The right order for schools

Civitas, 24 August 2007

As of September, schools will have the power to apply for parenting orders. This means that head teachers will be able to ask the courts to impose a requirement on parents to attend guidance sessions where they receive help and support in dealing with their children.

Aside from the fact that parenting orders per se do not seem to be a particularly good idea (poor parenting tending to be more often about dysfunctional family situations relating to unemployment and poverty and sometimes irresponsible departed parents, factors which parenting classes cannot really impact on), further distracting teachers from teaching is very unwise.
The idea behind this move by the government is to ‘empower’ teachers to deal with poor behaviour in schools. But in a very New Labour way, this ‘solution’ both sidesteps the problem at hand and leaps to the extreme. Teachers have been frustrated from intervening sufficiently in pupil’s behaviour in school, where they should have control, yet now the government is asking them to intervene in behaviour in the home.
Never mind the misguided regulations which allow unacceptable behaviour to be tolerated, over-sized classes and schools have turned too much teaching into crowd control and too many schools into community-less vacuums. Discipline problems have swelled in synch. Ever-changing curricula and teaching directives from Whitehall have concurrently distracted all teachers from teaching and all pupils from learning. Failing pupils play up in response and demoralised teachers leave, jeopardising continuity and stability in pupils’ lives. Were these issues to be addressed and teachers allowed to do their job – to teach – then standards of discipline as well as standards of achievement would undoubtedly improve.
It is unequivocally true that dysfunctional home-lives have a negative effect on children. Nevertheless, the best way for teachers to improve these children’s behaviour is to educate them well – the thing that will improve their life chances in the process.