Parents, teachers pin for return of cane in classrooms in UK

Updated on: Saturday, September 17, 2011

Parents and teachers overwhelmingly want to bring back the cane in schools in Britain complaining that the classrooms have turned unruly.

The vast majority of them are also pinning for back-to-basics discipline measures including detention, expulsion and forcing badly behaved children to write lines.

A survey of 2,000 parents countrywide and 530 children by the Times Educational Trust found strong support for the reintroduction of smacking and caning to discipline the most badly behaved pupils, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Corporal punishment was banned in UK in 1986.

Some independent schools, however, continue to meet out physical punishment, such as slaps to the hands or ordering press-ups until it was outlawed 10 years later.

The startling disclosures have been thrown up by the survey amid claims by the education secretary Michael Gove that adult authority has been eroded in too many schools.

"In far too many schools, discipline is not upto scratch. We have problems with truancy and disruption," Gove said while speaking at the conference.

UK education experts have already warned the government of extraordinary large dropout rate in schools and Telegraph said that the survey showed that the phenomenon was touching even teachers.

"Something like one-in-four newly qualified teachers leave the profession in the first two years and others complain that their school time is devoted as much to crowd control as teaching," the paper said quoting educationalist.

Another research done by YouGov found that 85 per cent of the parents plead that the teachers were less respected than before.

But, so far, the Education department is turning a blind eye to such demands.

Parents, teachers pin for return of cane in classrooms in UK

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