THE introduction of police officers into schools in England and Wales has shocked many people. But this situation has been developing for a number of years. Strathclyde Police started to target truants in 1996 as part of a zero tolerance policing initiative - and since then a number of authorities have paired up education attendance officers with police officers in the hunt for kids dogging it. Through this process, something that was once an education issue has become a matter of law and order.

Concern about teacher safety has led to calls by the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers for personal alarms and training in self-defence. If necessary legal action will be taken. Here, the issue of discipline has again left the school grounds and ended with the boys in blue and the courts. Authority is enforced by law rather than being developed in a more informal relationship between teacher and pupils.

The worrying trend indicated by these examples, is not, as is commonly felt, the growing degeneration of today’s youth, but the collapse of adult authority itself and the reliance on the police to deal with matters that should not be their concern. By focusing on children as the problem in schools we ignore the far more important and difficult question of why teachers - at an individual and institutional level - find it increasingly hard to control them.

Discipline was once a term that referred to the education process itself - creating disciplined scholars. Today it has moved to a discussion about the more base form of control and punishment in its own right. Part of the problem within education is that a determination to create disciplined minds requires a sense of where society is going - and within that a sense of what it is that education can bring to the individual and society.

This is something that new Labour’s education initiatives have clearly not achieved - with lifelong learning looking more like an endless process of acquiring pieces of paper than an inspiring celebration of education. The question of the lack of adult authority is not just an issue within education, but within society generally. Increasingly the behaviour of children that would in the past have been seen by adults as merely mischievous or a nuisance and something they could deal with is being reinterpreted today as criminal.

The issue of children’s rights and the equation of the use of force by adults when disciplining children with acts of abuse and violence has clearly not helped in establishing a relationship of authority. Nor has the practice in many schools in Scotland of teachers passing almost any disciplinary matter up to the guidance staff or headteachers.

Here, the difficult issue of controlling a class is taken out of the teacher’s hands and, rather than being forced to develop their authority with a class, teachers are encouraged to pass this responsibility ever upwards. This institutionalised relinquishing of the responsibility for disciplining children has developed over a number of years and it is of little surprise to find that the ultimate handing over of authority to the police in targeted schools in England and Wales has come about. In Scotland it is likely that the question of having police in schools or not will be merely a matter of when rather than whether it should happen at all.

The broader question of why adults lack the sense of authority to control children is a big one and one that is only confused by focusing on children themselves. Unfortunately, introducing police officers into schools only reinforces the message that children are out of control. It will encourage a sense of helplessness felt by many adults both within schools and in the wider community.

Stuart Waiton is a youth researcher and author of “Scared of the Kids?”