Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No103

Themes: sex surveys and the failing therapeutic management of children

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This week we take a look at the latest controversy about the (anal) sex survey of Scottish children, followed by an article by educator, Rachael Hobbs. Rachael asks, why is it that our ‘evidence’-obsessed authorities keep using therapeutic behaviour management techniques in class despite the fact that there is no proof that it works?

The controversy about the Scottish government’s Health and Wellbeing Census carried out by 16 councils and involving 130,000 pupils has hit the headlines again, this time because the data was to be shared with external researchers, something that appeared to go against the original statement of confidentiality.

Once parents found out about the contents of the original survey in 2021 it was already controversial, in part because of the highly intrusive and sexual nature of some of the questions.

One question, for example, read, ‘People have varying degrees of sexual experience. How much, if any, sexual experience have you had?’ The multiple-choice answers included ‘oral sex’ and ‘vaginal or anal sex’. The surveys were carried out with children as young as 14 years of age.

There were other problems with the original research. Firstly, despite being informed of the survey in advance, parents did not know what the questions were going to be. Being asked if you are happy for your children to take part in a health and wellbeing survey and then discovering that it includes questions about anal sex was, I suspect, was not what many – in fact, any – parent would have been expecting.

But, of course, this is to give the surveyors more credit than they are due, because to talk about consent is also confusing. As a university lecturer, if I were to carry out a survey, it would need to be via informed consent, i.e. not only would the content of the survey need to be shown but I would need participants or their parents to actively opt in. To do otherwise would be seen as unethical and the survey would be immediately stopped.

This is what happened here. With children! Parents were not asked to opt in, but to opt out. In other words, if you did not consciously withdraw your child from the survey, he or she would most likely have done it.

There are other serious concerns about the survey, including the matter of confidentiality, and many are convinced that due to the computerised filling in of the survey, a numerical identification would have been associated with each child, meaning that the idea of confidentiality was a fiction.

Because of these concerns, originally, half the councils in Scotland withdrew from the survey, and now the Scottish Secretary for Education, Jenny Gilruth, has faced a grilling in Holyrood about the potential release of the data to third-party researchers. As a result of the furore, the Scottish government has halted any further use of this data.

One of the things that is worth asking is, why is there such an urgent need to get data off children about their lives? I suspect few adults reading this carried out a detailed survey of this kind, but since the late 1990s, and increasingly over the last decade, these sorts of survey have become relatively common.

The first observation I would make about this is that in the space of a generation, politicians and those in authority have become obsessed with minutiae of everyday life. Historically, politics was more about the big things, the big questions, macro policies, while the everyday behaviour of the public – their eating and sleeping habits, sexual activity, etc. – was of little concern. As politics lost its substance, it would appear that there has been a growing preoccupation with the little things, and in the process, politicians and professionals have started to obsess over our behaviour and everyday life.

Additionally, I would add that the change in political life, the demise of mass parties and mass politics, has also left us with a new type of elite who are increasingly disconnected from the public. They literally have little or no idea what we are thinking or doing. Worse still, their imagination has run away from them, and they tend to see and think that ordinary people have something wrong with them. After all, we don’t appear to be doing what we are told: we still appreciate a drink, some still like a smoke, some parents even think a light smack doesn’t harm their kids (the shame!) – and of course they’re convinced that we’re a bunch or sectarian, racist, misogynistic … the list for this ‘basket of deplorables’ goes on.

What’s so wonderful about Jenny Gilruth’s answers to her grilling by Conservative MSPs was that she justified the original survey by saying this: ‘Throughout the pandemic, issues were raised by the Children’s Parliament, the Scottish Youth Parliament, YouthLink Scotland and YoungScot that consistently indicated that children and young people were concerned about their own health and wellbeing and that of others around them.’

It’s good to know that the Scottish government was listening to someone during the lockdowns. That it was children, however, should worry rather than appease us. Once again, we see the sleekit way in which children are used to act as the voice of the Scottish government.

This is not just a children thing but can be thought about in terms of the way governments use charities and organisations that they fund, run or manage to create a feedback loop for the ideas and policies they already want to introduce. Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs wrote a pamphlet about this, entitled, Sock Puppets: How the government lobbies itself and why.

When it comes to children, this process is even more deceitful and fraudulent, as any honest youth worker will tell you after they have got the children to decide on the rules of their youth club. Amazingly, they’re always the same, and are always what the adults in the room wanted all along.

There is something deeply worrying in all this, because what we appear to face at the moment is a governing and a professional class of people who essentially want to bypass parents both to find out what kids are thinking and then to implement changes to how everyday life is managed, by use of the ‘data’. This way, politicians can pretend that all they are doing is creating ‘evidence-based policies’. It’s not them who want to create ever more intrusive policies, practices and education. They’re just following what the research says!

Of course, these surveys never ask children if they would rather not have bucketloads of sex education, or if they think their teachers are being creepy and weird in class. The reality is that the agenda is preset, and as a result, through survey after survey, the intrusion into the behaviour of both children and their parents takes another step forward. But not this time.

Thanks to parents and punters who have been keeping an eye on this survey, it looks likely to be binned. Now perhaps none of us will ever know how much anal sex children are having, or rather, how much anal sex children say they are having. How will we cope?

A final note. It’s a bit of an obsession of my own, so I am prepared to be proven wrong. But one of the reasons I think that the anal sex question was in this survey, a bit like how sex education is becoming sexualised, and children are discussed from the United Nations down through the talk of childhood sexuality, is because those who run our institutions are increasingly disconnected from everyday life and people.

After all, anyone with just a semblance of common sense, or who had at least one foot still in their communities, would know instinctively that asking 14-year-old children about anal sex is completely unacceptable, hugely intrusive and wrong.

This is one of the reasons that SUE is so keen to get parents more involved in schools and education. Because it is ordinary parents, and grandparents, whose instincts can act both as a barrier to our disconnected elites and help get schools back to what they’re meant to be doing: educating our children.

Stuart Waiton

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Therapeutic education and poor behaviour

Rachael Hobbs is an educator and mother.

Schools face a continuing challenge to manage disruptive pupils, and we hear about it only within a discourse over an apparent children’s ‘mental health’ crisis.

Historically, a key aspect of schooling was learning how to behave in class. Today, however, while teachers continue to try and regulate children’s behaviour they increasingly do this through the language of ‘emotional regulation’, where talk is of ‘wellbeing’, something that constantly identifies problems through a therapeutic lens.

Few question this narrative, despite a stark acceleration in poor behaviour running parallel with the same timeframe in which the language of wellbeing took hold of education. The therapeutic industry and psychological jargon continue to expand into school training and lessons despite no evidence that it works, and it may even be sending the wrong message.

Behaviour interpreted through mental health

One implications of wellbeing applied in schools is that poor behaviour is almost always seen as a mental health issue.

As more and more children are viewed through the prism of ‘mental health’ resources needed for the relatively small number of children with serious difficulties becomes stretched. At the same time, we are not addressing what may be a truer crisis which is the declining authority of teachers. What we are left with is teachers being in a constant state of ‘negotiation’ with children, rather than using their authority in class. One result is that children come to learn that there are few serious consequences for their misbehaviour, in fact that this misbehaviour is not really their fault. The result is that more and more children are encouraging to think they have a mental health problem.

Ensuring that we are sensitive to the difficulties that some children have at home does not mean there should be lower expectations for children in school. In effect, I would strongly argue that difficulties related to wellbeing cannot be dealt with without instilling in children the necessity of deference and civility in school. If we fail to do this, then over time the inner sense of morality and responsibility will decline in children.

When it comes to children with serious special educational needs or disabilities (SEND), ‘self-regulation’ may be a valid way of understanding and helping these children. However – and to their credit – it is often the case that these children are not the ones who are causing the disruption in class. Rather, poor behaviour is more often than not caused by the environment that teachers have created. It is not a mental health crisis that is the problem; the problem is one of teachers’ authority, and children are learning to behave in the way they do.

Refusal to stay in class or to follow commands, or walking around and disrupting others, usually lead to an alteration in how teachers manage a particular child, and they might be assumed to be ‘neurodiverse’ rather than just poorly behaved (again, taking resources away from SEND children).

The therapeutic approach can result in a work area in class set away from others, provision of an array of ‘fidget toys’ once suited to a younger age group (big business for educational suppliers), and a diminished academic or even attendance record. Furthermore, the children in question may be designated a separate space (considered a ‘safe space’) within school premises when they want to run off. Staff embark on tiresome efforts to get the pupil to talk about their feelings (whether they want to or not), rather than talking about and dealing with their conduct.

Ultimately, the whole thing risks poor behaviour becoming a permanent problem. The child might do snippets of schoolwork, if they’re lucky, or a chosen activity, so they can come out of a state of ‘dysregulation’ – but they are missing core learning.

Therapy in place of expectation

We are doing these pupils a disservice. It is unlikely that poor behaviour will stop, because crucially, in many cases, it expands into the physical and psychological space that has been created for it to grow.

Because teachers view authority as a negative rather than a positive necessity in the classroom, children who misbehave are really being told that they are on their own. This is unintentional, but if the teacher fails to take control of a classroom the authority dynamic of the child–adult relationship is lost and children are left without the boundaries and, indeed, without the leadership that they desperately need. It’s a strange kind of abandonment – when the grown-ups are with you every step of the way but simultaneously refuse to act in an authoritative manner. Through the therapeutic lens, emotional introspection is encouraged for those often crying out simply to be shown a boundary.

Poor behaviour may also be rooted within our contemporary weak message of ‘gentle parenting’ and ‘choice’. Consequently, I often find that we face a dual problem where there is a lack of authority in the home and in school, something that is needed to instil a sense of self-control in children as they get older and which might be the best ‘therapy’ of all. But even where this is the case in the home, historically schools were a place where children were given strong expectations to behave in class. This is declining and is actually being undermined by the ‘caring’ ethos that many schools have adopted.

Problems should be resolved early by instilling consistent expectations, whereby a child gauges the moral and social tone of their environment, to which they need to adapt. Children must learn this if they are to acquire a central tenet of self-development, which, ironically, is obligation to others.

Pupils want to be reined in and to understand that behaviour is something they are in control of. Until they see this in themselves, teachers are responsible for sustaining parameters, not expanding them. Indeed it is the teacher, the authority figure, who helps children to develop self-control, by setting clear boundaries and disciplining those who cross them.

The ‘therapeutic’ endeavour in schools can have meaning only within a limited context. This is not easy, given that wider society is also captured by our therapeutic culture, whereby a healthy amount of repression (read self-control) is undermined at every turn. In schools, this is teaching children that how they feel is insurmountable, which if we must play amateur therapist, is not true.

Through our often-egotistical rush to demonstrate how good we are at understanding children’s ‘needs’, all we are doing is showing that we have no grasp of them at all.

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News round-up

A selection of the main stories with relevance to Scottish education in the press in recent weeks, by Simon Knight.

https://archive.is/m0xZP Tom Ball, Film about trans teen will be shown to pupils as young as 11. The documentary, following a sixth-former through the use of chest binders and cross-sex hormones, is set to be shown in schools in LGBTQ+ History month. 03/02/25

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24899878.glasgow-comic-first-official-patron-lgbt-education-charity/ James McEnaney, Glasgow comic is first official patron of LGBT-education charity. 31/01/25

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yvr65dpgzo Lucy Adams, School pupil 'sex survey' data offered to researchers. 04/02/25

https://archive.is/oRDG0 Mark McDougall, Glasgow teachers vote in favour of strike action. 04/02/25

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/03/why-is-the-british-taxpayer-keeping-stonewall-afloat/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2Dw1D_GOYb0ONZxABFDyKHuUR9NodlNFiMe8YrMDR18RxCayFLu9LGLiU_aem_SoAj5Rw9nezEiezmfLyGGA William Yarwood, Why is the British taxpayer keeping Stonewall afloat? As the private sector turns its back on DEI idiocy, the state remains determined to keep propping it up. 03/02/25

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8plvqv60lo Alice Evans, Mobile ban in schools not improving grades or behaviour, study suggests. 05/02/25

https://archive.is/ngpbK Joe Wright, The radical Labour council waging class warfare on the south coast. Much-loved seaside town targets middle-class families in ‘dangerous social engineering’ experiment. 05/02/25

https://archive.is/YJCg8 Craig Simpson, Lego can be anti-LGBT, says Science Museum. Museum’s Seeing Things Queerly tour claims people think the toy bricks are ‘gendered’ and reinforces idea ‘heterosexuality is the norm’. 06/02/25

https://substack.com/home/post/p-156759386?source=queue&autoPlay=false Andrew Doyle, The ignorance of culture warriors. Many of today’s debates are caused by fundamental misunderstandings. 10/02/25

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4md23dgg2o Hugh Pym, Campaigner launches bid to ban cross-sex hormones for under-18s. 31/01/25

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