Scottish Union for Education - Newsletter No7

Newsletter Themes: The political class, restorative practice, and therapeutic capture

Mar 16, 2023

In this week’s newsletter we look at the rise of therapeutic ideas in education. Julie Sandilands reports on the influence of restorative practice and how it has shaped the way that we think about discipline in schools, and Linda Murdoch looks at how attitudes towards higher education students have changed because of the adoption of an ‘affective’ approach to learning. To start, Stuart Waiton wanted to share with you some correspondence in the SUE email inbox from Glenrothes MP Peter Grant.

Keep an eye out for the tickets for our next online event Stuart Waiton in conversation with Lionel Shriver

A message from Peter Grant MP

Stuart Waiton is an academic and Chairperson of SUE

When we launched the Scottish Union for Education, we emailed politicians about our organisation. Usefully, Peter Grant, SNP Member of Parliament for Glenrothes, emailed back, but the response from Mr Grant is a telling example of the bad faith that we often see coming from today’s political class. Our email explained that we were a union being set up for parents, teachers and communities concerned about aspects of education that were becoming a form of indoctrination. The articles in the Substack elaborated on this point.

Rather than engaging with the ideas being presented, the MP emailed back with a technocratic response, sounding more like a bureaucrat from HR than a politician. His email read:

‘You’ve emailed me several times describing yourselves as a research organisation. Can I ask you the same questions I ask of any such organisation that lobbies for my support.

What’s your constitutional status? If you’re a registered company or charitable organisation what’s your registration number?
Do you subscribe to any recognised code of ethics for academic research? If not, what independent assurance is there that your research is not biased?
Who funds you? Can you provide details of any individual or organisation who has provided funds that would meet the threshold for disclosure if they were provided to a registered political party.
Can you provide me with a copy of your constitution and of any register of interests completed by your board or senior staff?‘

If Mr Grant is genuinely interested in the answers to his questions, he could look at the ‘About’ page of the Substack where he’d find our board members and our community group’s constitution. There is no code of ethics, but we have a very clear approach and we welcome challenges or questions about the work we are doing. All our work is in the public realm, and we are funded by our members who subscribe to the Substack.

As an academic, one of my areas of research is the emergence of what is often called the new elites. One of the characteristics of this group of people is that they often hide behind administrative and seemingly value-neutral processes and procedures, speaking in a language that masks their own outlook or prejudices. ‘Who funds you? Are you registered? What are your codes and procedures?’ they ask. Rather than having clear politics and principles, these new elites prefer to find technical ways to dismiss those with whom they disagree and to talk about ‘doing’ politics differently, instead of engaging in a political or moral exchange. The first email from Peter Grant falls nicely into this administrative approach.

Today the other substitute for political engagement among politicians and ‘right thinking’ types is name calling. As we have seen with the Gary Lineker drama, to call opponents fascists or equate their views with those prevalent in Nazi Germany has become standard practice. Coincidently, Peter Grant was guilty of a ‘Lineker’ back in 2021, when he had to apologise for a bizarre tweet about Nazis directed at Andrew Neil.

I replied to Peter Grant’s email, suggesting that he might want to read the Substack and that I would be happy to take his name off our mailing list. Grant wrote back and then we start to get a little closer to his real concerns. It read: ‘Could you clarify your constant tirades against “indoctrination” in Scottish schools please? Are you against denominational schools? Are you against religious education? Or is it only “indoctrination” when it doesn’t coincide with your world view?’

As it happens, SUE has no position on denominational schools, and religious education, in my opinion (as an atheist), it is fine and can be a useful part of schooling if indeed it is educational. Regarding indoctrination, I replied to the MP as follows: ‘There shouldn’t be a “world view” taught as fact in school. Just now headteachers’ guidance is to teach “social justice” – this is a value-laden ideology. Educating social justice as facts is indoctrination. A debate about social justice would be very welcome. For example: Do you think all white people have white privilege? If you do, that is your political opinion – not an accepted fact. Do you think gender is fluid? You may think so, but again, this is your opinion, but it is being taught as fact – and taught to very young children.’ There are areas of indoctrination in our schools and Grant can read what we think about them online. In the spirit of open debate, we would welcome a public response from the MP for Glenrothes, which we are more than happy to publish.

It would be nice to hear if Peter thinks that it is acceptable to teach young children that their gender is fluid, or that they have ‘white privilege’. As 96.2% of the Scottish population is white, perhaps he could explain what on earth having white privilege means in the Scottish context. The Glenwood area, in Glenrothes, is in the bottom 10% for deprivation in Scotland, and the number of Fifers living in extreme deprivation is on the rise. It would be fascinating to know if Mr Grant has told his constituents about their privileged existence. It would be interesting to know if Mr Grant believes that his constituents elected him to oversee an education system that has embraced this social justice perspective.

SUE believes that we should have a liberal education system. There are specific ideas and ideals associated with this outlook, such as the idea that school education should be focused on academic subjects, and in later years and especially in further education, a belief in open debate and academic freedom. A liberal approach to education aims to teach objective facts to children – facts that have been accepted within the academic community, whether that relates to mathematical formulas or to biological facts about X and Y chromosomes. It is also an approach that allows the potential for all other perspectives and approaches to be aired, at least for older children, and encourages open discussion and debates about different beliefs and ideas.

So, Mr Grant, let us know if you are opposed to the children in your constituency receiving a liberal education. Let us and your voters know if you believe schools should be adopting a dogmatic social justice approach, and if so, please explain how this approach is anything other than indoctrination.

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What is Restorative Practice?

Julie Sandilands is an English/business teacher who worked in several secondary schools in Fife until 2017. Now based in Cumbria, she works as a private tutor teaching children both in and out of mainstream provision.

Following on from last week’s newsletter and the article by Richard Lucas, Unspeakable Evil, it seems appropriate to look at the Restorative Practice (RP) initiative and the impact it has had on behaviour management policies in Scottish Schools. First trialled in 2004, restorative approaches to education have been widely adopted (‘Teachers are Afraid we are Stealing their Strength’: A Risk Society and Restorative Approaches in School). The terms ‘restorative justice’, ‘restorative practices’ and ‘restorative approaches’ have been used to mean ‘restoring good relationships when there has been conflict or harm; and developing school ethos, policies and procedures that reduce the possibilities of such conflict and harm occurring’ (Kane et al. 2007; Morrison, 2007).

Back in 2004, funding was provided by the Scottish Executive for a two-year pilot project on RP in three Scottish local authorities (later extended for a further two years). The overall aim for the national pilot was to learn more about RP in school settings and to look at whether there could be a distinctive Scottish approach that offered something additional to current good practice. See The Scottish Restorative Practice project.

The underpinning principles of the pilot were described as: fostering social relationships in a school community of mutual engagement, accepting responsibility and accountability for one’s own actions and their impact on others, respect for other people, their views and feelings, empathy with the feelings of others affected by one’s own actions, fairness and a commitment to equitable processes and active involvement of everyone in school with decisions about their own lives. The ambitions were that conflict and difficulty be referred back to participants, rather than behaviour being pathologised, and that schools should create opportunities for reflective change in pupils and staff (Kane et al. 2007).

Fife Council received funding for the pilot and encouraged participating schools to develop their own approach. They had required schools to produce an action plan for each year of the project, and these plans have formed the basis for subsequent developments, indicating the commitment of Fife Council to the development of RP. See Final Report of the evaluation of the first two years of the Pilot Projects.

Between 2006 and 2008, I led a behaviour management committee at a secondary school in Fife, tasked with creating a workable behaviour management policy. It was my belief that RP was another tool in the box, and I believed, at that time, it was introduced and implemented as such.

Seven years later, when at a larger secondary school in Fife, I discovered that every classroom now had a small, laminated card with several questions that the teacher should read out in a particular order to manage disruptive behaviour. The questions on the laminated card included: ‘What went wrong for you today?’ and ‘What can I do to make things better?’

These cards provided the opportunity for students to identify and blame outside influences rather than taking ‘responsibility and accountability for one’s own actions and their impact on others’. Richard Lucas is correct in suggesting that increasingly the very idea of personal moral accountability ‘is holed below the waterline’.

Today, schools with good reputations (and outstanding exam results), such as the Michaela Community School, have robust behaviour management policies with clear rules and consequences, where all stakeholders understand the expectations of behaviour and attitude. In Scotland there has been great emphasis on preventing and managing school exclusions. In practice, this means decreasing the number of exclusions year on year – by any means necessary. The adoption of restorative approaches supports this strategy. Together, the RP approach and exclusion policy lead to inconsistency of expectations between teachers and departments, the lack of a framework of consequences from warnings to punishments (if any), the censorship of language by teachers to restore order, and sometimes a difficult learning environment leading to poor morale in both students and staff.

In their enthusiasm to tick boxes on the latest evaluation and indicator system such as HGIOS (How Good is Our School?) or GIRFEC (Getting it Right for Every Child), have local authorities and school management teams (SMT) fostered restorative practice not as a complement to robust behaviour management policies but as the alternative? Nobody can argue with the principles of restorative practice, and in an ideal world, they sound like the recipe for the most conducive learning environment imaginable. In the real world, however, is it now time to question whether they have become more of a hindrance than a help?

The Therapeutic Capture of Our Universities

Linda Murdoch is writing a doctorate on the impacts of institutional therapeutic capture on the practice of university careers advisers. She is the former Director of Careers at the University of Glasgow.

Last Thursday was University Mental Health Day; according to charity Student Minds, these special days are necessary because between a quarter and a third of all students suffer from poor mental health. Given the proliferation of reports about the fragility of university students, you might be forgiven for thinking that higher education is deeply harmful. Or alternatively, you might be forgiven for thinking that those that describe young people as frail, flaky or snowflakes have a point? It’s almost every day a university announces ‘trigger warnings’ cautioning students about course material, or a student group demands a ‘safe space’ away from hurtful ideas. A closer look tells another story behind these accounts of student fragility and calls for protection.

In 2017, Universities UK (UUK), the body that oversees how our higher education institutions are governed, recommended that they adopt a ‘whole’ university approach to supporting student mental health and wellbeing. In its own words it said, ‘The whole university approach recommends that all aspects of university life promote and support student and staff mental health.’ (UUK 2017, p. 12).

UUK advocated that universities become ‘health’ settings and that their fundamental purpose as educators should be subordinated to safeguarding the psychological health of their students. According to this approach, teaching and learning can be tolerated only if they don’t upset students. This shift involved universities moving from an approach where their counselling services discreetly treated students who approached them for help to one where the whole institution became geared to safeguarding student mental health and wellbeing.

In practice, this meant that all aspects of university life, from how courses are designed and how student services are delivered, to the construction of buildings and all interactions between staff and students, were reshaped around an expectation of student fragility. Staff are obliged to attend mental health awareness courses; everyone from the catering staff to the senior university management team are informed about how to spot signs of students in distress and guide them to expert help.

This holistic approach was accompanied by campaigns to encourage students to guard their mental health and seek support for their anxieties and stresses at the earliest opportunity. At the same time, university websites devoted pages to ‘wellbeing’ to warn students of a long list of threats including, but not limited to, exam pressure, financial stress, bullying, sexual harassment, staying safe on and off campus (especially at parties), and protecting themselves from financial and accommodation scams. Today most universities give their students a safety app on their phones that guarantees them 24/7 protection. Whether students use these or not, their message is clear: being a student can be a very dangerous business.

Universities now warn students that they are at risk and invite them to safeguard their emotions and seek expert support, so perhaps it is no surprise that more and more of them are feeling unwell. Looked at differently, this ‘whole’ university approach to mental health and wellbeing has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, the approach itself creates a framework for its own propagation.

However, there are other reasons that coincided with the transformation of universities from educational to health-based settings that offer a clue as to why so many students think they may be mentally fragile. Over the past 30 years, our understanding of what constitutes mental illness has changed beyond all recognition. As outlined in the UUK’s promotion of the ‘whole’ university approach, being mentally healthy and mentally unwell have been merged into a ‘continuum’. Whereas previously, those diagnosed with mental illness would have been viewed as different and treated separately, according to this continuum view, we all stand together on the spectrum labelled ‘mental health’ regardless of our psychological state. By reducing the differences between mental ill health and being mentally robust to a matter of ‘degrees’, the continuum approach suggests that many of what were once considered as normal emotional reactions to our everyday experiences – such as stress, meeting essay deadlines, or exam anxiety – now constitute a much more serious threat to a student’s mental health.

Applying the continuum approach means that everyday stress and anxiety, which used to be seen as unremarkable effects of being a student, are now viewed as clinical conditions. Although these notions about the elision of normal emotions and pathological reactions are contested, they now form the basis of how universities and society more broadly treat students. For example, students often have a habit of saying that they are suffering from anxiety and depression. This somewhat casual combination of an commonplace emotion such as anxiety with what used to be understood as a psychological illness requiring a medical diagnosis is indicative of how our view of mental health has changed. Put differently, nowadays anyone can claim to have mental health problems without a proper clinical diagnosis, as can be seen in the ease with which GPs currently prescribe antidepressants. Given this trend towards the wholesale pathologisation of what are normal reactions to university life, then is it any wonder that an increasing number of students are complaining of a deterioration in their mental health?

It’s worth asking why students don’t just rationalise all these warnings about how at risk they might actually be? After all, universities offer students far more support with the academic and non-academic aspects of their degree than was provided to their predecessors in the twentieth century, who were given a booklist and essay deadlines and told to get on with it. In other words, in the past, no one taught students how to manage deadlines, write essays, study, or deal with antisocial behaviour on campus. It is also arguable that students are far safer at university today than they have ever been. Just why is it that students seem to be more prone nowadays to believing that they may be harmed by what were previously thought of as normal experiences of being at university?

The answer might lie in how today’s students are socialised to view the world around them differently from their predecessors. In the early part of the twenty-first century, all UK school curriculums were reformed to accommodate what is known as ‘affective’ or ‘therapeutic’ approaches to learning.

In 2005 the UK Department for Education and Skills (DfES) introduced the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) framework into compulsory education (Department for Education and Skills, 2005. Emotional, behavioural and social skills. London: DfES). Similar recommendations regarding the teaching of these aspects were introduced in Scotland with the introduction of A Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) (Scottish Executive, 2004).

These new approaches were underwritten by ideas that pupils who feel good about themselves are more likely to learn. Despite being contested, these approaches now form the building blocks of school pedagogy where children are taught to prioritise their feelings in lieu of their thoughts. This leads to an undue concern among pupils about how their emotions might be impacted by their learning and in some cases an intolerance of ideas that they think might make them feel uncomfortable and harm them. This alteration in teaching and learning in schools has resulted in pupils and students having unwarranted fear about how their thoughts and feelings could seriously harm their mental health and wellbeing.

Given that students today have been taught to fear their thoughts and feelings, it is this, together with the pathologisation of their everyday emotions and the promotion of risks and campaigns in help-seeking behaviour, that have led to more of them reporting themselves to be emotionally fragile. Put differently, it is not students’ fault that they interact with the world in the way they do! It is the way that we, their parents, and educators have allowed our educational institutions to be turned away from the transmission of knowledge and captured by these dangerous therapeutic influences that treat our young as fragile objects rather than the strong autonomous agents that we need them to be.

News Round-up

https://archive.is/2023.03.04-090234/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/04/government-considering-urgent-review-inappropriate-sex-education/#selection-1209.4-1213.135 Louisa Clarence-Smith, ‘Government considering urgent review into “inappropriate” sex education. Rishi Sunak is said to be personally alarmed about Government guidance produced in 2019 that was endorsed by LGBT charity Stonewall.’ 04/03/23

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/08/sex-education-review-is-politically-motivated-say-teaching-unions Aletha Adi and Richard Adams, ‘Sex education review is “politically motivated”, say teaching unions. Tory MPs’ claims of extreme graphic lessons at England’s schools written off as “inflammatory rhetoric”.’ 08/03/23

https://ethicsintroduction.weebly.com/uploads/4/4/6/2/44624607/bertrand_russell_the_functions_of_a_teacher.pdf Bertrand Russell, ‘The functions of a teacher.’ 1950

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-64892868?fbclid=IwAR2ZbF8uV-RdGW2RjkZ2ujX4QwfrW0v4VRaqYGwJRmO7mR5m8E641ygE_D0 BBC, ‘Sex education review announced after MPs raise concerns.’ 09/03/23

https://blog.innerdrive.co.uk/underachieving-boys-what-educators-can-do ‘Boys in England are underachieving. What can educators do?’ Retrieved 10/03/23

https://unherd.com/2023/03/stop-trying-to-indoctrinate-kids/ Kathleen Stock, ‘Stop trying to indoctrinate kids. Axe-grinding political obsessives could kill off reading.’ 03/03/23

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/05/what-i-saw-inside-the-tavistock/?fbclid=IwAR2whs4izo8bFEWmlT7AbODLoV9P75hN5ud1eDKLzmzUREsm6ew8VDkkxCs#lewt56xzpjzyamyuhie Marcus Evans, ‘What I saw inside the Tavistock. The gender clinic put troubled children on a conveyor belt towards transition and snuffed out internal dissent.’ 05/03/23

https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/scotlands-transgender-debate-parents-concerned-about-rising-numbers-of-girls-identifying-as-male-have-a-right-to-free-speech-susan-dalgety-4059255 Susan Dalgety, ‘Scotland’s transgender debate: Parents concerned about rising numbers of girls identifying as male have a right to free speech.’ 11/03/23