School violence is a social problem and it needs an all-society response

Today it is being widely reported that new statistics show that female teachers are about twice as likely to face pupil violence than male teachers. For many who grew up in an era when violence against teachers was extremely rare, this is a shocking statistic.

In reality, disruption and violence in schools has been rising sharply but consistently for a while now. Initially this was treated as a schools policy issue but the scale of the problem has risen such that it is now the topic of wide social conversation. Unfortunately, as Kaitlin recently explained, that doesn't mean the quality of that conversation is necessarily very high.

Common Weal would suggest there are three broad courses of action necessary if we are seriously to tackle this problem; first to adjust the social environment we create for children, second to alter the nature of schooling to better engage poorly engaged pupils, third, to prepare them with ways of responding through non-violence – social care, education reform and non-violence education.

We developed the concept of 'social care' as part of our National Care Service work. It is recognised that there is the health service to deal with failures in health, but also that there is such as thing as 'public health', the way in which our society is organised and structured to either help create the conditions for good individual health – or to harm it.

Social care is the same concept; our society creates the conditions which will produce either more demand for care or less as a result of environmental and mental welfare drivers (poverty, poor housing, disrupted home life, crime, stress, anxiety, financial duress, long working hours, isolation and loneliness, unrealistic life expectations, the impact of social media).

In almost every case, our current economic and social model tends to create greater and greater negative pressures on public care. Just as the NHS is a response to when health fails, a care service similarly is a care failure or deficit which must be filled – but preventing care need is always preferable. While all of this is about everyone in society, these impacts will hit teenagers hardest.

We need a full public care agenda to address all the causes of rising disruptive behaviour – you can find more details here. But a substantial amount of the negative care pressures for many children come from inside schools themselves. By largely turning schools into make-or-break qualification factories primarily tasked with preparing the most academically bright pupils for university it puts undue pressure on all pupils.

Those not destined for an academic career are often poorly served by the system altogether while even those who are often face levels of stress and anxiety which are entirely counterproductive to the health of a developing child. We need a new approach to school that focusses on development rather than 'selection' and which properly values all positive outcomes from education. Find out more in Sorted.

Finally, violence is learned – and non-violence can be learned. There are steps towards this being taken in primary schools but we must integrate non-violence approaches into schools. This can mean learned alternatives to lashing out, practices such as anger management or mindfulness, negotiation training, de-escalation strategies and more.

Many pupils will benefit more from a range of negotiation and non-violence techniques through much of their life than they will from algebra. How this could be integrated into schools is also considered in Sorted.