Inside the new disciplinarianism

Why more 'discipline' can't fix comprehensive education

If you paid any attention to recent news, amidst the dominating headlines of Islamist rallies from Dagestan to Dearborn, you may have heard of a strike planned at a small academy in rural Cambridgeshire. Teachers at St Ivo Academy in St Ives are opposing new measures imposed by the school’s ‘learning trust’ – essentially, the chains that academies belong to in lieu of Local Authorities. These encompass a variety of ‘draconian’ behaviour policies which involve pupils being giving detentions for missing pens. You may also have heard of the planned protests/‘riots’ in many comprehensive schools against new toilet policies several months ago, and news from another academy that pupils were (apparently) to be given detentions for ‘looking at the clock’. A teacher from the school explained that while current pupils would be resistant to the policy, Year 7s who were unfamiliar with anything else would accept it, and by Year 11 would regard this as completely normal.

Anyone with a vague interest in educational news, then, will have noticed an ongoing pattern. There is in vogue a ‘neo-disciplinarianism’ across the UK. Many schools, especially academies and free schools, are adopting a myriad of new policies which all have the aim of micro-managing student behaviour. But what are the origins of this agenda? Readers of the Pimlico Journal will almost certainly have heard of Katherine Birbalslingh, a figure well-covered in the ‘Posh Turn’ series of articles published by J’accuse. Birbalsingh, the founder of the Michaela Community School, is not the only but is undoubtedly the most (in)famous pioneer of a new type of school. These are either academies or free schools – the former are usually failing comprehensives which are taken out of the control of Local Authorities, while the latter are new schools established independently of them – which aim to build holistic cultures aimed at optimising behaviour and academic achievement while simultaneously producing model citizens. Much of this agenda stems from Gove’s educational reforms, which (broadly speaking) aim to astroturf the norms and outcomes of private schools into state schools.

The SLTs of behaviourist (or ‘neo-disciplinarian’) academies explicitly conceive of their policies as being intertwined with the whole school ethos. These aim to automatically condition pupils to certain norms and expectations both within and outside of the classroom. They include silent/quiet corridors, line up prior to lessons (usually under staff supervision), pupils to always have a full range of equipment, and summary detentions for those pupils who fail to meet any of these requirements. Lessons are prescriptively planned and pre-modelled, and delivery is standardised and uniform. This is designed to eliminate teachers feverishly ad hoc planning, but also any eccentric variation which might exist amongst them. Lessons are always centred around a teacher-led explanation of subject content. This is combined with heavily scaffolded writing tasks which involve pupils being habituated into the repetitive use of PEEL paragraphs.

More fundamental is the now not-uncommon emphasis on so-called ‘school values’. In most schools, this generally just extends to the mantric repetition of inanities like ‘community, kindness…’, et cetera. But in the behaviourist new school, it entails trying to proactively model pupil behaviour ultimately beyond the school context. For example, the Michaela School expects students to give up their seats on the tube, but other examples could include things like mandatory after-school clubs and similar policies. These used to be the preserve of private schools, which traditionally presented themselves as ‘developing pupil character’. The aim, then, is ‘manners maketh man’, but in a comprehensive setting.

The most frequent critics of neo-disciplinarianism are left-wingers who are outraged by the boilerplate Cameroon criticisms of multiculturalism which stem from its pioneers, like Birbalsingh and Toby Young, and Mumsnetizens who believe that the emphasis on teacher exposition in classes will stifle the self-expression of their ‘DCs’. Behaviourist discipline is usually characterised as a form of cultic, petty, and panoptical tyranny by the left. But most of these criticisms aren’t valid from defenders of comprehensive education. If you ever talk to idealistic Teach Firsters who defend ‘relationship building’ teaching, in which you win over feral classes through sheer dint of personality, you’ll understand what I mean. Conversely, the centre-right are the most eager defenders of ‘traditional discipline in a modern setting’. But how reasonable is this apologia? And is this a model of education that right-wingers should seek to support as it becomes increasingly prevalent throughout the country’s schools?

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To discuss this, I want to tap into my own experiences of having worked at such a school, and to explain the wider context for why they are designed as they are and the social trends causing them to become increasingly popular. To start off with, most of these schools are usually very ethnically diverse, and, given their demographics and location, would conventionally be expected to be failing schools. However, the conditioning which exists in such schools is not merely performative. Indeed, it is remarkably and uncannily successful. Pupils you would expect to throw chairs at you generally dutifully and conscientiously copy out colour-coded PEEL paragraph after colour-coded PEEL paragraph, walk silently through corridors, and answer ‘good morning sir’ and ‘good afternoon sir’ to registers. There is a prevailing and unoppressive sense of calmness in the school. Even aspects of the school which feel contrived, like mandatory after-school clubs, are quiescently participated in. The most febrile times are breaks, which are loud and chaotic, but are still rarely (if ever) violent. When pupils are sent out of class, they usually fatalistically depart to internal detention. Of course, there are exceptions to this. There are those who are in a perpetually liminal state of being ferried from detention to detention by harried pastoral care, momentarily re-entering class to throw a chair before being sent out. But even this behaviour has a depressed and unfrenetic character, almost as if it were just an inevitable performance before re-admittance to indefinite internal exile.

So classes are calm, focussed, and conscientious. What’s not to like? Who says this is going to be the Chinese Century? Fundamentally, neo-disciplinarianism is a middle-class mission civilisatrice aimed at improving academic outcomes amongst primarily non-white student bodies. This phrasing would be aggressively objected to by its exponents, who are adherents of a kind of ‘tough love progressivism’, in which racial justice advocacy and no-nonsense teaching are synthesised into a noxiously twee paradigm. (Despite the cargo-cultic transposition of private school aesthetics, neo-disciplinarianism is generally implemented by unambiguously leftist teaching staff.) The hope is that schools can eliminate the ‘cultural capital’ divide between the middle classes and urban ethnic minorities on the basis that multigenerational indifference to education amongst the latter is the root cause of differences in outcomes. These schools are encouraged in predominantly non-white catchment areas by the government to improve non-white grades, and therefore to help bridge the part of the gap in outcomes which can’t be reached by increasingly explicit affirmative action (if you want a prime case study of this phenomenon, look at the Brampton School, which received a higher number of offers from Oxbridge than most top private schools). Draconian behaviour policies are also tolerated to a greater extent because most immigrant parents lack the social knowledge, time, or interest to oppose the kind of punitive sanctions which exist in these schools.

While I would argue that this paradigm is partly successful in raising grade levels (helped by the fact British public examinations, especially GCSEs, aren’t heavily g-loaded), its aims and praxis are from laudable. Indeed, there is another, often overlooked cohort of pupils who exist in these schools. In every classroom you’ll find a minority of middle or upper-middle class English children, usually accompanied by the offspring of European professionals living in British cities, who, impeccable in their traditional uniform, would not look out of place in a private school. Generally, this is a somewhat socially self-contained cohort (most conspicuously so amongst the girls) that quietly boosts the league tables of such schools, which still get to present themselves as providing outstanding education ‘in a genuinely comprehensive setting’. They are invariably the ones answering questions and contributing to the content of the lesson. They are also the ones who passively sit when they’ve completed the umpteenth comprehension writing task which the other half of the class takes twice as long to do. They do seem legitimately bored of lessons that, however individualised in their delivery, are designed primarily to support and buttress the least able.

This is the fundamental logic behind neo-disciplinarianism. If you provide enough behavioural conditioning and enough prescriptive structure to academic tasks, and do so throughout the course of Years 7, 8, 9, even less able students will be able to competently complete GCSEs, which as a form of examination optimise for rote learning factual information to be regurgitated in standardised writing formulas. While more able students might be bored, as their educational experience is deprioritised, they will inevitably do well anyway because they’re fundamentally intelligent. And while this might be an uninspiring experience, in which class debates and explorations of the periphery of subject content will rarely happen, they won’t be ‘taxed’ at the school gates, or unable to learn because the third supply teacher of the term can’t maintain control of the classroom. And indeed, as private schools become unaffordable, increasingly guarantee exclusion from Oxbridge, and might simply cease to exist under Labour, the behaviourist ‘outstanding comp’ will become even more attractive to the middle classes. I already frequently see private school-uniformed prospective students being given tours of the school, and it is not uncommon for existing pupils to have siblings who attend fee-paying schools.

The behavioural and academic agenda of neo-disciplinarianism might be entirely structured around accommodating the lowest achieving and most behaviourally challenging strata within a school, but this is just the logical consequence of non-selective state education. Outside of literal corporal punishment, routine conditioning and the repetitive certainty of a detention is the only way to make many function in a school setting. The heavy modelling is also necessary so that such pupils can attain the basic writing skills necessary for achieving decent GCSEs, meaning that schools aren’t judged unfavourably by Ofsted. Any sound policy for comprehensive schools must be structured around the lowest common denominator, and indeed behaviourism is simply optimising state education within the parameters established by the state since the abolition of grammar schools.

Of course, it is a sad reality that this is what a ‘good’, ‘outstanding’, and ‘brilliant’ education looks like in modern Britain. It is a form of education that both comes at the expense of and requires the compliance of our most able students, who have no alternative. But, for the foreseeable future, as Britain becomes more ‘diverse’ and the latent challenges presented by the demographics of comprehensives greater, it will increasingly become the norm in Britain’s schools.

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Image rights. By Jonathan A Jones (talk) - I (Jonathan A Jones (talk)) created this work entirely by myself., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=146095069

This article was written by an anonymous Pimlico Journal contributor who works as a secondary school teacher. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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