Sir Alan Steer has claimed that Britain's pupils are better and better behaved, according to the Times Educational Supplement (April 24th). The teachers' trade paper comments that "raised eyebrows and cries of disbelief" greeted Sir Alan's comments. However the paper's commentator, Michael Shaw goes on to support Sir Alan's view.

He says that NUT surveys became more positive about behaviour between 2001 and 2008. He also comments "youth crime also seems to have fallen over the past 15 years, with the proportion of ten to 17-year-olds who are reprimanded, warned or convicted by policy down by 12 per cent since 1992."

He also recommends a book, State Schools Since the 1950s: The Good News, by Adrian Elliott who apparently found that students were four more times likely to truant in the 1950s and he also offers other indications that there was no perfect discipline in a supposed "golden age".

These measurements deserve to be looked at closely. However here is a little anecdotal observation of my own from the other side. Near to me is a well-known comprehensive school in a pretty smart area of London, though many of the students travel in from council homes further out. I often see the children come out of school in the afternoon. At that time I usually see three or four "community police officers" stationed in the street that is nearest. They are clearly there to police the children.

When I have been in the shops nearby, there have sometimes been two or three other officers making sure there is no disruption in that area either. I once saw a shopkeeper angrily shooing off some students who wandered into his shop. I don't think it is too much to guess that he has had trouble with the children before.

Of course, it would not be new for children to shoplift. But when I was young, I went to school near to what was called then a "secondary modern". I often saw students from that school. I never saw a single policeman or any trouble on the streets at all.

Yes, yes. I know this is merely an anecdote and proves nothing. It is just a sliver of evidence. Perhaps more substantial are the figures obtained by David Ruffley, the Conservative police reform minister. He has found that the number of persistent young offenders has increased by 60 per cent over the past decade:

In 2008, there was a total of 15,819 persistent young offenders in England and Wales – up 60 per cent on the 9,868 recorded by police forces in 1997.

The full account is in the Telegraph.

The government minister responded that the figures "are not designed to measure overall trends in youth crime, and will give a misleading picture of the true trend if used for this purpose."

Unfortunately his reasoning for thinking that the figures are misleading has not been reported, or perhaps he gave no reason. In any case, I am afraid I am now sufficiently cynical about government statistics that the only ones I am inclined to trust at all are ones which are not normally cited by anyone and therefore have not been subject to political manipulation. On this basis, these figures obtained by Ruffley may be an excellent indication of the trend. But now attention has been drawn to them, we can expect a remarkable apparent improvement.

Many indicators (quoted in the book) make me confident that children's behaviour has deteriorated in the past 50 years. I strongly suspect that the decline continued in the past decade.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Education

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