Politics

Ruling the Classroom

January 20, 2014
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Who said what to whom? Tristram Hunt, Shadow Education Secretary, wrote in The Sun last week, "Surely the very least we can expect as parents is that teachers have had training in teaching and how to control a class? … So Labour … would train up a new generation of behaviour experts to boost classroom discipline."

What does it mean? Just like Sadiq Khan, Shadow Justice Secretary, Hunt is adopting a "law and order" position to outflank the Coalition Government. The promise is to have at least one trained behaviour expert in every school.

What could go wrong? At an educational level, there is some support for a move like this. Teachers can be as fed up of discipline issues as parents. Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College and executive head at the associated Academy, argues that state schools could do more to adopt the house system and stricter ethos of independent schools. Dominic Raab, a Conservative MP, has publicly supported the idea of schools staffed by armed forces veterans.

The challenge will be money. If Hunt is proposing additional staff, then that's extra cost. If he is proposing to give a new hat to some existing teachers, then the issue may be whether he can find enough willing volunteers for discipline training.

When will we know? There will be a tough spending review led by the Treasury in 2015 after the election, no matter who is in power. There are more cuts to come. The spending review will be the graveyard for lots of pre-election social policy commitments.

Commitment rating 2—given the bigger pressures on quality and facilities in education, discipline training might fall by the wayside or have to be delivered in a relatively cheap 'sheep dip' sort of way.