Continue viewing this article with a TANK Digital subscription.

By Sammy Wright

Since I began teaching, I have been called a fat cunt, a stupid cunt, a beardy cunt and a black cunt (I am white). Also a faggot, a prick, an idiot and a fucking idiot (I’m not gay or an idiot; I might be a prick). But if there was anything that would make me give up teaching, it is the conversations with kids in which they just say “no”.

“You need to do your detention.”“I’m not doing it.”“You need to.”“No.”“You’ll end up in isolation.”“I won’t go.”“I’ll have to exclude you.”“I don’t care.”

At this point I clench my hands and silently pray for patience.

School is a good thing. It’s got to be. Like vitamin C and Christmas, we just know it is. But in many ways we’re not entirely honest about how schools actually work, and what real function they have in society. We don’t have a clear enough idea of what schools are for.

Take behaviour. Dealing with difficult behaviour is the single biggest problem in schools. It is what breaks teachers, and breaks students. One answer is zero-tolerance policies that declare bad behaviour a choice: if we let kids get away with things, we’re letting them down, and leading them towards an unhappy adulthood of poor impulse control and unmade beds. Ranged against this is “trauma-informed” or “restorative practice” – the epitome of the progressive bogeyman, where all behaviour is communication, and the trick is to find the unmet needs and, well, meet them. What’s fascinating, though, is that the question of which approach to apply isn’t just about whether you manage to get kids to behave – it’s also about the moral world you describe in the process. What do we mean by poor behaviour anyway? There is an awkward spectrum of school rules that run from the commonly accepted norms of civilised society (don’t kick people in the balls) to highly specific rules of compliance (you need to wear the correct school socks). In fact, the reasons and structures behind how we manage behaviour in schools speak to many of the deep contradictions in our society, and the way we conceive our individual relationship with it. They speak to how we think about free will, authority and the state, and what the underlying British values are – not those referenced in a personal development curriculum, but the unspoken ones that bubble up in sitcoms and children’s books, in car parks and in Saturday night queues for the bar at your local.

Harry is blond, year 9, 14 years old, with a cautious smile and what your nana might call “a twinkle in his eye”. He looks cheeky, but not malicious. Harry is at an alternative provision (AP) in an ex-industrial town in the north-east of England. The term AP covers a range of specialist provisions – this one is where kids end up when they’ve been excluded. I ask Harry how long he’s been out of mainstream schools.“About a year.”Are you clever? I ask.“I don’t know,” he says, but he smiles. His voice is warm and low. He tells me about his enthusiasms, though – about code-breaking, the Second World War, long walks. You’re quite old-fashioned, I say. He smiles again. “I hate phones,” he says. “I’m not on social media at all.” We dig into what happened with him at school. “In primary school I was quiet,” he says. “I’d just sit there. I had all my friend group, but I’d just sit back and do me work. But when I got into year seven – I think it’s because you go through hormones and all that – I became rebellious.” Spell it out, I say. What do you mean, rebellious? “Walking off.” Was there a trigger? “The first time I walked out was in French in year seven. It sounds stupid, but I needed the toilet and I was desperate and I was putting my hand up. Then there was a group of girls who all went at the same time. They’re not going to all be needing it – they’re going to be going and talking and that. She lets four girls go, and I’m like this isn’t fair. So I just said, I’m walking out.” So did you get an exclusion? “Yeah.” How did it feel? “I didn’t care.” Why not? “I don’t think most people in that school cared.” But surely the whole point of a punishment is that you should care about it. “But they’re too soft. They’re like, ‘Oh, you can go home’. It’s just ...” What should they have done? He smiles. “What do you think they should have done?” I tell him they should have been fair about who goes to the toilet. Harry smiles. We both know this is true, if unhelpful.

The only real solution to behaviour issues in a school is to stop them happening in the first place. The perceived fairness of a system is essential – and often that means the more draconian and rules-based, the more visible the fairness. Everyone-who-does-X-gets-Y punishment is pretty straightforward for even the most challenging kids to understand – and that straightforwardness makes it easier to keep behaviour management at a low level.

The other revealing thing in what Harry says is how little impact the more extreme sanctions – like suspension – actually have. He saw resorting to them as soft; it’s the lower-level detentions, and the simple picking up on issues quickly and consistently, that he saw as “strict”.

Joey is in the same AP. “I wouldn’t say I was a bad kid,” he says. “I wasn’t one of them people who’d always try to start trouble. I’d just talk to people if they talked to me, and then I’d always be in trouble for it.” Was there a particular incident? “No, like, behaviour built up.” I try a few approaches to get him to say the kind of things he might have done. He pauses for so long he forgets the question. Eventually, I ask it differently. In a lesson, would you normally get the work done? “Sometimes. I wasn’t really bothered like.” Sounds like you couldn’t see the point. He disagrees. “No, I could.” He pauses. “I’m just laid back, like.” The next few minutes are like getting blood out of the proverbial stone. Not because Joey is unwilling – but he seems to barely remember where he is. He tells me his mum was a hairdresser, but that she no longer works. I ask what his mum thinks of his behaviour. “She likes me a lot better here. I’m better behaved here. In the other school, every day I’d have done something wrong.” So why are you better here? “I’m not. It’s just that there, they talk to you all the time like they’re in charge, like you have to do this, you have to do that. Here, they just talk to you like they’re your mates.” As he talks, his words are halting, but he’s more awake now. “In mainstream they just make you react.” How? “Like when the teachers are being cocky with you. That’s just like a-asking for a reaction, really.”

It is a fascinating idea: the universalisation of education, something we instinctively think of as about freedom and equality, was explicitly sold as a means of building the collective, not of changing the role of the individual within it. In fact, one of the motivating factors was the thought of what kind of schooling might fill the void if the state did not. In the informal village schools of the early 19th century, you might find Chartists and Wesleyans and other rabble- rousers, who would do the very opposite of “promote the maintenance of public order” (in the words of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, another key 19th-century educational reformer). Gladstone’s link between military success and schooling was again made 30 years later when the poor condition of soldiers in the Boer War led to the introduction of free school meals in 1906.

That’s only one version of school, however. For middle- class kids and their families, school is very different. Rather than the product of universalised education, it exists in the far older, selective tradition of public schooling and grammar schools – places designed to provide actual academic training, rather than a disciplinarian simulacrum of it. In middle-class, professional homes, school is the fundamental thing that defines what success means. Your place in the world is contingent – and the linchpin of it is your education.

In more recent decades, an attempt has been made to marry these two visions into the comprehensive ideal – a version of school that insists it is both universal and aspirational. The old emphasis on compliance is reforged into self-actualisation, no matter where you come from or where you are going. Yet this vision masks the way society has changed. With the erosion of the old secure industrial jobs, and their replacement with precarious, low-status service work, the middle-class attitude to childhood has been accepted as the broad assumption of what education should be. No matter what your background, you attend school to optimise your chances – even when those chances are slim.

If you are from one of the culturally working-class communities at the blunt edge of this change, there are two vital truths. One is the lag between the speed of change in the world around you and the slower change in the attitudes of your parents – a cultural inertia that continues to devalue school, even subconsciously. The other is the hard fact that opportunities are simply not as visible for these communities as they are for the established middle class. Either people don’t succeed, or they do but they don’t stay, moving away to “better things” elsewhere. So just as it always was, school seems to have little impact on your later life. In which case, other imperatives take over.

“When you do something bad, it’s fun.” This is Frankie, 16, just about to leave school for a vague destination as an apprentice. “It’s only fun when you’re bad. If you do something bad, then it’s funny. If you’re learning about, I dunno, algebra, you’re not going to find that funny.” Algebra is said with performative scorn. It’s amazing listening to him, because I can see two things at once – both the truth of what he’s saying and how he wants it to be the truth. He’s staking a claim for who he is, for what he thinks is admirable, and expressing a clear set of values – the deep values of school, not the ones that teachers claim.

Candace is in the same year as Frankie, and is also leaving in two days. She tells me she likes school. She also says she’s naughty; I ask her what this means. “My attitude, and my temper. I can lose it easily.” She is slight, and bounces round the school with a spiky energy. For several years I’ve chased her from her favoured smoking spots, but there’s always been something charming and good-humoured about her – even as I’ve also seen her erupt into fury. Do other people not lose their temper? I ask. “Yeah, but at the same time, no. I look at some people that are the quiet ones in class, and I think that the reason they’re quiet and sit by themselves is because that’s how they want to be.” As she speaks, she keeps her eyes on me. There’s something suddenly very young about her. She looks at me in the way that little children can sometimes when they’re trying to figure you out – eyes wide and unblinking. Only she also has the faintest of smiles. When I told her I wanted to speak to her for an article in a magazine she was with her friends and she shrieked and pranced, shouting that she was going to be famous. I said I’d anonymise her, and for the next five minutes she ran around, striking poses and saying, “I’m going to be anoninonus!” Now, in my office she’s serious and almost sad. So it’s a choice? I ask. Do you choose as well? “No,” she says. “It just happens. I get bored, and if I get bored I get irritated.” Has that always been the case? “No!” She sounds surprised at how vehement she is, almost like she’s forgotten how she was. “In year seven and eight I was perfectly quiet, but there was... new friends, and just the way people look at you. When I was in year eight and I was quiet, they’d say something, but now I’m loud, they don’t say anything.” So it was a kind of self-protection? “Yes.” So was that the right thing to do? “No. I feel like it was completely wrong. I really regret it.”

They know this. When I visited, I was given a list of things not to say to the kids, the most striking among them: “If you are from a private school, please do not tell the children that your school is very relaxed and you do not give detentions.” The clear implication is that the students have been told of a mythical ideal of private education that has little relationship to reality. In fact, the truth is that the standards and expectations of behaviour are very different for those of our students who have money and those who do not. Private schools – and state schools that live in a world of privilege – can afford to relax a bit, to wing it, to valorise the short-cut and the half-arsed, but for the students without that privilege, “having a laugh” is not so far from being the butt of the joke.

Let’s not end on that note. Let’s end with Patrick. I was his tutor in my second year of teaching, 20 years ago. I remember him as being a different shape from the other kids in his class. He had a kind of square, muscular solidity, with a broad face and a huge cackling grin. He had that voice, the one where it’s a bit too gravelly for a child, even though it hasn’t necessarily broken yet. He was also naughty: fighting, confrontational to teachers, very hard to manage in a classroom situation, often playing to the gallery. I remember him vividly in a sex-ed class. We had a visitor from the Brook Advisory Centre, a diminutive woman in her forties with a permanent scowl. Patrick was the kid who just had to ask whether the condoms came in extra large, to howls from the rest of them. The lady from the Brook calmly opened a packet, and pulled the johnny over her fist then all the way down to her elbow. “It’s not bigger than this, is it?” she growled. Patrick just roared louder in absolute delight.

On the phone, when I catch up with him, I tentatively explain that I got in touch because I wanted to talk to someone who found school difficult. “I don’t feel like school was difficult,” he replies. “I feel like I was difficult.” It’s a striking thing to say. He is articulate and thoughtful, and sensitive, at the same time as having a kind of cast-iron confidence. At school, that was twinned with an all-consuming fury that would sometimes grip him, and a brash insistence on being top dog. On our call, he tells me about domestic violence in his home, about the estate where he grew up, and the violence and crime present in it, but when I try to suggest that maybe he needed more support from school, he’s dismissive. “I made choices,” he says. “There was all sorts of moments where I could have done something and I chose to do something else.”