7 Where government thinking on low level disruption stops.

For many different reasons too few key personnel in education have been encouraged - or are encouraged now - to access a higher understanding of low level disruption in schools.

As a result of this, schools have long been provided with strategies which, at best, provide short term performance improvements for the student or the teacher (such as zero tolerance or counselling) but fail to provide any long term meaningful improvement for either. Over decades this has led to the belief that there are too many variables involved in finding a solution to low level disruption and a sense of hopelessness: that children are becoming - or have already become - unmanageable.

As shown previously, the last decade has seen a significant step forward being made to address this: recognition that students are not the only cause of the problem; that there is fault in the process of administering managerial procedures; and that such faults occur through inconsistency.

Yet this significant step forward is now in danger of being used to create a significant step backward: that by somehow getting adults to be more consistent - almost exclusively through the addition of more rules - original strategies that did not work previously will now automatically work. Increases in performance related criteria throughout education indicate that this is already happening. However, these increases are unlikely to stop ‘staff not knowing how many rules there are’ and it must be time to consider that the problem lies elsewhere.

A true step forward from the earlier point is to recognise that there is likely to be more to inconsistency than we currently know - that it is more than a temporary aberration or resolved with more instructions - for something else is clearly awry. 

How can it be that adults - who, as children once themselves, should be in an excellent position to understand children (and all the more so with usually very helpful hindsight) - have so lost sight of what it is to be a child that the only outcome is to deem them unmanageable?

To move the low level disruption discussion forward a much more complete understanding of the causes that lead to this lack of - or losing of - knowledge must be reached. Within this understanding a way of identifying a verifiable point in time should be sought during which certain factors combine to cause our current failure to convert our experience of childhood into useable knowledge to better manage childhood.

If it can be imagined that such a moment in time exists on the generic timeline of human life wherein the child led state of mind - still active in classroom low level disruption - transitions to the adult led state of mind - that fails to see how classroom low level disruption can be reduced or avoided - then events/factors preceding each might also be identified. Thereafter, those events and factors might be reversed, and a sustainable model provided to replace them and prevent them recurring.

The next two sections identify the factors and events involved and provide a way forward.

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