Paul Dix

The school behaviour debate is fuelled with emotion and ignorance. It is framed by a system obsessed with control and punishment. From desperate politicians cracking down on discipline to the tabloids who openly attack damaged children, the wider public debate on behaviour is laced with aggression directed at young people. The search for more severe punishment to beat down the most resilient is something of which we should be ashamed. Calls for corporal punishment and more exclusion are a desperate consequence of a system bereft of ideas, one that blindly insists on pure punishment in preference to reparation and rehabilitation.

Paul Dix, When the Adults Change, Everything Changes, 2017, p.107.