Show no mercy to feckless parents

As a school governor, I find the attitude of some mums and dads towards the school and its rules quite astonishing

I am against capital punishment, the birch, smacking infants, the live transportation of animals and "getting tough" with asylum-seekers. I also cry when children or dogs die in movies. There are few people more soft-hearted than I. But the week before last, my liberalism stopped just outside Patricia Amos, the Oxfordshire mother sent to prison because of the persistent truancy of her two children. Though I feel like one those voices of outrage in the middle-ranking tabloids for saying so, I was rather glad that so public a line had been drawn in the social sand.

And this week my authoritarian tendencies have been further provoked by the publication by the National Union of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (surely there's a case for a name change here?) of a dossier of 67 cases of violent pupils who have not been excluded from school. Some of the details were included in these pages yesterday, but for those of you who missed them, the miscreants included a 14-year-old boy reinstated by an appeals panel despite having kicked another pupil in the face, having stoned two others and having held a fourth in a headlock while making him swallow tablets.

Now, I don't like the NAS/UWT much. I have never once heard its leaders say a good word about teaching, pupils or schools. It is a union, as far as I can see, of depressives. Its general secretary, Eamonn O'Kane, said that his dossier illustrated "that the number of cases where we (the union) have to take action is not diminishing, in spite of all that has been said."

Actually the statistics for exclusions and unsuccessful appeals released this week seem to show the opposite. The number of exclusions in England and Wales rose from 8,323 in 1999/2000 to 9,210 in 2000/01. And while there was a concomitant increase from 950 to 1,100 in the number of appeals lodged by parents (following a decrease in the previous year), the percentage of successful appeals actually went down from nearly 37 per cent to 32 per cent. So, about 4 per cent of all exclusions are successfully appealed against.

Ethnicity is interesting here, and may explain the success of some of these appeals. Among Indian pupils, exclusions ran at the rate of three in every 10,000; among whites, 13 in every 10,000; and among Afro-Caribbeans, 38 in every 10,000. These are not comfortable figures. In Scotland, where exclusions are down, a huge 45 per cent involved children entitled to free school meals. It is also true that the 12,600-plus annual exclusions that David Blunkett inherited in 1997 represented a terrible failure. In some places exclusion was in danger of becoming a weapon of first, and not last resort.

Even so, the NAS/UWT's leader is on to something when he argues that "governing bodies and appeals panels (should) be a bit more supportive". This, I think, all starts with parents. In my limited experience as a school governor, I find the attitude of some mums and dads towards the school, its rules and its managers quite astonishing. Shouting matches in the playground, absurd partisanship towards their own children (who can do no wrong) at the expense of other kids (who can do no right), a cavalier disregard for basic punctuality (what do you say to the mother who you see shepherding her kids into McDonald's for breakfast five minutes after school has started?) and – from time to time – a chaotic inability or unwillingness to get the child to school at all.

Most parents are not like this. But even the majority can sometimes baulk at actually doing anything that calls people to account for their behaviour. Unless, of course, their own children are immediately affected by antisocial actions on the part of others. It's hardly surprising that this aggressive passivity can make governors and appeals panels similarly disinclined to give teachers the support they need and – usually – deserve. We have a strange culture here in Britain of blaming the person who makes a fuss, and not the person who commits the misdeed.

It is a paradox that when some parents are fighting so hard to stop their erring progeny from being excluded, others are prepared to go to prison rather than send them to school. In the Amos case the mother, Patricia, had already been convicted nine years earlier of failing to take action to prevent an older daughter from truanting. With the two youngest girls, first the school and then Oxfordshire LEA had gone through a battery of measures over two years to try and get the kids into class, including meetings, counselling and – eventually – the granting of two parenting orders against Mrs Amos. None of this worked. From September 2001 to February 2002 the older daughter, Emma, attended only 55 out of 190 school registrations – a 29 per cent attendance rate – and her younger sister attended 64 of 190 – a 34 per cent attendance rate.

You don't get any kind of an education that way. And taking responsibility for the attendance of your child at school is not, as some seem to think, an optional extra of parenting; it is as basic as feeding or sheltering your child. To fail as a consequence of a lack of effort or even connivance constitutes straightforward negligence. Not only that, but it is a negligence from which we all get to suffer. This year, the Government estimated that 40 per cent of street crime, 25 per cent of burglaries, 20 per cent of criminal damage and a third of car thefts were carried out by 10- to 16-year-olds who were truanting.

I was struck by the way the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson, Phil Willis (himself a former school head) reacted to the Amos case. He thought the punishment was Dickensian, that something else (unspecified) should be done, and blamed the Government for introducing a curricular regime insufficiently attractive as to appeal to the Amoses. In other words, it was everyone's fault except the parent's. A similar naivety was demonstrated in the BBC Today programme when the girls were interviewed by someone who obviously had no idea of how a 13-year-old can dissemble.

Now released, the mother admits, rather poignantly, that the jail sentence has given her and the girls a shock and has helped them see the light. "It has brought me," she said, "to my senses." She then retells a sad family saga involving diseased kidneys, pethidine, the wrong crowd, heroin and – most traumatic of all – the death of her own mother. Who, she says, was the one who really brought up the five children. Who were, says Patricia, more like her sisters.

And here we come to it. A child does not force other children to go to school. A child has no adult responsibilities. If a child is chaotic and can't cope, then someone else will come along and pick up the pieces. But a parent cannot be a child – not unless they betray their own children. And you cannot give birth to five kids and then seek to duck your responsibility for their welfare.

If this sounds tough, well it is. It's also realistic. In the wake of the Amos case some heads are reporting an "Amos Effect" with the parents of truants trying that bit harder to get their charges into school. With all respect to the admirable Mr Willis, accepting excuses or permitting evasions is not always helpful, or kind.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com