The Authors

Our book explores the dynamics of schools and classrooms and in particular the effects of over-authoritarian attitudes. The authors are
Dr. Sean Warren, secondary school senior teacher in a mixed comprehensive, who successfully achieved his PhD for the research
Dr. Stephen Bigger his supervisor who led him through critical questions about pupil motivation, developing self-reliance, self discipline and citizenship development by adopting non-authoritarian practice. You can find more on Stephen's ideas here and his publications here.


Sean learned to base his work in school on mutual respect and collaborative learning. He explores his successes and his challenges.

Sean tells the story of his own education in East London which provided him with few options upon leaving school. A product of a broken home, he experienced himself as both vulnerable and resilient. He overturned his lack of qualifications by adult study at night-school leading eventually to teacher training. His subject, Physical Education provided a platform to convey his assertiveness as an adult in charge. In his third school he changed to Religious Education, a subject which has the potential to be challenging in that the RE teacher tends to meet the whole school for one lesson a week without the carrot of a qualification to come out of it. After his own life experiences, he found class discipline unproblematic and gradually rose to be in charge of whole school discipline. Conclusions from his Masters informed his proposal to start a part-time Doctorate. He considered himself a good disciplinarian and wanted to research how he might disseminate his habitual approach. But then cracks began to appear – he became increasingly aware of a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction but was unable to articulate it. Was he too controlling? Were his tried and tested disciplinary methods too authoritarian? Did they compromise his relationships? Was his professional practice incongruent with the values he claimed to hold? He began to wonder if there was a better way, where authority could be maintained but in a context of respect and cooperation? Involving 16 classes and 6 colleagues, this began a four year research project which is crystallized in this book.


Stephen entered secondary school teaching in 1973. He had finished his BA and studied for PhD in 1970-73. Married, and planning for a family, a job with a salary was imperative. The school was an overnight amalgamation of a boys' grammar and a secondary modern. The modern school became years 1-3 (7-9 in today's terminology). If you now fear the worst, multiply by ten. The year is referred to (not affectionately) as ROSLA, standing for 'raising of the school leaving age' to 16. In other words most of year 5 (year 11 today) had hoped and expected to have escaped but had been dragged back. By November my head of department had a breakdown - I found him crying in the toilets - and in all my inexperience I took his place. Out of teaching a 34 lesson week,  I taught 24 different classes and had to write reports for them all. Where I had more than one lesson a week, it was with ROSLA classes. No examinations were on offer. I remember looking up to one teacher, a disciplinarian, who cnfessed to me later he couldn't sleep on Sunday night for fear of Monday. A PE teacher liberally used his plimsol in the store cupboard. Despite this being my first year in teaching, I had no mentor or anyone to relate to at all. When a 5th year threatened me with a broken bottle he was made to apologise, but the one who ran in when drunk, smashed tables, chairs and a wall, was I gather dead within two further years of drunkenness.  I returned a few years later and the whole school had been blotted out. I have just read Charlie Carroll's On the Edge: One Teacher, a Camper Van, Britain's Toughest Schools and much seems familiar. I remember saying to a pupil leaving without qualifications having  signed to play for Everton, what happens if you break a leg when you are 25? He did break a leg when he was 25 and it ended his football career.

I moved on to a school which taught GCE and A level and all together taught in secondary schools for eight years. I recall some pupils getting a GCE pass for me and for no one else, to accusations that my subject must be easy. The truth was I made the subject interesting and relevant, trying to enthuse and not humiliating pupils who were struggling. I was taking with a long standing teacher friend who told a similar story, having been placed in a socially deprived area with extreme belligerence from pupils at first, but persisted by being nice to them. They surprised her in the end by putting together a leaving party and telling her she was the only teacher who had shown them respect. Some pupils of course were bad then and are still bad now. I remember a Facebook message from a naughty pupil then who managed to insult me and my wife  five times in ten lines. She was of course shown the door. We are not naive - some pupils were nasty and remain nasty. But not all.

Our simple message is to respect pupils as much as possible. Some may be difficult, and this is no magic bullet, and some may need to learn in a non-school setting. But it remains true that where good order is disrupted, it may be the teacher doing the disruption. John Holt saw this in the 1960s, as did Ivan Illich later. John Dewey argued earlier that democracy and pupil voice was better than dictatorship. In my school visits on teaching practice, a saw a great deal of good practice and happy relationships; but I also saw some abusive practice. Shouting, sarcasm and shaming for me should never be a normal disciplinary strategy. I took part in a programme with disengaged pupils (see Viv Bartlett, Nurturing A Healthy Human Spirit which I was happy to provide a Preface to). This essentially befriended pupils who had written themselves off, and offered them strategies to succeed, some even moving from complete failure to university degrees. Turning pupils around from failure to success is not part of today's agenda of quantifiable appraisal (league table) though it is the most educational of all school processes.