Working with Emotions

Responding to the Challenge of Difficult Pupil Behaviour in Schools

Peter Gray, Peter Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134558216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Difficult pupil behaviour presents a number of issues for teachers, parents, other pupils as well as for children themselves. Inevitably it raises a number of emotions and challenges people's sense of their own personal effectiveness.
This edited collection of short, concise chapters provides advice and guidance to professionals on how to respond to the emotions experienced and generated by pupils with behavioural difficulties in schools. Many chapters are written by such professionals themselves and address common problems in a practical and accessible way. Working with Emotions is an essential text for all schools, support services, LEAs, SENCOs and voluntary agencies and includes discussions on the government's current Social Inclusion initiative.

Part I
Context

1 Working with difficult behaviour
The impact of emotions

Peter Gray

Fear and loathing in the nursery–how toddler rage is spreading through the nation

Such headlines are becoming increasingly common, even in the so-called ‘respectable’ newspapers. They seem to capture a mood in Britain that is inexorably drawn towards notions of a breakdown in society. Standards of children’s behaviour in schools and elsewhere are seen to be deteriorating as family and societal values change and children are exposed to an increasing range of corrupting influences. Incidents such as the murders of Jamie Bulger, Damilola Taylor and of the Head Teacher, Philip Lawrence, which gained significant media coverage, only serve to confirm such beliefs.

Teaching unions in Britain have continued to argue that their members are experiencing considerable stress and hardship as a result of difficult pupils and unsupportive parents. There are an increasing number of cases where teachers are seeking compensation for physical or emotional damage that they attribute to their experience of difficult behaviour in schools.

At the same time, pupils and parents have also become more prepared to assert their rights and entitlements. There have been some high-profile cases where teachers and head teachers have been brought to court following allegations of physical or other assault by staff. The application of European law has also opened up the question of pupils and parents seeking compensation for unfair treatment that can be proved to have caused personal harm.

The emphasis on rights has raised the stakes in relation to tensions and conflicts that have always to some extent been present. And there are now very real issues about how to achieve a proper balance between the rights of pupils at risk of exclusion and their parents and the rights of teachers and the pupils with whom ‘difficult pupils’ are educated.

The government’s Social Inclusion agenda has attempted to show that there are no ‘winners’ from unresolved difficulties at school. While permanent exclusion may shift the problem on elsewhere, those pupils who become marginalised from education affect all of us to some degree, whether in terms of their involvement in crime or other antisocial activity or in terms of their ability to make a longer term contribution to society.

Many politicians and commentators seek a resolution to this issue by arguing for more alternative provision for difficult pupils, away from the mainstream system, and the present government has invested additional funds to help create more such options. However, the costs of such provision make it unrealistic to expect that this will take all our problems away.

A key theme of this book is that problems can only be adequately addressed if there is a proper understanding of the emotions that are associated with difficult behaviour, not just for pupils but for the range of adults involved, whether they be teachers, parents, support workers, administrators or politicians. Emotions do not excuse difficult behaviour in children (or adults) but they do help to explain it. Any response needs to take on board and plan for emotional issues. They are part of the human condition. Understanding emotions is part of communication, and communication is ineffective if people’s emotions are neglected or not properly understood.

The world of behaviour problems is characterised by blame. As problems become greater, there is an increased propensity for schools to blame parents, parents to blame schools, and both to blame the children. Support services and other agencies are not immune, either from being blamed for not producing instant solutions, or from finding inadequacies in others. And children are not always prepared to take responsibility for their own actions!

This book adopts a ‘no blame’ approach and rejects the more adversarial trends that have developed over the last 20 years. The contributors argue that behaviour, both in children and adults, is generally understandable, if not always easy to accept. This is not to imply that all behaviour has deep-seated emotional origins. Too much energy and time has been wasted over the years in trying to establish clear distinctions between pupils who are ‘disruptive’ (and therefore to blame as they are in control of their actions), ‘disaffected’ (school to blame for not providing a sufficiently relevant and interesting curriculum) and ‘disturbed’ (pupils not to blame, but potentially ‘incurable’). Instead, the theme of the book is that all difficult behaviour has an emotional component, either in relation to the pupil whose behaviour is causing concern or the adults and other pupils who respond to it. Being aware of, understanding and planning for this component is an essential part of any intervention, whether this is at the level of the individual pupil, teacher or school, or at the level of local and national strategy.

The book is divided into several parts. The first of these sets out some of the broader context for understanding issues concerning difficult pupil behaviour. In Chapter 2, Gerv Leyden looks at the issue of violence. Teacher unions and others, both in Britain and elsewhere, have continued to express concern about increasing violence in schools. How accurate is their belief? Are schools really less safe environments than they were 20 or 30 years ago? The chapter sets out some of the myths and realities with regard to the theme of increasing violence and identifies ways in which violent incidents can best be prevented and avoided.

The second part focuses on adult emotions. Contributors provide an analysis of some of the issues faced by teachers, parents and others when difficult pupil behaviour is experienced. Gerda Hanko (Chapter 3) looks at the emotional experience of teaching and argues that helping teachers to understand pupil emotions gives them a better understanding and insight into their own positive and negative feelings. Tessa Sambrook and Peter Gray (Chapter 4) focus on issues for parents, who tend to be seen, unhelpfully, as ‘always the problem’ rather than ‘part of the solution’. Pauline Fell (Chapter 5) looks at the relationship between teachers and those who attempt to support them in addressing problem behaviour.

The third part looks at pupil emotions. Rob Long (Chapter 8) argues that there has been an overemphasis on understanding pupil behaviour at the expense of a clear analysis of pupil emotions. He proposes an approach to assessment and intervention that takes account of both areas and the linkages between them. Bill Wahl (Chapter 6) focuses on the importance of developing an effective ‘working alliance’ between pupils and key adults. This requires an understanding of the way children’s past experiences and associated emotions can affect the way in which they engage with those who are trying to help them. Eddie McNamara (Chapter 7) provides a more specific model for intervening with pupils with problem behaviour, based on a cognitive approach to assessing and working with pupil emotions. Finally, Adrian Faupel (Chapter 9) revisits the issue of violence, through examining the position of anger and aggression within a broader continuum of emotions.

The fourth part looks at some examples of supportive systems that help teachers and others in working with difficult pupil behaviour and which explicitly recognise the emotional issues this raises for adults and for pupils themselves. Jey Monsen and Beverley Graham (Chapter 10) point to the value of school-based teacher support groups as an effective means of solving problems cooperatively and positively in school. In Chapter 11, Jey Monsen and Sean Cameron describe the benefits of ‘coaching’ as a practical form of supervision and support. Hugh Williams and Amanda Daniels (Chapter 12) then outline the Birmingham Framework for Intervention model, which encourages teachers and schools not only to identify problems but also to think more clearly about ways in which they can help in addressing them.

In the final part, I look at the area of policy and provision for pupils with behaviour difficulties and show how this is affected by policy-makers’ own emotions and sensitivities. The emotive (and political) character of the area makes it extremely difficult to develop and maintain coherent and consistent policy that can help address pupil and adult needs effectively. However, a number of steps could be taken to improve existing strategies and these are outlined.

The book does not espouse a specific theory about emotions and behaviour and is permissive of a range of models of analysis, from psychodynamic to behavioural. However, a unifying theme is that emotions are as much a part of the landscape in understanding the world of behaviour problems as the behaviour itself. In an era when emotions tend to be debarred from concepts of professionalism, we would argue that a professional response to resolving behaviour issues is only likely to be achieved if proper account is taken of both pupil emotions and our own.

2 Myths, fears and realities regarding pupil violence to teachers
Evidence from research

Gervase Leyden

Introduction

Concerns about violence in society have a long history. More recently, following union and media pressure, the focus has shifted to encompass workplace violence, particularly in the public sector where staff in hospitals, social services, housing and benefit agencies as well as schools have been the subject of violent attacks. The most up-to-date information we have about the nature and costs of workplace violence in the UK derives from the British Crime Survey for l997 (BCS 1999) which reports that:

• approximately a quarter of a million physical assaults at work resulted in actual physical injury (e.g. bruising, broken bones);
• in about 5,000 of the incidents the victim required an overnight stay in hospital;
• the majority of victims experienced distressing symptoms, including anger, fear and difficulty in sleeping;
• people who suffered violence at work were at a high risk of repeat victimisation (almost half of the assault victims suffered more than one incident in the year);
• the survey estimated 3.3 million working hours were lost each year because of violence, and the financial costs were around £62 million per year, potentially rising to £230 million taking into account potential compensation claims.

(HSE 1999)

In the education sector, teachers, parents and the general public were shocked by the murder of the headteacher of a comprehensive school in London, the frenzied machete attack by an intruder in a Wolverhampton infant school and the tragic murder of sixteen pupils and a teacher in Dunblane primary school. Although these incidents were primarily ‘intruder violence’, they served to draw the attention of parents, the public and media to the general problem of physical violence in schools, and culminated in a public enquiry chaired by Lord Cullen (DES/WO 1996) and a government-funded research investigation (Gill and Hearnshaw 1997).

This chapter takes the stance that pupil violence towards their teachers is an extreme example of challenging behaviour. In one author’s account, it symbolises ‘the most significant, disruptive and distressing expression of disaffection’ (Parsons 1999). For teachers, violence presents a critical threat, not only to their personal safety and psychological well-being, but also to their professional motivation, self-belief and views about their role in the academic and pastoral development of young people.

In the following pages I will attempt to describe the nature and extent of pupil violence in schools and outline the steps individual teachers, schools and managers can take to create a safe learning environment for all who work and learn in them.

Social attitudes to violent and challenging behaviour by children

Attitudes towards and perceptions of violence are influenced by changing social and political values, and in turn influence the behaviour of individuals and groups in societies. Parsons (1999) claims that ‘exclusions from school are direct consequences of socio-cultural arrangements’ and points to the shift from humanitarian towards controlling and disciplinary attitudes in the latter years of the twentieth century. He comments that while most schools and teachers continue to value Personal and Social Education (PSE) alongside pupil-centred activities, the introduction of the National Curriculum, external accountability and the push for standards and basics ‘has reduced the pastoral power of schools.’

Views about a ‘golden age of education’ or society tend to be accompanied by attitudes which construe children as being either ‘angels or demons’. Such attributions are often enshrined in educational and legal procedures. Asquith and Cutting (1999) point to national differences underpinning the age at which children are held to be ‘criminally responsible’ for their actions, particularly in respect of serious offences such as violence and murder. They cite the abolitionist movements in the USA, which argue that young offenders should not be treated any more leniently than their adult counterparts. In their view, the focus should be on the crime, and not on the degree to which the offender is mature enough to take responsibility for what he or she has done.

While some believe that children who commit violent offences merit adult punishments within the framework of the law, there is no evidence that punishment is particularly successful in reducing the risk of reoffending in later life (Asquith and Cutting 1999).

The age of criminal responsibility varies greatly in European countries. For example, in Switzerland, this starts as young as 7 years of age. Belgium on the other hand does not consider young people as being criminally responsible until they are 18. Other countries lie between these two extremes. However, England, Wales and Scotland are much closer in this respect to Switzerland than to their other European neighbours. A 10-year-old child in England and Wales (and an 8-year-old in Scotland) who committed a seriously violent act would be held criminally responsible for his/her actions. In most other countries (e.g. France (13), Germany (14), Spain (16) and Poland (17)), this would happen at a much later age (see Asquith and Cutting 1999).

Incidence and definitions of violence in schools

A historical perspective

While myths of an idyllic ‘golden age’ of education persist, we have no reliable archive records to support this. In fact, there are examples of the reverse: such as the highly disciplinarian boarding schools in which pupils were the victims and staff were the assailants, either directly, through caning, or indirectly, through condoning institutionalised bullying. Smike, in the academy of Dotheboys Hall, would have been unimpressed to learn that he was living in an educational golden age!

There are examples too, in biographical accounts, of instances where students have risen violently against their oppressors. In 1793, Harrow students staged a rebellion which lasted for 3 weeks. Some 4 years later at Rugby, the boys blew the door off the headmaster’s study and as a result troops were called in and the Riot Act read (Rock and Heidensohn 1969).

An illuminating acc...