A Scottish primary teacher - frustrated with those in the profession who advocate zero-tolerance approaches to behaviour - has responded by performing a poem, filmed in his own classroom. Now, the video has gone viral.
The poem, penned by Edinburgh-based primary teacher Blair Minchin and posted on Twitter, calls for schools and teachers who take a hard-line approach to behaviour to do things differently by highlighting the tough circumstances that many pupils who act out in school have to deal with at home.
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Introducing the video - which at the time of writing had been viewed nearly 200,000 times and had racked up almost 5,000 likes on Twitter and over 1,700 retweets - Mr Minchin wrote: “Over the holidays, there was lots of chat about behaviour and zero tolerance approaches.
“My class are doing poetry at the moment, so I thought I’d give it a go too.”
Interacting online with those who commented on the video, Mr Minchin criticised schools where pupils got detention for forgetting a pencil, who were sent back home to put on a tie, or excluded for shouting at a teacher.
He said that “there are other ways to handle such behaviour, patience being the key”.
Later, he added that “these kids need patience, compassion and a consistently calm adult that believes in them”.
The poem, entitled She didn’t…, focuses on a female pupil and begins with Mr Minchin listing all her acts of disobedience throughout the course of the school day.
She will not take off her hoodie, she has not done her homework, she does not have on a tie, she gets into a fight because she steals someone else’s lunch, she throws a water bottle across the room and says class is “something rhyming with bite”.
However, Mr Minchin goes on to paint a picture of what awaits the pupil when she goes home after school.
The poem says: “She didn’t say ‘Hi’ when she came in the door,
“She didn’t want mum’s drunk boyfriend hearing her tiptoeing across the floor.”
There is no home-cooked meal, the poem continues, and no one to say goodnight to.
The poem concludes: “She will go to bed tired and lonely and wake up to the same reality,
“Shouted at, kicked out of class - isn’t it time we did things differently?
“Zero tolerance? Not for me.”
Many of the comments responding to the video were positive, with teachers and others posting comments like “love this” and asking to use it for staff training sessions.
However, some questioned how much time dealing with pupils like the one in the poem took up and what the impact was on the other children in the class.
Earlier this month, the NEU teaching union described zero-tolerance policies as “inhumane” as delegates backed a motion calling for local authorities to have oversight over academies’ approach to behaviour.
A Tes investigation earlier this year revealed claims that staff aggressively shouted at pupils as part of a “ritual humiliation” and “public shaming” to instil discipline at two multi-academy trusts, Outwood Grange Academies Trust and Delta Academies Trust .
