There has always been considerable debate about the best solutions to deal with disruptive behaviour in schools. On the one hand is the strategy of segregating disruptive pupils while on the other is a commitment to keeping such pupils in the ordinary school. This book advocates the latter philosophy and examines the best ways of coping with the problem. These concern both teacher skills and school organisational flexibility. In addition, the authors propose the provision of a support team whereby local authorities can help schools, teachers and children with problems of disruption without setting up ‘sin-bins’. Change is thus shown to be possible at three levels – teachers, headteachers and local authorities. Detailed illustrative case material is presented throughout the book.

A large number of pupils are, or are liable to become, disaffected with their schooling. In this comprehensive account of the problem, Ken Reid suggests that school can and should do much more to prevent and overcome disaffected behaviour, as manifested by such factors as absenteeism, disruption and underachievement. The book covers disruptive behaviour in its broader context and examines the search for an explanation within schools themselves. Formal and multidisciplinary approaches to the problem are also fully treated. The author has drawn on his considerable school and research experience and the book is well illustrated with examples and case histories. Ken Reid argues that questions about attitudes and approaches in teaching and in pastoral care provoke a continued challenge, and stresses that if such questions are not faced squarely the long-germ prognosis for secondary education in Britain may be bleak. Teachers in training and all those involved in the education and welfare of difficult or disadvantaged children, especially teachers, heads and social workers, will find Disaffection from School both challenging in its analysis and helpful in its suggestions.

Focusing on pupils moving from primary to middle or secondary school, it describes and evaluates the schools’ programmes to ease transfer, and includes material provided by the pupils themselves. The main body of the book is a rich and detailed account of the first months of life in new secondary schools, where the pleasures and perils of new friends, new teachers and new subjects, and a new approach to teaching are encountered. The book conveys vividly how pupils experience a new environment, and meet its dangers, rules and regulations, timetable, complex groupings and ideology. Inside the Secondary Classroom was the first comparative ethnography of school life in Britain, carried out in six schools. It reveals surprising similarities and differences between them.The cases studied range from highly successful pupils with nine ‘O’ levels to others with severe social and personal problems.

When originally published this book reported the first major application of ‘labelling theory’ to deviance in classrooms. The authors explore the nature of classroom rules, show how they constitute a pervasive feature of the classroom, and examine the ways in which teachers use these rules as grounds for imputing ‘deviance’ to pupils. A theory of social typing is developed to show how teachers come to define certain pupils as deviant persons such as ‘troublemakers’ and several case-studies are used to document this analysis. Finally, the teachers’ reactions to disruptive classroom conduct are examined as complex strategic attempts at social control in the classroom. The book has a double focus on deviance theory and the process of teaching.

Survival as a school teacher depends on an ability to achieve classroom control. In the years since this book was first published little has changed in this respect. Classroom control continues to lie at the heart of competent teaching. Teachers know it, pupils know it. They know it implicitly because they experience it as a normal part of their daily lives in schools. But, in this book, the author stands back from our everyday knowledge about how things work in classrooms to ask what control actually consists of. What is it? How is it recognized? How is it challenged by pupils? How is done by teachers? How is it negotiated? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in three large secondary schools in England Martyn Denscombe explores the meaning of classroom control. He looks at the influence of teacher training and the role of school organization in establishing expectations about control, and then shows how control is played out through the interaction of teachers and pupils in class. His analysis travels well across the many contexts in which teaching occurs and provides an illuminating insight into the work of teaching and the nature of classroom life. His evidence is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in three schools in England, and secondary sources covering the phenomenon of classroom control in the UK, USA and Australia.

The time has passed when learning was identified purely as a process involving the ability to store and recall knowledge and facts, and the competence to produce them when required. These abilities still seriously concern the potential teacher and this book duly examines them, but the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’ of learning and teaching are now considered as important as the implanting of facts for regurgitation at exam time.Some children learn more quickly than others, some can remember facts more easily, and a teacher must ask several fundamental questions in order to understand the factors at work in this learning process. Where is knowledge stored? Why do we remember some facts and forget others? When are we learning new facts and when are we remembering and adapting knowledge to see it in a new light? To help answer these and many other questions a number of learning situations, typical in most schools, are examined, the processes at work in the classrooms are examined and then they are both related to different theories of learning. The examination of a series of learning processes should not necessarily involve a choice between them, and a feature of this volume is its lack of partiality towards any particular teaching method, although the teacher and student will draw their own conclusions.

The internal organisation of the school touches on many areas of contemporary debate. Is there such a thing as a ‘good school’? Are large urban comprehensives necessarily impersonal? Are the charges of indiscipline, conflict and declining standards in modern schools based on a failure to understand schools as institutions? At the time this book was first published sociological analysis had neglected to consider schools as organisational entities, preferring to see them as either the sites for negotiated encounters between teachers and pupils or else as agencies of class reproduction. The author redresses this imbalance and by relating the various literatures on the school to the constitutive patterns of its internal organisation he demonstrates the need for a more intensive sociological study of this embattled institution.