The climate in Scottish schools and classrooms post-pandemic has variously been described as a ”behaviour emergency” and an “aggression epidemic”.
But Scotland’s new children’s commissioner says that although education is a hot topic for young people, apparently, deteriorating behaviour in schools is not preoccupying their minds.
Nicola Killean - who became Scotland’s children’s commissioner in May 2023, replacing Bruce Adamson - told the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee today that Scottish education was facing “multiple complex challenges” and children “always wanted to talk about their experiences of education”.
Education ‘top priority’ for commissioner
As a result, she said, education would be one of her three “top priorities” over the next four years, along with poverty and mental health, which were also raised by young people with “remarkable consistency”, she said.
However, Ms Killean said she “had to push” young people “to talk about behaviour as being an issue because they weren’t raising it”.
She said when she had prompted one young person to speak about behaviour, asking them: “Are you worried about behaviour because a lot of adults are talking about this?” They had said: “Adults need to step back and see why our behaviour isn’t great. There’s always an underlying thing.”
Ms Killean said her own view was that “any behaviour…is a form of communication” and there was a “need to understand the reasons for that distressed behaviour”.
Big issues for children included bullying, as well as a lack of support in school and wanting to be taught differently, she said.
Ms Killean said: “We can prevent lots of challenging behaviour happening but we have to have a system that is well-resourced.”
She added: “We have much more understanding now around children and young people’s developmental needs, children and young people who are neurodiverse and what they actually need within a particular setting to be able to support them.
“But that is not being implemented systematically throughout our system. And that’s what we want to get to is actually a plan and a vision with children and young people of how that can be.”
Ms Killean made her comments as she set out her strategic plan for 2024 to 2028.
She said the plan had been informed by a survey of over 5,000 young people as well as online assemblies and her office’s 25 young advisers.
Pupil voice at centre of reform discussion
An early focus for her office, said the commissioner, would be on “putting children and young people’s voices back at the centre of the discussion around education reform”.
She said her office planned to create a set of priorities with children and young people for education reform after building “relationships and trust” - in particular with young people from marginalised groups.
And added that the piece of work would run over two years but would share findings regularly over the period.
Ms Killean said: “We absolutely recognise that there are lots of amazing educationalists, teachers and support workers who are trying and working extremely hard. There are many children and young people who are having really positive experiences just now within schools and our education setting, but there are many who are not.
“So it’s really important we are honest about that and we express how strongly children and young people have asked me to work on this and [us] as an office to work on this. And we’re really excited about developing those links with those groups to bring them back into the conversation.”
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