Threats, assaults and sexual harassment are endured by teachers in Irish schools every day, and few are confident that proposed new measures will make any difference, reports Kate Holmquist
He’s violent, abusive, does no school-work and bullies fellow pupils, say his teachers. He tries to bring everyone down to his level by targeting pupils who are working hard. He was expelled for the safety of the school and to protect the rights of the majority to an education, but on Monday he’ll be back. His appeal was successful. This weekend, his teachers are dreading returning to work.
"This boy thinks he can beat the system," says a male teacher at the boy’s Dublin school. "Think of the riots in Dublin a few weeks ago and the shooting in Coolock. These are the kind of adolescents we’re talking about. One boy hit me with a chair and dislocated one of my fingers.
"Another boy destroyed a teacher’s car – smashed the windscreen and the windows and destroyed the instrument panel. One rode a horse onto the schoolgrounds in order to intimidate, sending pupils and teachers scattering. Our pupils have drugs in their bags, but we’re not allowed to search them.
"They carry knives, physically attack teachers and sexually harass the young female teachers who are afraid to tell their superiors lest they be regarded as unable to cope."
One teacher told The Irish Times: "Our students are spending many hours playing games like Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStations, and I’m supposed to teach them with a piece of chalk on a blackboard?"
Twenty years ago, adolescents feared adults in the community: teachers, priests, coaches and gardaí all commanded authority. Today, the pendulum has swung the opposite way and adolescents have no fear. The middle ground – where mutual respect might develop – seems elusive for many secondary schools and their pupils.
The report of the governmental Task Force on Student Behaviour in Second Level Schools, which was published this week after a year of consultation with six out of 700 secondary schools, contains 21 broad areas of recommendations. The Minister for Education, Mary Hanafin, announced a new package of measures including new regional behaviour support teams, a pilot programme of behaviour support classrooms, expansion of out-of-school provision to be examined, amending Section 29 of the Education Act (which currently enables students to appeal their expulsion from school) and making the Junior Certificate schools programme available in more schools.
When the Minister said this week that "there is no crisis", teachers at one troubled school asked, "What is this task force doing for us today? It’s only aspirations. We need resources now – not next year or the year after. The Minister announced a further ¤2 million to be spent this year. We could use ¤2 million just in our school alone."
The report is the fourth attempt since 1987 to tackle the growing crisis. The other reports – conducted in 1987, 1996 and 2001 (the McGuinness report) – were never implemented and while they gather dust, teachers fear that this report will too.
Declan Glynn of the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI), says: "This is a huge social problem. It's intergenerational in many cases. We need to get in there and aggressively support the schools, particularly schools with the worst problems, by giving them preferential staffing for a start. A tiny augmentation, spreading around ¤2 million, is going to make no difference to those teachers who are really suffering. The teachers who stick it in the worst schools are super-performers.
If they weren't they wouldn't be able to hack it."
THE TASK FORCE talks about ideals that would cost time rather than money to implement, such as the aspiration of involving parents and community. "There’s no point trying to talk to some parents," says one school principal with 30 years’ experience.
"A lot of them are strung out on drugs or drink." The addiction problem in schools is a challenge in itself. One teacher talks about trying to teach after lunch when 12 out of his class of 30 are stoned on hash. It’s proven that children with untreated emotional and psychological problems are more likely to attempt to ease their pain through illegal drugs.
"We are not going to teach children and help them modify their behaviour until they are no longer abusing substances and it’s not the job of the schools to offer rehab. It’s the job of the health-care system," asserts Dr David Carey, a lecturer at Froebel College of Education in Blackrock, Co Dublin, and an expert in learning disabilities.
Parental neglect is also a major issue. In west Dublin, a teacher tells of contacting a mother at noon because her daughter had disappeared and he was concerned.
"Stop f***ing annoying me. I’m trying to sleep," was the mother’s response. Lives are under threat in some schools, but calling the Garda when pupils physically attack teachers and each other would only make the problem worse, says a teacher who would like to see community gardaí stationed in his school fulltime, as has been done in Scotland.
"Some of these pupils are the children of major criminals. If you were to call the guards in, you’d be taking things to a different level where you could have personal threats made against you – and your family."
In schools like this, the phrase "disruptive behaviour" doesn’t mean giggling, flicking rubbers and shuffling bags in the back of the classroom. It means total social breakdown – and it’s not confined to disadvantaged areas.
In an expensive south Co Dublin school, one teacher says: "We have students on drugs. We’ve had 13-year-olds having sex in the toilets. We have kids hungover on Monday mornings. Parents who are too busy to be bothered. We’re dealing with all this well, I think. It’s part of what our society is now. I suppose the difference with us is that the parents can afford to pay for private psychological help and our school has a strong ethos where the majority of students who are really committed prevail. There’s an expectation that everyone will go on to third level."
In disadvantaged areas where many parents have no respect for education and resent authority figures, teachers are so inundated with social problems that pupils with bad attitudes effectively set the agenda. But impertinence, coming late, coming unprepared to class and generally acting the maggot is a problem in
all schools and at all social levels.
One in five teachers in the State has been physically threatened or intimidated by a pupil, a TUI survey revealed earlier this week. The survey was conducted across a range of schools, with 50 per cent in relatively privileged, middleclass areas, and it exposed that many teachers face bullying, cruelty, impertinence, defiance and refusal to cooperate by pupils on a regular basis. It’s just that some schools have worse problems than others.
"When the Minister said this week, 'there is no crisis', I could only wonder what schools she's been to. Schools in Donnybrook?" asks a teacher in the south west of the country, where some pupils' threatening behaviour is so bad that teaching has become impossible.
"The teachers are stressed out and frustrated. They're barely coping. Every teacher is an island. You go in to the classroom and close the door for 40 minutes and try to survive in there. If you get to teach, it's a bonus. I feel really sorry for the students who are trying to learn. Their rights are being ignored," says this teacher. In her school, one of the bullies drove a "good" pupil out of the school during the pupil's Leaving Cert year.
For six months, the "good" pupil got no tuition while the bully, who had been expelled, remained in the school pending appeal under Section 29. The bully’s appeal succeeded.
This reward for bullies who play the system is reflected across the Republic. In 2005, out of 193 suspensions, refusals to enrol and expulsions, only 73 were upheld after appeal. Out of 59 expulsions, only eight were upheld. Reviewing the legislation to strengthen the rights of the "compliant majority", as Hanafin refers to them, is one of her priorities. But how long will this take?
THE ONLY WAY that the secondary school system has survived is through "apartheid", as the task force report calls it, whereby many parents who can afford to, avoid community schools and send their children to fee-paying ones. Many schools operate enrolment policies, refusing to take difficult children and passing the problem on to community schools, which must take everyone.
"That protects certain schools, but it doesn’t protect society," says a teacher in a disadvantaged area of Dublin.
"My child, your child, will still meet these young criminals in the streets. These are the kids that will end up in Mountjoy costing the State millions because the resources aren’t being invested in their education, enabling us to help them before it’s too late. I don’t want my children afraid to walk the streets because of these pupils who are running riot.
These are the pupils who are going to be involved in the drive-by shootings of the future. And their hatred of foreign nationals is terrifying," he says. Discipline issues are dealt with by "year heads" who get no extra time to do their job. On top of teaching 22 hours per week plus preparation time, a year head in a troubled community school has to spend an additional 20 hours – unpaid –dealing with violent and abusive pupils, taking witness statements and meeting parents.
One year head describes attempting to teach a class of 30 pupils while simultaneously trying to control half-a-dozen disruptive pupils standing in the hall outside his door.
"If they’re down on the floor fighting, I can’t step in to break it up because if I were to unintentionally bruise an arm, the pupil could sue me and the pupils know this," he says.
Whether schools are disadvantaged or "middle class" and fee-paying, they are all experiencing the same problems to some degree and it seems it’s only going to get worse. Dr Carey, who is also author of
The Essential Guide to Special Education in Ireland (Primary ABC), warns that secondary schools are unprepared for the influx of children with special needs who have been mainstreamed in primary school in recent years and are now headed for secondary.
"There is a total lack of resources and a critical shortage of skills and knowledge because dealing with these learning disabilities is not included in the teaching diploma programme," he says.
Not all disruptive pupils have special needs and not all special needs pupils are disruptive. However, about 7 per cent of pupils have behaviour problems, such as conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder and ADHD. In addition, pupils with dyslexia whose needs are not addressed and thus feel excluded, can react by "acting out" – behaving badly in school – or by "acting in", which means withdrawing and engaging in self-harm.
Dr Carey points out that the exam-based secondary school system is inflexible and relies on pupils being compliant, absorbing information and then re-presenting it through literacy skills. "Children are expected to fit into the system, rather than the system being designed to fit the children.
We are operating under the myth that we can create a one-size-fits-all system," he says.
FIXING THE PROBLEM is far more complex than introducing "behaviour classrooms" in 50 schools, when children with behaviour problems exist in every school.
No one even knows if this intervention would succeed.
In one school in Cork, a gang of bullies routinely beat up the students they perceive as "good" at the bus-stop on the way to and from school. A teacher at the school says: "Parents are having to leave their children to school in the mornings and leave work early to collect them in the afternoons.
And the Minister is talking about setting up "behaviour classrooms" out of existing resources? Even if my school gets a behaviour classroom – which would probably brand us so that all the good pupils would leave – who out of the existing teaching staff is going to stay in the behaviour classroom and teach a collection of disruptive children from six different years, different needs? I think it’s pie in the sky, to be honest."
Principal Brian Fleming, of Collinstown Community School in Dublin, also doubts the effectiveness of the Minister’s approach: "This idea of behaviour support teams falls into an increasing pattern which has emerged in the last 10 years of support teams being set up to go around advising schools and teachers as to how to do their job. In my own experience, I have seen only limited advantage in any of these, with the notable exception of those working for the National Council for Special Education.
"What schools need is not advice, but resources to spend directly on programmes for the pupils. This would represent a far more focused intervention in my view and a better expenditure of scarce resources."
For the parents of children who get into trouble at school – no matter what their social status – trying to cope can be soul-destroying. David Coleman, clinical psychologist and presenter of the RTÉ TV series, Families in Trouble, points out that Health and Safety Executive (HSE) waiting lists are typically six to 12 months long for pupils referred by schools to the psychological service. If a child is expelled, that child is seen more quickly, but often during the year-long wait for psychological help, the behaviour of children who haven’t been excluded from school grows worse until expulsion is the only option.
Often, schools do not inform parents of difficulties until the school has already made a decision about the child’s future. Coleman says, "There needs to be openness in secondary schools and more communication with parents. In my opinion, every school could use a full-time social worker or psychologist to deal with pupils’ behaviour and emotional issues."
The Minister is talking about hiring an unspecified number of psychologists to work with certain schools – but that’s far cry from a complete, school-based service for every secondary pupil in the State.
The "blame game", as Carey refers to it, was running rampant in media coveragethis week. The task force report recounts the familiar litany: consumerism distracting parents from young people's care and supervision; increased cynicism towards authority; diminished influence of the church; pupils' part-time employment; youth culture; popular culture; crude language patterns; hyper-stimulation by the media; street violence; indiscipline on the playing field; prematurely sexualised behaviour; drugs; mothers working outside
the home . . .
In social discourse lately, the mothers – especially single mothers – are always blamed. Says Carey, "It’s time we put that one to bed for once and for all. These women are burdened enough and suffering enough, doing the best they can for their kids with little or no support. It makes me angry to hear single mothers and working mothers blamed."
Dr Pat Dolan, director of the Child and Family Research and Policy Unit at NUI Galway, has vast experience working with troubled youths. He says, "Everyone knows a teen who is breaking his parents’ hearts and acting out despite receiving good parenting.
Look at your own teenage years, didn’t you behave badly once or twice? Everyone does. It’s part of developing the resilience of childhood."
The issue of discipline in schools should not be seen in isolation and social factors are part of the broader picture, but that shouldn’t let schools off the hook, he believes.
"Research by Joy Dryfoos [US research specialist in adolescence] has shown that the culture of the school needs to be childcentred and very aware of children’s rights and voices. Having worked with very difficult adolescents myself, I can appreciate the pressures that teachers are under.
positive school culture which values teachers is more likely to meet the challenge of difficult pupils. Also needed is a real point of connectedness between the school and the parents, because this considerably lessens the likelihood of young people going off the wall."
DR DOLAN SAYS every young person needs 18 assets to protect them from falling into negative behaviour. Among these are having a mentor, engaging in a sport or hobby, or having a talent that’s recognised by others.
Academic and material achievement alone will not form a happy child – worse, it automatically sets up certain children for failure.
To be mentally healthy, a young person needs support from three areas: home, school and social community, Dr Dolan says: "Where kids have no sense of community, and don’t have happy home lives and are unhappy in school, the school becomes the playing pitch for acting out deeper problems. The school environment is hugely important when there are problems at home, but at the same time there are people who come from unbelievably good home lives in every way, and yet they act out in school – although this is the exception.
In general, there’s a correlation between difficulty at home and difficulty in school."
Brian Fleming urges: "The experience in relation to the McGuinness reports makes it difficult to be optimistic that the recommendations of the task force will be implemented. Hopefully the Minister will be able to secure the necessary resources to ensure that the education system plays its part in assisting young people to develop into responsible members of society."