This article first appeared in the Scotland on Sunday on 2 November 2025
The problem of poor behaviour in Scottish schools, and the devastating impact this has on life chances, can no longer be ignored. The Commission on School Reform’s recent report captured the scale and consequences of the problem. The systemic denial about, and failure to adequately deal with, poor behaviour is the biggest barrier to pupils achieving their potential in our schools. We can have the best curriculum in the world (spoiler alert: we haven’t) but if pupils are disrupting their learning and that of the well-behaved majority then everything else is pointless.
What’s preventing this from being tackled? I think there are broadly three main reasons. First, there’s systemic and institutional denial that there’s even a problem in the first place. This permeates governmental, local authority and school leadership level, and is present even amongst some teachers (“they behave for me”) for whom poor behaviour and low standards are just normal. This is driven by ideology. The system is currently based on trauma-informed and restorative practices. Not only are these not working they’re causing immense damage. To therefore challenge those ideological sacred cows is to admit their ineffectiveness and we don’t have brave or visionary leadership prepared to do that, beyond the occasional outlier like Bruce Robertson. Scotland’s largest teaching union, the EIS, is part of the problem, as they too are committed to this flawed and damaging approach to behaviour that’s wrecking such havoc in our schools. Second, at all levels the system overwhelmingly promotes conformists who won’t rock the boat. Job interviews largely check for ideologically correct answers making it extremely difficult for those with new approaches and fresh ideas to break through. Third, there’s a rainbows and unicorns approach to education in Scotland with bold statement and a complete lack of accountability from a leadership that displays learned helplessness and revels in an excuses culture. Look at the headline on the SQA’s website: “the heart of Scotland’s world-renowned education system.” Evidence shows this to be a completely false claim. Poor leaders and bad teachers get moved around and schools are not answerable to the communities they serve whilst local education authorities are mammoth bureaucracies unanswerable to the public. Behaviour problems in Scottish schools reflect these profound wider systemic failures.
So, what does this look like on the ground? I’ve worked in a few Glasgow secondary schools over many years and decided to record a typical week. As always, there’s far more that can be said.
Monday
Period 1. When the bell goes to start the lesson, I have three pupils present and ready to learn. Everyone else trails in over the next forty minutes, causing significant disruption, especially to those already ready to learn. There’s constant talking and I count that I ask for quiet a total of 47 times. I’m an experienced teacher and know this isn’t normal. Most pupils take a pencil from the front because they’re not expected to have their own. An email is regularly sent round reminding staff not to challenge pupils on lack of equipment. It’s not just about a pencil though, is it? It’s about habit, culture and routines. Needless to say, they all remember their phones. We have no expectations of pupils at all. We don’t even expect them to turn up on time, in uniform and with the correct equipment. In a class of 27, only three are wearing the correct uniform. Two look like extras from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. One girl can’t hold a pen because of her massive nail extensions. Despite excellent attendance records at primary school and latterly with us, many pupils have reading ages that are three or four years lower than their chronological age. We have a literacy crisis and a behaviour crisis.
Tuesday
Period 3 I ask a pupil to put their phone away and am told to fuck off. Period 5 I ask another pupil to remove their outdoor jacket, and am also told to fuck off. My faculty head laughingly tells me that I could write it up, but, as always, to remember that I won’t get any support on this. As I leave school a depute asks for a word and tells me that I shouldn’t challenge pupils on uniform or outdoor jackets, as “we’re lucky to have them in school” and that “it’s a social justice issue”. I ask if kids having £500 trainers and not being in uniform is a social justice issue but am met with a look of total incomprehension. I arrive home to read an email that lists about one hundred pupils who are excused from wearing uniform due to “sensory issues”. As I leave the building, I walk past our unused and very full uniform store where families can collect brand new and used uniform for free, no questions asked.
Wednesday
Almost thirty years on from the Dunblane tragedy, it staggers me how open access our schools are. There is no security, which unsurprisingly leads to three intruders entering the school and staying there undetected for a total of three hours as they seek out a child in S3 for a revenge attack. Management hush up the incident but everyone knows what’s happened, not least because kids have their phones out all the time and it’s on YouTube before you know it. A young, pregnant female member of staff is pushed and falls in a corridor scrum, with jeering following. She’s encouraged not to formally report it because she’s on a temporary contract so “you should leave it with us”. Nothing happens.
Thursday
A probationer, whom I really rate, is told in response to extreme behaviour problems in their class that they need to “build a relationship”. There are absolutely no consequences for any behaviour infringements, other than a general chat with a middle or senior leader. And guess what? None of this works. There are no systems in place and that’s before we even get into issues of teaching and learning, neither of which can happen in an atmosphere of such chaos. On the upside, my day finishes a little earlier than scheduled, as last lesson half of my S1 class have an “anxiety pass” to get out five minutes early and are entitled to take a friend with them, leaving me free for the final few moments of the school day. These passes are available on parental request to pastoral care.
Friday
We have a no-consequences behaviour system and an education system that medicalises normal emotions. Someone once told me that you can get a sense of a school and its ethos within the first five minutes of walking around the building. I think that’s so true. Whilst extreme behaviour is always hard to deal with, no matter how normalised it’s become, it’s actually other things that really depress me as I look around at what’s in front of me: pupils routinely turning up late, wandering around school chewing, with phones out and earpods in completely unchallenged. Many, if not most, pupils wearing tracksuit bottoms and lots wearing crocs. Corridor rowdiness and a scrum between lessons. Litter and food waste left all over the place for minimum wage female cleaners, usually working several jobs, to pick up. Phones out all the time despite our supposed ban on them. The acceptance of lateness. And that’s before we get into the literacy crisis.
Schools are microcosms of society. What sort of society are we creating with this culture and lack of any expectations at all? When colleagues tell me that many kids won’t succeed, out there in the real world I profoundly disagree because society’s standards will lower to accommodate them.
It’s often hard to see a pathway to change, but the behaviour crisis is proving increasingly difficult to ignore. There are no rules in most Scottish schools; a rule is only a rule if it’s enforced, otherwise it’s just a statement. Indeed, we have lots of statements in our school policies. The behaviour crisis only exists because we’ve collectively decided that we’re fine with how things are, and extreme behaviour has become normalised. However, this is not normal and there are no shortages of solutions; look at the work of Tom Bennett and the success of systems used in English schools. Without getting into the finer details, behaviour management systems need to be clear, fair, have robust and centralised for consistency and practicality. Tackling the so-called minor issues means that the bigger problems will eventually be significantly reduced. This can absolutely be done, but we need more teachers to speak out and better leadership to achieve it.
The author is a teacher at a secondary school in Glasgow.