The stick still holds sway in the classroom
The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) on Monday heard an appeal in the matter of Centre for Child Law v SA Council of Educators (SACE). The matter involved sanctions imposed on two teachers found guilty of using corporal punishment.
A seven-year-old child was hospitalised after the first teacher hit him with a PVC pipe, and the other case involved a 10-year-old who sustained head injuries that left her bleeding from the ears and with long-term medical complications.
In separate hearings before SACE disciplinary panels, both teachers pleaded guilty. In both cases, SACE imposed identical mandatory sanctions in accordance with the professional code of ethics, the teachers being fined R15,000 and removed from the register of educators. However, this last sanction was suspended for 10 years and the teachers returned to their classrooms. The SCA reserved judgment, as it considers whether the sanctions on the two teachers were appropriate, and a process to ensure that the views of the learners and their parents are taken into consideration.
When the case was first heard in the high court, judge Dawie Fourie ordered SACE to revise its mandatory sanctions to include corrective and rehabilitative sanctions such as anger management, as well as training in non-violent child discipline techniques as an option in cases where teachers are found guilty of using corporal punishment. SACE originally appealed against the part of the ruling relating to the revision of the mandatory sanctions but dropped this at the start of the SCA hearing.
The Children’s Institute, which was entered as a friend of the court, welcomes SACE’s decision to withdraw the appeal and is looking forward to commenting on the revised mandatory sanctions. These revisions will ensure that the best interests of the child are respected, that the views of children and parents are considered when sanctions are set, and that individual teachers are retrained.
However, on average SACE receives fewer than 200 reports a year of corporal punishment, so though we welcome the revision of the mandatory sanctions, these measures do little to reduce the high levels of teachers hitting children.
The use of corporal punishment in schools was banned in 1997. Yet more than two decades later, corporal punishment is still used as a common form of discipline. In 2019, just more than a million children of 5 to 17 years old reported that they had experienced some form of violence at school, according to Stats SA.
The use of corporal punishment has lasting effects on the children who are assaulted, those who witness this violence, and the teachers themselves. Corporal punishment at school results not only in physical injuries but is linked to mental health and behavioural outcomes that can have long-lasting effects. For children, schools can become a place of constant fear of being harmed by teachers and other pupils — this leads to a dislike or avoidance of school, difficulty in concentrating and learning, performing less well at school or even dropping out.
Corporal punishment can not only compromise children’s right to a safe learning environment but is linked to long-term psychosocial outcomes that also affect educational outcomes. It is also linked to significantly reduced lifetime earnings. It is time to find a lasting solution to eradicate violence in our classrooms.
Corporal punishment must be viewed as structural, as the “broader” system for years has endorsed it as a way of controlling learner behaviour. Corporal punishment is a “symptom” of a lack of teacher knowledge on how to manage difficult classroom situations, thus corporal punishment becomes easy to fall back to. There is an urgent need to address teacher training as teachers are central to the solution.
In Africa, we have a growing evidence base of what works to prevent violence in and through schools. Our context is one where we have many under-resourced schools, large learner-to-teacher ratios, and low levels of in-classroom educator support — all of which increase the likelihood of teachers using harsh forms of punishment to manage learners in the classroom.
In an evidence review led by the Children’s Institute, we found that relatively short interventions can empower teachers to effectively manage learners’ behaviour, making their job less stressful and more rewarding. Notably, we found that engaging multiple stakeholders such as school staff, parents, learners, community-based organisations, leaders and community members in planning and implementation and encouraging their participation are important features of successful programmes.
Such programmes are normally school-wide, aimed at developing the capacity of school-based leaders (both teachers and learners) and investing in addressing values, policies and practices that target the whole-school environment to reduce violence by shifting the school culture and values. There is an urgent need to invest in training teachers to enable them to manage difficult classroom behaviour, as this has the potential to shift the experience of millions of children across South Africa.
Expecting individual teachers to change their behaviour when they work in a school culture where violence is normalised is unrealistic if we do not give them the tools to support behaviour change.
Retraining teachers after a guilty finding should be mandatory to protect children but if we want to stop corporal punishment from happening in the first place, we need to change the culture in our schools, starting with the transformation of school leadership and governance.
This requires that non-violent discipline is part of teacher training and that the department of basic education put in place programmes to support a whole-school approach to ending violence.
✼ Jamieson is a senior researcher at the Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town. Mathews is a professor in the faculty of health sciences, and evaluation lead for the global What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls Programme