Civitas Blog

These findings are particularly concerning as they most likely confirm that the poor are continuing to do worst. Poor pupil behaviour, poor pupil performance and poor pupil socio-economic background have become virtually synonymous in the UK. Equally inextricable are poverty and family breakdown. The lower the average parent income in both primary and secondary schools, the worse overall achievement tends to be – with bad behaviour playing a key role. The equation seems pretty clear: support stable families for better results. Literally.

Under New Labour ‘teachers blame pupil behaviour/performance on home life’ headlines have appeared on several occasions. Each time, the ‘revelation’ is treated as if it were somehow shocking, and the teachers suggesting it, somehow outrageous in doing so. It is as if once children are institutionalised in schools, they must become clean slates severed from their backgrounds.( Kelly Hours, where schools were to become not unlike orphanages, would do this in the extreme.) Thus to acknowledge the potential impact of an adverse home life is to impede egalitarianism. Blair’s myopic focus on the potential of education combined with the refusal to battle family breakdown is largely responsible for this mind-set. Blair relentlessly champions education as the only way to create a more equal society. According to Blairite doctrine, education is the single best way of levelling the playing field. To imagine that schooling can right all the adverse effects of a child’s background, however, is naïve. To deny many children family stability by not fostering the two-parent family in policy, is the surest way to perpetuate inequality. Universally accessible education is undeniably a key component of a meritocracy. But why attempt to remedy home life disadvantage solely through school, leaving the root of the problem untouched? It is more than coincidence that after a series of governments doing little to promote the family, family breakdown has rocketed and, according to researchers at LSE, social mobility has declined significantl.

Sure Start is an example of dealing with the consequences but doing little to solve the problem. Crudely put, the point of Sure Start was to remove children from their disadvantageous homes in order to mitigate the adverse impact of their home life. The scheme arguably also enables mothers to work and thereby pro-actively improve their children’s life chances. Yet a relatively small amount of additional cash has limited potential to change circumstances. Moreover, family policy focusing solely on getting mothers into work, is often a sticking-plaster response to family breakdown which might have been avoided by a different political agenda.

Life chances aside, the government needs to re-think the home/school interface simply to hold onto teachers. The last notable piece of research on school discipline showed that a huge number of Newly Qualified Teachers consider changing jobs after only a few months – because of poor pupil behaviour. The exit rate from the teaching continues to be very high, and according to OfSTED, retention and recruitment is a problem in two thirds of the LEAs. Whilst it was once training and low salaries which thwarted the profession, pupil discipline now appears to be the primary problem for schools.

In the survey, teachers called for ‘zero tolerance’ to tackle unruly pupils: two thirds wanting powers to exclude pupils. There is a strong case for giving schools more autonomy in disciplinary measures. But there is an even stronger case for the government to start tackling behaviour issues at the root – through the family.

So let’s alter Blair’s mantra, for family surely comes first.