Scottish government may introduce unlocked housing for young prisoners and nationalise secure care services.

[Scoffingbiscuits]

The Scottish government is extremely kind towards young convicted criminals. For example, until the age of 25, when they're sentenced the judge has to put what's in their best interests first and only sentence them to imprisonment as a last resort. This is what led to a young man convicted of raping a 13 year old girl in a park, twice, getting a community order to do 270 hours of community work.
It seems that they now want to make things pleasanter for young offenders who have, until now at least, been locked up for the safety of the community. It's short on detail as yet, but a warning of what's to come. The SNP are also looking at nationalising secure care services. A young person has to be very dangerous to end up locked up in Scotland these days, so let's hope that when secure care services are nationalised and the doors are unlocked all will go well for local communities.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15484349/SNP-want-young-thugs-therapeutic-hubs-no-locked-doors.html?i

Permanent exclusion doesn't solve the problem - it just kicks the can down the road. A place still has to be foud for the excluded pupil in another school and no school will want such a pupil adding to their student body.

Or - OR - we could reopen pupil referral units. Or residential schools for troubled kids. Both of which we had when I was a child and when Scottish education was the best in the world.

Who the hell votes for these idiots?

Other idiots. And xenophobes. Most of who do rather well out of the bloated public sector and welfare system.

it’s an absolute shitshow in Scotland.

But there has always been violence and bullying in schools, even when exclusion was an option.

Some of the things I witnessed in school in the 80’s/90’s could have been treated as attempted murders and no-one was expelled for any of the most serious incidents.

Your comment about your friend in England is interesting, I really hope this isn’t one of the “England is better than Scotland, I hate the SNP” troll posts that we see so often on Scotsnet.

The fact is that England are also moving to intervention strategies and the rate of permanent exclusion is tiny with 1.1 children out of every thousand excluded, even if that rate, which is also declining, is matched, the majority of Scottish high schools on average wouldn’t even have 1 child expelled.

Behaviour/violence is a societal problem which we are all aware is intergenerational and linked to poverty.

Your biggest issue is the wellbeing and future of your nephew, the societal changes you seek are not going to be achieved anytime soon, if at all, and as a family you’re watching a child standing on train tracks while his family are trying to change the weather instead of helping him overcome this.

Even if John Sweeney is miraculously reading this forum, agrees with everything you said and tries to change the policy it would take years to go through votes consultations, governance and structure to actually change it, by which time your nephew will already have left school with his future severely impacted.

You were dismissive over my suggestion that your nephew should get into fitness and martial arts, all my children (and now step-children) have done this, variously judo, kickboxing and ju-jitsu.

None of them have been bullied, not one, there have been a few attempts over the years but they have all dealt with it at the time.

Out of the 5 of them though there has only been two incidents where they’ve had to physically defend themselves, the reality is that bullies prey on people who they see as weak/easy targets, not strong confident people who are trained in martial arts.

For my older sons 2 of whom ate now (against my advice) working in law, this confidence has allowed them to assert themselves in an often hostile world, some of the worst bullying I have seen is in corporate environments so these skills have helped them succeed.

Would you not rather your nephew followed that path than being scared of things that are never going to change?

@Meeplemakeglasgow so it’s the fault of the dc being assaulted then? The corporate bullying, is that physical?

But we’re not talking about that situation are we?

We’re talking about a young boy who has had his confidence wrecked through a violent act and the trauma/fear after it.

Would teaching him how to defend himself and have the confidence to rejoin the world not help him?

I have seen scores of bullied, downtrodden kids who have turned up to Judo over the years having their lives absolutely transformed in a supportive environment, gaining the confidence to thrive.

You dismiss that if you want, Scottish society has always had violence/bullying, all societies have issues with it so you feel free to shout at a cloud all you want .

At a macro level of course we should be tackling it as a society but at a micro level I would do everything to make sure my children have not been victims of it.

Nice pivot, of course it isn’t.

You may not want to face the reality of it but violence and bullying have always happened in society, especially amongst young men and teenagers.

In my opinion teaching children to be confident and assertive enough to avoid bullying is good parenting.

My parents will probably fund him to go to a private school. My SEN child went to a private school and experienced no bullying whatsoever after a horrendous time at a state primary. The difference being that private schools can exclude violent kids on the spot.

I don’t experience violence in my day to day life in dcotland. I don’t think it’s something that should be habitulised as ‘just what happens here’. We should aim for higher.

Agreed, it kicks the can down the road in more ways than one.

School is one of the only places where society has the opportunity to influence kids who have grown up around violence/poverty so we can do everything we can to stop the cycle continuing.

Removing them from society at this stage or placing them amongst similarly minded peers just accelerates their descent into a life of crime, violence and harm.

Nearly all children are growing up with violence now as they're experiencing it in school.

Are you seriously claiming there is no bullying in private schools?

Just because you don’t experience violence in society does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Glasgow teenagers in deprived areas have a 500% risk than others to be the victim of violence.

I’ve always lived in or around Glasgow/Lanarkshire and from my experience there has always been violence in schools.

I would find it hard to believe anyone in Scotland who told me they went through 12-13 years at school and didn’t witness any bullying/violence no matter what era the grew up in.

But violence as reported by teachers is rising at an exponential rate. This is well
publicised information.

Yes, shockingly so.

Much of this especially in younger age groups is to do with a lack of ASN support.

The data collected is far from standardised so we need to do this to actually quantify and understand the problem before we can tackle it effectively.

Ultimately though there’s a lack of places for kids who need support, budget constraints have caused withdrawal of support workers, youth workers, behavioural specialists and classroom assistants.

Teachers have been left to deal with problems that are impossible to deal with alone.

This has always been there, it was managed better in the recent past.

It's interesting to discuss permanent exclusions - but very difficult to demonstrate that a permanent exclusion alters the path of the child excluded. Their behaviour must already be very extreme (almost certainly violent) to be excluded in England, and I can't see how keeping them in school would improve it when presumably they've been at that school for years already yet are still violent. Moving to a specialist setting such as a PRU makes a lot more sense, alongside providing decent SEN settings for kids who need them. I'm very sceptical about including everyone in mainstream - outcomes for children with significant additional needs are getting worse, not better.

Agreed. I feel inclusion is really failing the 90% of kids who just want to go to school, sit in a safe, calm classroom and learn.

Yes, I think the issue with this conversation is that many think that exclusions should happen if a child is caught bullying or fighting etc..

What you have noted is true, the reality is that only the extreme cases would be dealt with by expulsion so the bullies and violence will always be there to a certain level.

Teachers can’t fix societal problems such as violence/poverty, but they can play a part in influencing children who can be helped.

But this shouldn't be own their own though, they need support from other interventional professionals to make this viable.

Are you really advocating for the removal of close to 70’000 Scottish children from the classroom or did you just make that statistic up?

That would be roughly 80 new high schools worth?

Any child who hospitalises another child or is charged with assaulting another child needs to be removed permanently from
the school. These need to be recognised as the extremely serious incidents that they are.

Yes there are many more violent kids in school than just these examples but how many of them are acting out that violence because they know there are no consequences to doing so, whereas if there were consequences might not? Not all of them, some kids are just not nice people, but some kids know how to restrain themselves but are currently given no incentive whatsoever to do so.

No. I think 90% of kids go to school to learn. Some have ASN and should be in specialist schools. Some go to school to muck about and if threatened with exclusion would knuckle down and get on with learning, and some are violent little thugs who are on a fast track to prison and need removing to a PRU where staff can work to turn them around.

PRUs aren’t bad places. If you think that you haven’t been paying attention.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ykm86y4nzo.amp

A couple of very badly behaved children in a class make it almost impossible for any of the other children to learn. So that's their education (such as it is in the Scottish school system) wrecked. And if there's bullying, then that will not only wreck the victim's time at school, it will have a big impact on their development and personality for the rest of their life. So why is the impact of expulsion on the bully all that matters here? What about the other 30 children in the class? What about the victims of bullying? What about the teachers? What about Scotland's future when so many children are missing out on a real chance of a decent education?

This is from a teacher posting on another Scotsnet thread:
The SNP need to say - if a child violently attacks another child - then they are permanently excluded from that mainstream school and sent to a specialist school.
Children are being physically attacked in primary schools upwards and kept in the same building and classroom as the attacker.
I am a teacher and a mother and have seen it from both sides. Keeping a child in at lunchtime is not a normal consequence for them strangling another child in an unprovoked attack.
The removal of exclusion has lead to a whole generation of traumatised children who are fearful of school as they have been physically attacked there.
Yet, the government only sends out guidelines on positive behaviour strategies.
It's like saying to the police - if a woman is battered the man can stay in the house to continue battering her but the police should talk to him about how he might be making her feel.
Parents would never allow their child to set foot in a classroom again if they really knew what their child is being subjected to. They would not believe the lack of safeguarding there is today. I didn't until I became a teacher later on in life and had my child start the school system.
No one in government or higher up in local authorities is actually doing anything to protect children.

Here's the other thread, on violence in Scottish schools. It's a scary and despair-inducing read.
Violence in our schools | Mumsnet

“Permanent exclusion doesn't solve the problem - it just kicks the can down the road. A place still has to be foud for the excluded pupil in another school and no school will want such a pupil adding to their student body.”

I don’t care.

The alternative to a permanent exclusion in the worst cases is an entire class of behaving kids losing out on an education or worse - facing working conditions such as assault or constant threat that wouldn’t be tolerated in any adult working environment ( other than teaching!) We have to go with the greatest good for the greatest number.

There's more information on the "therapeutic hubs" here. This certainly suggests that they aim to reduce the number of young offenders who are currently held in custody (and remember that if a young person is held in custody it will be for something really serious). Even the SNP acknowledges that there will be risks to local communities. There's a consultation out on this, which I will try to track down. SNP Proposes 'Flex Secure' Hubs for Teen Offenders Without Locked Doors - British Brief