The promised national action plan on behaviour in Scottish schools will be published “early this year”, the education secretary has said.
Jenny Gilruth said she could not be more specific because the plan was being produced in conjunction with councils and she needed their “buy-in”, but she added that she recognised “the urgency around this issue”.
Ms Gilruth made the comments after hearing that Roz McCall, the Conservative MSP for mid-Scotland and Fife, had been “inundated” with correspondence from constituents raising concerns about “widespread violence” in schools.
Ms McCall said that teenagers were also “engaging in attacks outside the school grounds” and called for action, saying any time delay would allow “violence to escalate and embed”.
Concerns from teachers and headteachers about pupil behaviour dominated the education landscape in 2023 with the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association warning in March that teachers were facing “an aggression epidemic”.
Official research published in November found “a general worsening of pupil behaviour” in Scotland, including an increase in serious disruptive behaviour.
However, there was widespread disappointment when the government’s response to the findings was the promise of a plan - as opposed to putting a plan into action.
Meanwhile, the £900,000 funding it promised for school staff training in the wake of the research was considered both too little and the wrong focus. The EIS teaching union pointed out this was “less than £30,000 per local authority or, worse still, £360 per school”, adding that it would not “touch the sides”. Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Willie Rennie pointed out that it is more staff that schools need, not more training for existing staff.
Boundaries and consequences
Today in the Scottish Parliament, Mr Rennie said that in the past few weeks he had met a pupil support assistant with a broken wrist and a teacher off because of stress - “both as a result of violence in the classroom”. He urged Ms Gilruth to “look again at the issue of boundaries and consequences”, adding, “I think we’ve got that out of kilter”.
In November, Tes Scotland reported on Fife Council’s anti-bullying policy, which described punishing bullying incidents as “counterproductive” and advocated dealing with them “educationally, supportively and restoratively, rather than punitively”.
Tom Bennett, a behaviour adviser for the UK government, said it was “tragic” that the council was ruling out sanctions and that “kids need boundaries, and boundaries require sanctions”.
There has also been criticism that the pressure in Scotland to drive down exclusions - when pupils are barred from attending school usually for a fixed period - has effectively removed that sanction from the range of action that schools can take when faced with challenging behaviour.
Rarity of exclusions
The latest figures on exclusion, published in December, showed that just one pupil was permanently excluded from school in Scotland in 2022-23 and cases of exclusion have fallen from a high of 44,794 in 2006-07 to 11,676 in 2022-23. (This was an increase on the previous set of figures but the report warned that the low number of exclusions in 2020-21 was “partly attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic”.)
Ms Gilruth said that, in terms of consequences, the action plan would “look to set out some of that in more detail” so that headteachers understand “they have these options at their disposal”.
However, she also warned against patronising the profession. She said teachers knew how to develop and deliver good learning and teaching, and how to set boundaries, but that they also needed support from councils.
“That’s why local authorities and [local authorities body] Cosla have to be key to the development of this national action plan,” she said.
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