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Viewpoint of Kate Gainsford, President of the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA), on violent incidents in our secondary schools.
May 2010
What’s the plan Anne?
Fortunately serious incidents like this one are rare,” was the dismissive response of minister of education, Anne Tolley, to the alarming news of a second knife attack on a teacher by a student in the last eight months. What is unfortunate is that the statistics clearly do not bear out the minister’s view at all. In 2008, 422 teachers needed treatment under ACC for assault injuries and schools stood down 288 students for physical attacks on teachers.
What is truly “unfortunate” is that these events are not rare at all. The figures indicate that two serious assaults take place in a secondary school every day. That these do not necessarily result in life-threatening injuries is testimony to the capacity of individual teachers to defuse and deflect violent situations, not to any national initiatives around student and teacher safety.
Support a plan, some action and some money for Positive Behaviour for Learning intervention in secondary schools
Yes, I do know about the Positive Behaviour for Learning Action Plan and would like to be a strong advocate for it. The problem is there is no plan, no action and no money to support its operations in secondary schools. Of course it is important to support interventions in the early years of a child’s life because all the evidence is that behaviour is much more difficult to change as the child gets older, but as the experts at the Taumata Whanonga noted, “intervention needs to be early in life or early in the life of the problem”.
Waiting for the existing cohort of secondary students to leave school is not a reasonable approach
While I agree with Mrs Tolley that the problem of disruptive behaviour is “not something that we are going to solve overnight,” I cannot accept that waiting for 12 or so years until the current beneficiaries of the Positive Behaviour for Learning Action Plan reach secondary school age represents a reasonable timeframe. Teachers who suffer either physical injury or the psychological effects of working in a physically and verbally threatening and stressful environment need to know that the minster of education understands the urgency of the issue and is on their side.
And it isn’t just teachers – too often teachers’ injuries result from their efforts to stop fights between students, so parents too must feel concerned by the minister’s apparent indifference to the rising levels of violence in secondary schools.
Not that I am remotely interested in the suggestions made about “search and seizure” power for schools. The problem of community-based violence, particularly that connected with gangs, will not be solved by increased search powers or metal detectors in schools.
A coherent nationwide support service is what is needed to reduce violence in schools
The problem with Tomorrow’s Schools is that it dumps responsibility for student safety entirely on boards and principals while denying them access to the coherent nationwide support services that have been shown to reduce violence in schools. More than once this year I have been in schools which have accessed funds from the increased Interim Response Fund only to find there are no appropriate support services for them to purchase in their region. It certainly makes a nonsense of the minister’s fobbing off of any responsibility by claiming that schools have flexibility to cater for students that don’t “fit in”. More thoughtful answers are required.
PPTA’s annual conference identified the need for an extensive network of specialist support (including more RTLBs, trained case managers, social workers, liaison support positions) operating out of behavioural health clinics attached to schools. The real answer lies in the recommendations that called on the government to coordinate and resource those programmes which have been shown to successfully reduce conduct problems in schools. Of course that would be expensive (though effective), whereas it is cheap to legislate for schools to have expanded security powers even if it does nothing to address the underlying problems. It’s even cheaper to offer soundbites. For politicians, lots of words and legislation can give the appearance that something is actually being done.
Students and teachers deserve a safe place to learn and work
Finally on this topic, I have been intrigued by the media practice of describing the teacher who was injured last week by such phrases as “popular”, “laidback” and “well-liked.” Some media even went so far as to check the highly dubious website ratemyteachers.com for information. What are we to make of this? Are we to assume that if a teacher were less popular, the public would consider their injuries as somehow deserved?
There is simply no justification for a teacher to be assaulted in the course of his/her work and, however expensive and difficult it may be to fix, the minister cannot avoid government responsibility for ensuring schools are safe places to work and learn.
Published May 2010 issue of the PPTA News
 PPTA News archive
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