Far from dispelling violence, it positively encourages it. By the time you have waded through the document, your gorge will have risen to the point where you could cheerfully strangle the authors with the same ferocity with which they mangle the English language.
“Support schools to implement a spectrum of relationships and behaviour approaches, appropriate to the specific context, taking account of issues such as the public sector equality duty and intersectionality,” reads one sentence.
Then there is the jargon. BISSR, Sagrabis, Girfec (Getting it right for every child), and a battalion of other orcs bestride its pages. But amid thisD-minus effort in obfuscation, there are glimpses of the mayhem and anarchy that are everyday realities for some pupils and teachers in some Scottish schools.
“New and emerging themes of challenging behaviour, which are widespread in secondary school, are beginning to emerge within the primary sector,” the report opines. “These include pupils asking to be let out of class so they can vape; ‘in-school truancy’, whereby pupils are in school but not in class. “Instead, they congregate in corridors, toilets and social areas”.
A rise in “misogynistic and explicitly sexualised language amongst boys”, and the problematic use of mobile phones leading to disrupted learning in class and online bullying and abuse was also noted.
These are children aged 11 and under.
