Gary Thomas on children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. Both of these books are tormented by definitional goblins. You can’t define children with emotional and behavioural difficulties in the way that you can define and count children with measles or children who are over five feet tall. Nor can you assume that everyone agrees that a “difficulty” exists. And if difficulties are agreed to exist, are they the child’s or the school’s?

Chazan, Laing and Davies defuse the problem by devoting their first chapter to definition and allied matters. Farrell faces the challenge confronting all compilation editors: to avoid - like Just a Minute competitors - repetition and deviation. But the particular definitional goblin here is so troublesome that most of his contributors want to have a stab at exorcising it at the beginning of each of their chapters, and repetition becomes a little tiresome.

But attempts at definition in this knotty field are understandable and necessary, and their frequency shouldn’t detract from some excellent chapters in Farrell’s book. Peagam’s account of a recent survey is interesting not so much for his results, many of which are depressingly predictable (children presenting difficulties are predominantly male, and disproportionately come from unskilledunemployedsinglelow income parents, reconstituted families, council housing, Afro Caribbean background), as for his discussion, which is sensitive and well argued. It is as good and as succinct an exposition of the area as you will find anywhere. The finding about which most disquiet should be felt is that schools which were developing a reputation for successfully dealing with behaviour problems were worried that their reputation might attract more children with problems, and might also encourage parents whose children did not have such problems to opt for another school.

Special needs is an area where there is too much pontificating and too little research, so the chapter by Boreham et al qualitatively analysing interviews with parents and psychologists is refreshing. One psychologist they interviewed had built a fascinating model to explain his conversations with headteachers.

In describing a child, a head would ignore actual behaviour, offering instead a number of “tokens” which, it was tacitly understood, could be swapped with the psychologist for some sort of help such as tuition time. These tokens tossed into the discussion - poor concentration, short attention span - poor short term memory were seen as the currency with which resources were bought.

Following Elton, the spotlight in managing difficult behaviour has swung toward schools’ organisational and pastoral systems. Collier’s excellent chapter on emotional abuse - on the rejection, degradation, terrorisation, and isolation systematically inflicted on children - is a salutary reminder that many of the problems children experience arise from cruelty by adults. Children subject to such cruelty will need more help than changes in school organisation can provide.

In the second of his own chapters Farrell returns to definition. He asks how many of us have never “sworn at the neighbour’s dog, or even at the neighbour?” This sounds rather too much like Alan Bennett’s clergyman who asks, “How many of us have never had the desire to set light to a large public building? I know I have,” to be taken completely seriously. There is a serious point though - perhaps not strongly enough made in either of these volumes - about relativism in judging behaviour: we all do odd things when under stress, and it is problematic - unethical even - to judge and label the behaviour of others.

Farrell’s compilation of diverse, thought-provoking chapters makes a nice complement to Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties in Middle Childhood, by Chazan, Laing and Davies, which is solid, comprehensive and coherent and is set to become the key textbook and sourcebook in the area.

It starts by trying to define emotional and behavioural difficulties, to talk about “prevalence” and to suggest causes. These are thoroughly and carefully discussed from a position which is resolutely within the middle lane of mainstream educational psychology. However, the occasional steer to the left to examine in more detail notions of deviance and labelling would have been refreshing. It was disappointing, for instance, to find no reference whatsoever to the classic Deviance in Classrooms from Hargreaves et al in this discussion, especially as the blurb proclaims “an overview of the main issues”. The reader gets little flavour of the arguments which have raged about causes and definitions.

The book moves on to look at the ways in which schools, parents and teachers can help, with some excellent ideas on school policy and classroom management as well as strategies on behaviour management and group control. A number of methods ranging from the behavioural to the cognitive are discussed succinctly. Problems caused by tensions at home are covered well.

Throughout the discussion, illustrative case studies are referred to liberally. While these are helpful and interesting, they occasionally materialise with alarming suddenness. Rodney, for instance, jumps out of the middle of a section unbulleted, unheaded and unindented. As Rodney is a disruptive eight year old, perhaps this is the intention.

A dilemma faces schools and policy makers concerning inclusive education for children who are disturbing the education of others; it is bound to be more difficult integrating these children than those with, say, sensory or physical disabilities.

The dilemma is discussed with admirable coolness in chapters on special provision and integration. High exclusion rates are seen as being increasingly difficult to counter, especially if image conscious schools come to view high exclusion rates not as an embarrassment but, on the contrary, as a way of advertising to parents the strict codes of conduct operating in the school. The authors suggest using financial disincentives to exclusion, such as the removal of funding for pupils who are excluded.

The three final chapters are on specific kinds of problem: disruptive pupils; bullies and victims; withdrawal, anxiety and depression. Discussion is again thorough and conducted with sensitivity while continuing to give helpful advice on identification, assessment and intervention. Overall, the book has integrity as a complete yet succinct and readable overview.

Gary Thomas is Reader in Education, Oxford Brookes University.