Why Scotland needs more positive male role models like Eyemouth High School's police officer
Scotland’s laissez-faire attitude to discipline in schools comes at the worst possible time
Violence in Edinburgh’s secondary schools has risen by more than 92 per cent since 2019/20, according to information provided after a freedom of information request by the Scottish Conservatives.
Despite this, exclusions for schools have actually fallen by more than 43 per cent over the last ten years. It’s hard not to draw a causal link between these two facts, and there is a similar picture in many of Scotland’s schools.
Unruly children, particularly boys, are being taught the extraordinarily dangerous lesson that violence will be tolerated, that they will not face serious consequences, and that ‘authority’ figures have little real power. A collision with reality in the adult world awaits.
Obviously, if they are allowed to run wild, they are not being educated – something they may eventually regret when they end up with no qualifications and no prospects. Worse still, they are also preventing others from receiving an education.
Commenting on the figures, Tory MSP Miles Briggs said: “The fact that disruptive and violent pupils are not being removed from our classrooms is extremely unfair. In fact, it is increasingly the rest of the class which is evacuated due to the behaviour of individual pupils... well behaved children and exasperated teachers face unacceptable pressures every day.”
This laissez-faire attitude to discipline in schools comes at the worst possible time, with openly misogynistic and far-right social media ‘influencers’ encouraging boys to adopt their toxic brand of masculinity, which is often a sickening mix of machismo and self-pity.
Fortunately, there is an antidote to this warped vision of ‘a man’ as both a victim and an oppressor delivered in slick online videos – positive, real-world role models like the police officer based at Eyemouth High School in the Borders, where he helps young people, particularly boys, find a better path.
However, police officers are not the only people who can perform this role. From a self-employed electrician who takes on apprentices or a company chief executive to a player from a local football club, there are many men who have built a successful career and life and who can help boys realise what life is really all about and that hard work and kindness to others bring their own rewards.
Fostering closer links between schools and such pillars of the community is surely one way to counter the plague of violence and sexism in our classrooms. Given the scale of the problem, we may need to find many more.