Locking up schools is no cure for violent behaviour
12th March 2009



Last week’s stabbing of a teacher in Auckland has most of us in education bracing for the fallout. The response so far inspires little confidence that we can maintain perspective on this issue.

Talk of metal detectors and police patrols adds insult to injury. These are not simply facile responses to a complex issue, they are strategies that will, over time, escalate violence in schools.

There are four sources of violent behaviour in schools. The first, beloved by fiction writers through the ages, is violence from teachers towards students. The Dickensian school master, with stout cane and withering tongue, survived intact until remarkably recently.

Teachers who worked in the era of the cane and strap will tell you the relief they felt at the ending of institutionalised violence towards children. Some will admit it brought out the worst in them, an experience they found deeply unsettling and which clouded their relationships with students.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that teachers no longer bully children, but almost without exception the people who work in our schools today have constructive relationships with students, are highly positive and well supported in managing student behaviour.

The second source of school violence is bullying among students. This is a genuine problem in New Zealand and deserves attention. Bullying is a nexus of factors: individual, institutional and societal. Schools that experience high levels of disruptive behaviour can often link this to high levels of violence within their communities. Some schools succeed in becoming havens of respect and tolerance in even the most difficult communities, but to do so requires vision, stamina and extraordinary commitment from a wide range of agencies.

Bullying among students can usually be controlled by adults but the bullying will only cease when students take ownership of both the problem and the means to end it. Students, not teachers, are the guardians and enforcers of school culture. The most effective behaviour management consists of a student or group of students demonstrating their disapproval of wayward behaviour. This is as true of students at the age of six as it is at sixteen.

The third and fourth kinds are those acts of serious violence committed against students or staff. In one form they may be committed by a member of the school, such as last week’s attack in Auckland. Alternatively they may be the act of an outsider, such as an irate parent coming onto the school grounds to take the law into his own hands. What these two forms of violence have in common is that they can almost never be anticipated, they are highly aggressive and they are rare.

Schools have procedures to handle these events and react swiftly and firmly to minimise the risk to students and staff.

The debate in the past week has concerned itself almost exclusively with school violence of the third and fourth kinds. Several voices have chided schools for not doing enough to prevent such acts of violence. These contributors to the debate tend to be fans of metal detectors at the gate and police patrols in the playground but their solutions are more damaging to schools than the continuance of the very small risk posed by violent offenders of the third and fourth kind.

I have worked in schools in England where, in the climate of fear created by high level violence, school security is extreme. With chain link fences, metal gates, swipe cards and access codes schools have come to resemble prisons.

From my observation these measures have two effects. First, they seriously damage a school’s relationship with its community. The message to parents is, “we do not believe this community is a safe place for children, so we will make their safety the role of the state.” The security measures effectively disempower parents and children from taking responsibility for their behaviour. Unsurprisingly bullying and violence are major problems.

Second, the security measures do not work. It is impossible to keep a school in permanent lockdown. School boundaries are porous – people are constantly moving in and out for a hundred good reasons. The gates and security codes are impossible to enforce to the degree where they would exclude a person intent on harm.

Maintaining high-level security would be even more challenging in New Zealand where our schools, happily, are designed to be open to their communities.

In fact the greatest risk in over-reacting to last week’s incident is that we will draw a curtain between school and community. Violence in schools can be solved only by schools and communities working together. The idea that schools must be made into islands of safety in a dangerous world nurtures a climate of fear, creates discord among the groups that share the problem and leads to greater violence.