Steve Regan: the King of Hull

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There is panic throughout most of the state and voluntary-aided schools in Hull because so many pupils are simply out of control. A new report and survey chronicles the terrible situation in classrooms across this city. I'm sorry to say it is a picture which does not hold out a great deal of hope for the future. Children now routinely throw tables and chairs across the classroom as teachers dodge out of the way for fear of injury.

I've been kicked, punched and spat at and they don't care if (the teacher is) male or female. It's got progressively worse over the years and it's as bad now as it's ever been, says one teacher of 30 years standing, who is too scared to be named.

Who among us as adolescents never sniggered up our sleeves at weak and nerdish teachers and gave them cruel names behind their backs? Exactly. We have all poked fun at teachers, but only in a spirit of teenage rebellion. The situation now is very different. Many primary school children as well as secondary age youngsters have become hate-filled violent thugs who see nothing wrong with using the F-word in schools (and even coarser language), because their thick, feckless parents do so at home all the time.

The appalling details come to light in a new survey of city classrooms by the largest teaching union NASUWT into levels of violence and unruly behaviour. Shocking incidents of mob violence and intimidation of teachers were recorded. Not only are many of Hull's children and young people leaving school as ignoramuses, they are also completely lacking in moral training. They don't know even the basics such as the Ten Commandments. They have no internal moral compass to give direction and restraint to their baser instincts.

We must blame teachers for this as well as priests and religious leaders and parents. All are failing in the very serious business of raising youngsters to be good people. As for all the expensive attempts to drive up standards in Hull schools over the past five years or so… they constitute one big fat failure. Usually these half-arsed attempts have meant hiring extra and ever more expensive box-ticking educational bureaucrats.

Other things have been tried. Mentoring the pupils in their classrooms - using idiots with sociology degrees and no common sense - is one discredited "solution". Giving teachers loads of training leave and access to special resource centres is another. We should be sacking teachers who have failed - not mollycoddling them. Incredibly, some Hull schools have police officers on site daily to deter that oh-so-easy drift into violence and criminality that young people in this city are prone to.

Because our country, with the connivance of the left wing teaching unions, banned corporal punishment some years ago discipline has now completely broken down. Teachers are scared even to touch pupils in self-defence because panic about child abuse has a stranglehold on the educational establishment and justice system. Some kids will gleefully make up a story that they have been abused by teachers because they know the teacher concerned will then go through the absolute hell of an investigation.

Meanwhile, all the really bad kids can't be expelled anymore, merely "excluded" - i.e. sent to pupil referral units where they will be given special treats such as cinema and theme park outings in failed attempts to bribe them to be good.

All of the above is very bad news. I predicted things would come to this when everyone else locally - from Hell City Council to the Hull Daily Fail - were pretending that building new schools and buying new equipment would solve things. The terrible situation we face has occurred because for year after damnable year Hull's education authority, the city council, has been turning out pupils who are as thick as bricks.

Of course, all the inadequate nervous wrecks of teachers must also take their share of the blame. Generations of youngsters are losing their life-chances because so much of the schooling here is below Third World standards - so lacking in confidence, so wrecked and demoralised by political correctness. As for the poor youngsters, if they stayed ignorant and gormless throughout their schooling, then that's how they will be when they leave school … this summer for instance.

Many of the current school-leavers will be useless to employers, incoherent in speech, unable to express themselves in their native tongue (which happens to be the world's most beautiful and poetic language, by the way) and they will have no respect - for themselves, for others, nor for public and private property. Not every pupil is in such a state. Not every teacher in Hull is completely useless. But here's the truly alarming thing. The poorly educated and badly behaved pupils are probably in a majority. The poor-to-mediocre teachers certainly are. Am I exaggerating? Definitely not. The officially recognised abysmally low record of academic achievement in this city speaks an eloquent and frightening truth. We have created a dumbed down and damned generation of young people in Hull.

Steve Regan: the King of Hull continued here..

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