25.06.2015

Gone too tsar

How should ‘disruptive behaviour’ in schools be tackled? Mickey Coulter comments on the tendency to look to newly empowered bureaucrats for a solution

The grand title of ‘tsar’, a Russian word derived from the Latin caesar, is normally associated with those who, whether through heredity or political and military success, find themselves at the head of a social system, a people and more often than not an empire. They are those individuals armed with sometimes limited but often decisive powers. And now, appointed by Conservative education secretary Nicky Morgan, ‘bad behaviour tsar’ Tom Bennett is going to lead a government task-force to defeat low-level disruption in our school classrooms. Not every tsar is equally remembered by history.

Yes, it is a silly title - and seized on regularly by the press in connection with the seemingly ever-increasing number of media-grabbing government appointments of celebrities, ‘outstanding’ individuals or ‘experts’ to overblown, pseudo-governmental positions (drug tsar, anti-social behaviour tsar, small business tsar, troubled families champion tsar, and so on). The publicly declared expectation is that this person on horseback will singlehandedly overcome the multitude of systemic failings in the bureaucratic undertakings of the state. Because everyone except the politicians involved can see the stupidity of this, even Bennett himself (a former nightclub bouncer and teacher) has already requested, “Don’t call me tsar” in his first interview with the Times Educational Supplement (TES).

According to TheGuardian report, “His specific remit will be working out how to train teachers to tackle low-level distractions, which were highlighted as a serious problem in a report by Ofsted in September last year.” The report in question is Below the radar: low-level disruption in the country’s classrooms. The executive summary declares, uncontroversially, that “low-level” bad behaviour - that is, misbehaviour and nuisance-making which falls short of being obviously physically or emotionally harmful - is a source of frustration to pupils, parents and teachers. Going further, it supposes that the time wasted by both the distracting misbehaviour itself and the time taken by staff to manage it, knocks the equivalent of 38 full school days out of the school year - a full day per week, somewhere above an hour each day, or around 15 minutes per lesson by my rough calculation.

It will be Bennett’s job to bang the heads of his subordinate task force members and uncover at last the educational super-weapon that will achieve the final defeat of rocking on chairs, chatting, rolling of eyes, playing with mobile phones, working slowly and failing to follow instructions. His appointment is basically tantamount to creating a ‘weather tsar’ tasked with stopping it from raining.

This is not to say that every technicality picked out by the report is wrong, or that such behaviour does not disrupt lessons. Indeed, TES online features many articles filled with useful classroom management titbits, which if consistently implemented probably would each shave a few hours off the 38 lost days. But when one does think about the technicalities, it only highlights the fundamental wrongheadedness of the approach.

Of course inconsistent behaviour policy application generates uncertainty and a lack of boundaries, and thus problems. Of course the failure of senior school management to support teachers trying to implement the school’s own policies creates anger and frustration amongst the teaching staff. Of course the vast majority of pupils want a learning environment where time is not wasted by a troublesome minority. But, given that these are all highly localised problems (localised to each individual school, each classroom), the idea that, simply because these are common problems across most schools, there can therefore be a bureaucratic solution commonly applicable to all derived from a tsar-led think-tank is utterly absurd.

Appearances

Take the failure of senior management to back up their own staff, attested to by some 50% of teachers in a recent union survey. Superficially it would seem rational for management to support their teaching staff. After all, they are in the business of producing the best school possible that attains the best results possible - something which is obviously obstructed by constant time-devouring classroom problems.

But we must take into account the effects on what is perceived or incentivised as ‘rational’ within the bureaucratic framework of which the school is a part. That is, if the bad behaviour were to be consistently recorded, logged and dealt with, it may make the school look bad - the appearance would be of an increase in bad behaviour, whereas ignoring it or berating the concerned staff member may allow the continuation of disruption, but would at least look better in the eyes of Ofsted, the local education authority, the government or whoever else is imagined to be peering over your shoulder.

Another problem identified is overcrowding in classrooms, something about which the tsar can do absolutely nothing, as this depends fundamentally on the policy and funding decisions of central government.

Minister Nicky Morgan took care to couch the appointment of Bennett in the language of social justice, explaining that it was especially unfair for already disadvantaged children to be even further disadvantaged by losing out in their education. Who could possibly object to this?

It is no coincidence that the most badly disrupted schools tend, on the average, to be the ones with the most impoverished intake. These children may have been socialised in a chaotic or traumatic environment, they may lack proper sleep or nutrition, they may have parents who themselves are alienated from wider society, who feel more intensely than most that education is pointless, with no connection to real-life struggles. Such children may simply find school boring and be more willing to express their frustrations than others.

Even if the school itself suffers no more disruption than the average, the nature of the intake may cause it to ‘lag’ in government statistics behind those whose intakes are from wealthier, more educated families, who can provide a whole host of benefits - cultural experience, financial stability, extra tutoring and so on. Thus the time lost to “low-level disruption” is seen in isolation as a problem to be tackled in itself rather than a symptom of the inequality and insecurity generated by class society.

In other words, the consequences of such social problems are to be addressed from on high by an individual armed with ‘insight’ and ‘experience’ within the very same bureaucratic apparatus which is responsible for adding to or obfuscating those very problems. An apparatus which is itself an integral part of a system whose premise is private property and production for profit, leading to inequality, unemployment, poverty and economic crisis. It is this that creates disadvantaged, damaged, alienated populations, which the establishment seeks to cow into conformity within increasingly dreary, exam-focused, bureaucratically run schools.

No-one can be that stupid - can they? If we are cynical we could suppose that this may be part of the Conservative government’s plans to label more schools as failing or ‘coasting’, so that they can be ‘academised’ when it is discovered that, regardless of what one does, children talk during lessons, rock on chairs and worse, but that state schools cannot stop this happening. There is also a risk that the ‘solutions’ handed down by a new body will only generate further problems, drawing attention to that body - in this case headed by the tsar - and thus create another level of bureaucracy removed from the actual social relations that gives rise to these problems in the first place.

Of course, the current rage for ‘tsars’ is itself problematic, given that its premise is the solution of complex problems by an empowered ‘expert’, unaccountable to those most directly involved in the production and use of a given service. When Michael Rosen responded sarcastically on Twitter to the news of Bennett’s appointment by asking, “What about a book tsar? Or an arts in education tsar?”, he was pointing to the proliferation of a form of Bonapartism. From the city mayors that no-one really seems to want, who will only add another layer of corruption, to celebrity political leaders (from Beppe Grillo of the Five Star Movement on the right to Pablo Iglesias of Podemos on the left), these are all manifestations of anti-democratic and by extension anti-proletarian politics.

The solution is not to appoint more competent or more leftwing Bonapartes, whether as mayor, party leader or government tsar, any more than it is to place better bureaucrats into rotten structures with the expectation of a different outcome. The solution lies in democratisation and mass empowerment.