Outside pressures ‘are hitting pupils’ learning’

Mar 7 2008 by Abbie Wightwick, Western Mail

LEARNING in schools is being disrupted to an unprecedented level by the increasing pressures pupils face outside the classroom, a conference will be told today.

Marital breakdown, commercialisation and parents’ long working hours are among social changes causing learning and behaviour problems among children, Brian Lightman, president of the Association of School and College Leaders will tell his organisation’s annual conference.

Speaking exclusively to the Western Mail ahead of the conference, Mr Lightman, head of St Cyres Comprehensive in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, said social changes were a “mammoth challenge” which schools could not cope with alone.

Children were less likely to learn if there are problems at home and more likely to behave badly under the influence of poor celebrity role models and pressure from advertising, he warned.

Mr Lightman will tell the conference that factors contributing to problems in classrooms include:

Marriage breakdown

Long working hours for both parents

Commercialism, and

More open sexuality

He told the Western Mail yesterday , “The challenges are much greater than they were 10 or even five years ago. If children are occupied with concerns such as parental break-up there are clear physiological reasons why they are not going to learn. Neuroscience shows that children cannot learn when they are stressed.

“What we need in schools is support services to make sure that if they have problems we can help them learn.”

He warned that young people were bombarded by negative role models.

“Children in the 21st century are growing up in a very different environment. One of the changes is in standards of responsibility. There are not the same role models in society now so it is much more difficult. In many ways schools are the last bastions of traditional values. Schools are maintaining values that many young people’s role models don’t.

“If you think of celebrity culture, drink and drugs, I don’t want to name anyone, but if you think of that and all the media that children are subject to, they are growing up in very different circumstances.

“There is also a continuing increase in children from families without two parents.

“Young people also have enormous access to information. There is pressure on them from advertising and the media they see in their homes – the television and internet. They are bombarded with fashion and things they may wish to have.”

Access to different types of media and ways to get information meant young people were less able to concentrate in traditional classes, Mr Lightman said.

“Traditional classroom teaching is less attractive to them which also puts pressure on teachers. All these social changes and issues mean that the demands on professionals are much greater than ever before.

“Teachers have to be much more skilled and here in Wales they are very, very skilled.

“But we need more services such as counsellors and pupil support services in schools. It needs a multi-agency approach.

“This is not a criticism of the Assembly or the Whitehall governments. The Assembly is committed. But this is a mammoth challenge for us all.”

Mr Lightman said people must not assume this meant children were not as bright and keen to learn as in the past.

“Children still very much want to learn. There’s enormous pressure on them to achieve from the public, the media and the Government.

“They want to achieve more than ever and are more hard working than ever. But at the same time there are some who are more challenged than ever before.”

The chair of the Assembly Government’s Behaviour and Attendance Review yesterday agreed that “social fabric was changing”.

Professor Ken Reid, also the deputy principal of Swansea Institute of Higher Education, said criticising parents for relationship breakdown or working was not an option and more support was needed.

“Having both parents working on a full-time basis means that children and young people spend increasing time on their own and self-monitor themselves,” he said.

“It’s a sensitive issue because you can’t criticise parents for needing to work but the reality of it is that, sometimes, when children need help they have to find ways of coping themselves.

“There is evidence there are more children from one-parent families and that they truant and are excluded more. But, the majority from one-parent families are well brought up.

“Schools are quite correctly operating the same standards that applied 20 or 30 years ago but schools no longer receive the same respect and support that they used to from parents – and they used to take that support and respect for granted.

“The social fabric of society is changing.”

The three-day ASCL annual conference opens in Brighton today when delegates will also be addressed by Ed Balls, the Whitehall Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.