One source said the attempted assault was ‘swept under the carpet’, because the school didn’t want the negative publicity of a police callout or council involvement.
The law, of course, applies equally, regardless of the location of a crime – whether it happens inside the school gates or not – and yet claims of cover-ups in the world of education abound.
Question anyone in officialdom about classroom yobbery and it’s a very different story – last year I asked the then HM Inspector of Education, Dr Bill Maxwell, if the policy of ‘social inclusion’ was fuelling the problem.
This is the idea that children with ‘behavioural issues’ should be educated alongside other pupils who do abide by the rules in mainstream schools – as segregation would be discriminatory.
Dr Maxwell assured me it wasn’t stoking indiscipline, and ministers back up the notion that it’s been an unalloyed success – but regular Wild West tales from the chalkface suggest otherwise.
Diminishing budgets mean many of the support staff who helped to control the worst-behaved youngsters have been axed, and all too often school managers are keen to ‘bury’ evidence of teachers and pupils coming under attack to prevent ‘reputational damage’ to the school.
The ‘damage’ done to teachers victimised by thugs – such as the one who hurled the chair at the librarian – is, it seems, a secondary priority.
But the inevitable consequence is a gradual acceptance that pupils who abuse staff and classmates will do so with relative impunity.
Last week we reported on a pupil at Knox Academy in Haddington, East Lothian, who took a knife from a home economics class.
The 14-year-old boy was said to have threatened to stab other pupils, eventually slamming the heavy blade into a wall before being chased off by a senior teacher.
Police Scotland had no record of police being called but when we later contacted East Lothian Council, the local authority told us, a few hours after we made our enquiries, that officers had since been contacted.
Yesterday police said the ‘youth community officer for the area is continuing to engage with staff in relation to this matter’.
A source told us the child involved had been suspended – an increasingly rare occurrence in Scottish schools.
In another incident last year, it emerged staff at a Dundee state secondary did not call Police Scotland after a girl was caught with a blade, while Glasgow’s private Hutchesons’ Grammar failed to report a boy with a Swiss Army knife.
Seamus Searson, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association (SSTA), said at the time that teachers can be ‘reluctant to bring in police because of the reputation of the school’.
And yet only three years ago, 16-year-old Bailey Gwynne was stabbed to death at Cults Academy in Aberdeen by Daniel Stroud, also aged 16 at the time of the killing.
Stroud was later sentenced to nine years for culpable homicide.
Anna Muirhead, the headteacher, told Stroud’s trial that she had previously emphasised to the killer that he must not take weapons into school.
Despite repeated SNP assertions that knife crime is falling, official figures last year showed under-16s were being reported to the authorities at a rate of nearly five a week.
Knuckle-dusters, meat cleavers, machetes, knives, hammers, crowbars, scalpels and sharpened screwdrivers are among the weapons seized from pupils as young as six in recent years.
Details of those incidents which are reported to councils are publicly available thanks to freedom of information requests from journalists and trade unions.
Historically, the Scottish Government published centralised data on indiscipline but this practice was ditched, meaning information – such as it is – has to be collected in piece-meal fashion.
Council figures show that, in 2017, teachers in primary and secondary schools were subjected to more than 6,000 separate incidents of physical violence and threatening behaviour.
Staff were punched, spat at, scratched, bitten and injured with ‘improvised weapons’ hundreds of times a month, by children from nursery school age upwards.
In one incident, a primary school teacher was pushed downstairs, while a secondary teacher was punched in the face after intervening in a brawl between two youngsters.
According to the SSTA, nearly one in five secondary school teachers has been assaulted by pupils.
Some of the more extreme incidents reported include a pupil throwing a chisel at a teacher and a drunk and disruptive pupil being removed from a lesson — but returning after sobering up.
In another case, a boy who punched a female teacher in the stomach then repeatedly punched a male colleague who came to help was punished with only a one-day exclusion.
A probationer said they had talked to management about going to police over concerns about sexual harassment by a violent pupil who had filmed the teacher, only to find the pupil back in class the next day.
In another case, a teacher said they had received no feedback after reporting that a pupil had carried a knife into the classroom.
Last week we revealed Graeme High School in Falkirk had seen 11 staff quit in the space of just three months, with indiscipline and poor support for teachers seen as key factors in their departures (the council denied this).
Under the previous Labour-led administration, there was much talk of discipline crackdowns and tough new approaches – which either failed to materialise or produced negligible results.
The SNP (and remember Nicola Sturgeon claims to have prioritised educational reform) has rarely mentioned the topic in the last 11 years.
In fact, a quick search of the news section on the Scottish Government’s website shows precisely no Press releases or policy announcements involving the word ‘discipline’.
Meanwhile there are far fewer tools in the armoury of the teaching profession to tackle those who make life a misery for staff and fellow pupils.
Exclusion is usually a dirty word for senior staff toeing the Scottish Government line on social inclusion, and expulsion – permanent removal from the school register – is virtually unheard-of.
The idea that the unruliest children are themselves victims, and mustn’t be kicked out in case it adds to their isolation and resentment, is a form of ideological dogma.
It misses the point that teachers and pupils who are verbally and physically abused need respite from their aggressors, who often escape scot-free.
Playing dumb on school violence also does the troublemakers no favours – they may need specialist help, away from mainstream schools..
Others could benefit from harsher discipline, and a meaningful threat of lasting exclusion may focus their minds.
Either way, pretending that staff and children aren’t being terrorised on a daily basis is a conspiracy of silence that fools no-one – and can only empower the thugs bringing havoc to classrooms across Scotland.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on November 27, 2018.
