State Schools - Satisfaction (not always) Guaranteed

I was reading the Daily Telegraph last night after a long and tiring day of worrying about Josh and the problems he's had with being bullied at school and happened upon an interesting article by Professor Tanya Byron entitled "The Fear of Young People Damages Us All". It's a well thought out and carefully considered article and well worth a read. It can be found at:


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/5007885/The-fear-of-young-people-damages-us-all.html


I felt moved to post a response to her article (which hasn't yet appeared in the "Comments" section of the web page). My response was as follows:

"I'm not at all scared of young people and, indeed, I agree with much of what Professor Byron has to say but I am the mother of a bullied child and I do feel that an increasingly faddish education system is letting down not only the children who misbehave but also those children who are on the receiving end of the bad behaviour. Schools don't seem to have mastered an effective way of imposing sensible boundaries for children and sadly, those children who need such boundaries, are unlikely to have any at home either. In my experience, greater emphasis is placed on enabling bullies to become "better people" at schools rather than helping an often traumatised bullied child to feel secure in the school environment. Exclusions and suspensions don't appear to be a deterrent to children who misbehave and I wonder if Professor Byron has any suggestions to help those kids AND to minimise the effect of the bullying on kids who don't misbehave and whose education is continually disrupted by the poor behaviour of their less well-behaved school mates."

While I was busy writing the above, DH called me to say that Alistair Campbell was discussing State Schools with Matthew Bannister (who's standing in for Jeremy Vine) on Radio 2. I tried, too late, to get through to the show and to speak to Mr Campbell with whose views I also broadly agree. I ended up by sending an email to the programme and wanted to ask what the solution to disciplining badly behaved children should be as, quite patently, the current faddish regulations of not being able to truly discipline a badly behaved child and the situation of teachers trying to keep order with both hands tied, isn't working.

I'm interested to know if either Professor Byron or Mr Campbell have a solution and if either of them do, please, please do tell me what it is!