I have been talking about the need to love within education for a long time. I have suggested, in a number of blog posts and articles over the years, that a key question for any adult working in education must be: Do you like children and are you able to love each one as if they were related to you?”

But does love really have a place in the classroom? I believe it does, and that it must if we are to ensure that schools are places where children feel safe and cared for, so that they can learn and achieve their full potential.

There’s a beautiful quote by Canadian author Scott Hayden that resonates perfectly here: “Teachers have three loves: love of learning, love of learners and the love of bringing the first two loves together.”

When I think back to the teacher from whom I learned the most at school, I can categorically say that he exemplified this triple-love approach. Mr Phippard was firm but kind, produced tailor-made resources that made learning German fun and logical, and even introduced us to Russian. He had a slightly wild passion for languages and he loved to share culture and traditions. I remember his classroom, lit by candles and with small bowls of figs, chocolates and tangerines on Nikolausabend (St Nicholas Eve, on 5 December). Such a surprise: nurturing, magical and - yes - full of love.

Peace, love and understanding

In The Promise, the document resulting from the recent Care Review in Scotland and released on 5 February, we are reminded that the driver for the review came in October 2016: first minister Nicola Sturgeon made a commitment that Scotland would “come together and love its most vulnerable children to give them the childhood that they deserve”. And, sure enough, “love” is a word that permeates the documents relating to the review.

It seems, however, that children do not have a right to love. If we stick to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the articles do not mention love. When I first became involved with the Rights Respecting Schools programme, I was somewhat bemused by this, and tweeted accordingly.

I discovered that love isn’t included as a right because it’s a difficult concept to evidence objectively. The preamble to the UNCRC does state, however, “that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.”

On occasions, my writing has led other professionals to admit a discomfort to talking about love in schools, on supposed safeguarding grounds. There have been suggestions that love is not anything to do with education and instead sits within the home and family sphere - and perhaps the preamble to the UNCRC above helps to reinforce those ideas.

So what might have led professionals to steer clear of using the L-word, or even to perceive it as a dirty word?

I worked in England in the 1990s, when the basic, risk-averse union advice for teachers was to have a very detached relationship with pupils, to avoid all physical contact and to protect themselves from any opportunities for allegations of “professional misconduct”. At that point, love was certainly missing from education dialogue. This caused particular issues in early years education, where practitioners were faced with situations of crying toddlers who could not be given a hug or a seat on an adult’s lap for fear of litigation. “No touch” policies became very common, allegedly as part of safeguarding.

But then a shift occurred, led by experts such as Suzanne Zeedyk, who compared harmful no-touch policies - which stop the distress of children being naturally addressed by caring adults through appropriate touch - to the once-accepted policies of caning children in schools.

We now have early years settings that have clear statements on the way that touch is used to help children to co-regulate, backed up by the finding of Harry Burns, Scotland’s former chief medical officer, who has explained the molecular science of a cuddle and how important it is to a young child to receive physical contact. In the wake of Paul Dix’s book When the Adults Change, Everything Changes, we have seen a wave of videos exemplifying children entering classrooms with teacher welcomes ranging from hugs to high-fives, led by the child.

Some schools and educational settings also began, in the 2000s, to include love as one of their core values. Scotland’s National Performance Framework, launched in 2018, makes no secret of the fact that children and young people in Scotland should “grow up loved, safe and respected” so that they realise their full potential.

And now the Care Review is asking once again that we look at the place of love in our care and support for our most vulnerable children and young people. But The Promise also steps back from defining exactly what that love should look like:

“Throughout this report, there is reference to love and loving relationships. The Care Review listened to thousands of experiences relaying what ‘love’ is, and isn’t, for children in Scotland’s care system and considered trying to define this.

“The Care Review has not sought to define love or seek to legislate for it. To do so would be reductive and serve only as an institutional definition of what love is. What is vital is that children feel the benefit of nurturing, loving relationships. It is for them to define their experiences, not for Scotland to dictate what love feels like.”

I wanna know what love is

Trying to define what love looks like is something that has challenged the human race as far back as the Ancient Greeks. It goes without saying that when safeguarding cases are reported in the press, these are not per se about love having been shown by an adult towards a child, but about an inappropriate and often criminal type of relationship having been pursued. It seems crucial, then, that we now take the time to reflect, if not on what love feels like for children, then at least on what it looks like in action, from the adults around them.

Then, surely, we will be confident that we are talking about the appropriate type of love that each adult in the life of a child should show, both in order to fulfil their role as a duty bearer within the UNCRC and to ensure all children in Scotland grow up “loved, safe and respected”, as the National Performance Framework puts it.

For most children in Scotland, we will assume that parents and carers will provide familial love (“storge”) and that teachers are more likely to provide “agape” (universal, altruistic love). But, if we are to learn from the Care Review, we need to see that many children in care over recent years have experienced a lack of familial, nurturing love; we need to do better at finding ways of plugging that gap, at taking a more sophisticated approach than assuming that the anonymous, homogenous concept of “corporate parenting” will fix things.

It seems to me that we need, as in all aspects of effective education, a differentiated approach to providing love in schools.

Some children will experience familial love in abundance and come to school feeling very loved, safe and respected. But other children won’t get that, and will need something different and extra from the other adults in their lives. This was certainly the thinking behind the Pupil Equity Fund and nurturing schools programmes in Scotland, which have provided money and training for home-school liaison staff to help families who need extra support.

With a background in secondary education - combined with a knowledge of adolescent brain development, teenage attachment processes and Bruce Perry’s ideas on attunement - I have recently been encouraging colleagues to consider what professional love in a secondary school classroom looks like, with the following suggestions as a starter for 10:

• Routines, repetition, rituals.
• A check-in of some kind where you see where pupils are emotionally.
• A hello (even if there is no response).
• Knowing a name and details (but being discrete about it).
• A smile.
• A physical proximity (but with awareness of the sensory needs of each individual).
• A calmness.
• A culture.
• No big gestures - no public humiliation.
• A genuine trust.

Now, in the wake of the Care Review, seems like the optimum time to come back to a conversation about what place love can and should play in schools, to identify what we can and can’t do in our roles as adults in different services and to define what each child needs from us. We can only do this if we know each child well, if we allow time for meaningful relationships.

If we are really serious about providing each child with the love that they need, our greatest efforts must be focused on ensuring what I have come to call a “quality of knowing”. This means that we draw on data that is far broader and more encompassing than test results and benchmarks - although of course we must make use of those if they have valuable insight to give us.

To know them is to love them

We must make sure that the “knowing” is achieved by drawing on the input of those who are the greatest experts in the child: that is, the child and the adults who care for the child.

It would appear that primary education is often better at tapping into this expertise than secondary, and this needs to be resolved. It is not good enough to say that adolescents are less willing to engage (as they aren’t, given the right strategies) or that parents and carers have a reduced role to play during adolescence (as they actually have an equal or greater role).

We also need to ensure that teacher judgement does not involve any sort of negative pre-judging, prejudice or unconscious bias that may prevent us from seeing the true potential in each child. As humans we make judgements - it is instinctive and part of our primitive brain functioning to do so. But we as teachers are not primitive. We are professional and well educated and we need to understand the power of human nature and be able to mitigate against it. We must take a pause and a breath before we make a judgement about a pupil simply because we “know the reputation of that family”.

Knowing each child and young person within our care, resisting labels and using history to inform positively rather than label negatively; these must be at the heart of what to do in schools. And schools and teachers must be given the time, space and resources to put these at the heart of what they do. This way, we will get the true measure of each child as they develop their sense of self, their potential and their individuality. We must be able to walk beside children and - even in our professional roles - ensure that they feel loved.

Lena Carter is education lead for looked-after children in Argyll and Bute, seconded from her post as head of teaching and learning in a secondary school. She tweets @lenabellina

This article originally appeared in the 13 March 2020 issue under the headline “Education - what’s love got to do with it?”