The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
It’s no wonder children are so badly behaved. Just look at their parents
Anyone who grew up with Pink Floyd’s 1979 hit understands the childhood appeal of educational anarchy. A protest song against rigid schooling and corporate punishment, the use of a children’s choir to sing lyrics like: “Teacher, leave them kids alone” was so inspired that it later won the band a Bafta for best song.
Yet life now appears to be imitating the supposedly artful idea of children needing “no education” or “thought control” in today’s schools.
Speak to any teacher and they will tell you that, too often, it’s the children who now think they’re in charge – not the staff. Pink Floyd called for teachers to stop being such sticklers for discipline and to treat students more respectfully. But the pendulum has swung so far from authority to individuality that it is the teachers who need protecting from unruly, illmannered pupils.
On Friday, Sir Martyn Oliver, the new head of Ofsted, revealed that behaviour at some schools is so bad that there are “no-go” areas for staff, and that some teachers locked themselves in classrooms for safety at lunchtime. Setting out the scale of the challenge facing education in England, he said that behaviour in particular was “certainly a challenge now”.
Parents who have raised their children to have respect for authority will no doubt be cringing at the idea of teachers cowering in classrooms as groups of boneheaded teenagers rampage through the corridors. They’ll be asking themselves: how on earth has it come to this? But it really isn’t hard to understand how or indeed why this has happened.
Authority is being undermined wherever you look. Take the case of the pupil suing Michaela Community School after it imposed a “prayer ban”. Some teachers allegedly faced “violence, intimidation and appalling racial harassment”.
The student, who cannot be named, alleges that a policy prohibiting prayer rituals on the premises, introduced by “Britain’s strictest headteacher” Katharine Birbalsingh, is discriminatory and has changed how she feels “about being a Muslim in this country”.
Good grief, girl. Get on with your GCSEs and A-levels, and leave High Court actions to the grown ups.
In another subversion of the way things ought to be, a primary school in east London is now being threatened with closure over its headteacher’s decision to ban children from wearing pro-Palestinian badges. Barclay
Primary School in Leyton has sent a letter to parents warning that it may have to shut and “revert to online learning” if the safety of children and staff cannot be guaranteed after it received bomb threats over its uniform policy. You read that right, folks: “bomb threats over its uniform policy”.
Defending Michaela, her outstanding school in Brent, northwest London, Birbalsingh has argued that the prayer ban was vital in order to “maintain a successful learning environment where children of all races and religion can thrive”. The court heard that prayer sessions had led to growing segregation between non-Muslim and Muslim pupils in the playground.
But leaving aside the details of these cases, a school is supposed to be a seat of learning, not a platform for protest. If you don’t like the rules – send your children somewhere else and let the teachers get on with their jobs, for pity’s sake.
Which rather gets to the point. It’s all too easy to demonise the younger generation, but if you’ve got mob rule inside the classroom – and a degree of it outside – then who else to blame but the parents? The case against Michaela and trouble at Barclay are arguably extreme examples of a disturbing trend playing out more widely across the country.
Sadly, plenty of parents these days are more bolshie and belligerent than the average Fortnite-addicted adolescent. If they’re not whining on about the uniform policy, or complaining about the quality of tuck in the shop, they’ll be wasting teachers’ precious time trying to overturn detentions and other disciplinary measures.
Obviously, there are times when parents need to step in. Perhaps their child is being bullied and the school is doing little about it. Or they’re worried that the school isn’t providing adequate provision for a special educational need.
But in what world is it appropriate for parents to question the punishments doled out to pupils? Yet this seems to happen frequently.
Think about the message that this sends out to the children; that staff aren’t to be taken seriously; that they can wriggle out of being held accountable for their actions. And then we wonder why we have bred a generation of over-entitled narcissists who think the world owes them a favour.
The Covid school closures only served to exacerbate the situation by giving bad parents a licence to be even worse. Some saw lockdown as an excuse to never send their children back to the classroom again. According to the Centre for Social Justice, 100,000 children almost entirely disappeared from education after schools reopened in autumn 2020. A YouGov poll commissioned by the centre-Right think tank recently found that more than a quarter of parents agree that the pandemic showed it was not essential for children to attend school every day.
According to official data, the proportion of pupils classed as persistently absent has more than doubled in England since the start of
Katharine Birbalsingh is being sued over her strict policy of secularism at Michaela Community School in Brent, northwest London
the pandemic. It has risen from 10.9 per cent in 2018-19 to 22.3 per cent in 2022-23. Last year, a record 399,000 parents were given a penalty notice by local authorities for their children’s unauthorised school absences.
Bad parenting is solely to blame for this – as is also the case when it comes to the shocking rates of childhood obesity or children starting primary school unable to brush their teeth.
The buck stops with mothers and fathers – whether it’s pupils being used to advance ideological agendas, atrocious behaviour, or children being incapable of doing the basic things necessary to being a functioning member of society.
The Government isn’t doing enough to defend schools, or give teachers the confidence to enforce their authority. Take the transgender debate. For years, the Department for Education has allowed confusion to reign, with unclear guidance that has empowered extreme activists. This has resulted in staff being bullied by a vocal minority. Good teachers have lost their jobs for “misgendering”. It’s nothing short of a safeguarding scandal.
So it really is no surprise that we are now facing a crisis of low attendance, increased disruption during lessons and a complete disregard for teacher authority. If parents cannot uphold good standards of behaviour, then what hope have their children? because it suspended a candidate for stating a biological fact.
Could this be evidence of ordinary voters turning against the hardLeft’s ideological extremism?
It is perhaps also worth noting that the Cazenove ward falls within the Hackney North and Stoke Newington constituency, represented by Diane Abbott. She was suspended by Labour last year after suggesting that Irish people, Jews and Travellers do not experience racism.
Labour might well argue that the good people of Hackney actively turned against Pascal because of her social media posts. But if that were the case, surely voters would have switched to the Greens or the Lib Dems, who only secured 13 per cent and 2 per cent of the vote respectively, rather than the Tories?
Note to CCHQ: another reason Sharer won was because he opposed Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs).
Pascal describes herself in her online profile as “unapologetic for my gender critical views”. Perhaps Reform should tap her up.