Charmaine Pountney: Mainstream no help to class rebels

Problems caused by young people with severe anti-social behaviour cannot be solved by mainstream or separate schools using present models.

Cooping up groups of adolescents in classroom boxes with individual adults doesn't encourage good learning in many well-behaved students.

And for those young people already damaged and disruptive, it is sheer hell for the misbehaving students, the other students around them, and teachers.

The first principle in dealing with badly disruptive students is that they need loving individual attention with systematic behaviour management.

Parallel to that is their need to experience educational success in order to become capable learners.

All the seriously disruptive students in our schools have major gaps in their learning experiences, not only in social skills but also in literacy and numeracy skills.

Until their learning, as well as their behaviour, is attended to they will continue to be a risk to themselves and others.

They cannot learn to good effect in conventional classroom settings for a variety of reasons.

Some have mental health disorders, some have not experienced respectful, loving relationships in their own homes.

Some are victims of gross abuse, some suffer chemical imbalances or perceptual disorders or limitations.

Whatever the reasons, careful individual diagnosis, and then sustained individual and small-group tuition, is necessary before they can become capable - if ever - of working within a large group.

A great deal of research is available on what works and what doesn't. Schools such as Felix Donnelly College have been working for some years to develop appropriate methods of teaching and learning, in association with care and therapy providers Youthlink Family Trust and Youth Horizons Trust.

Dr John Church, of Canterbury University, has written an extensive review of research, both local and international.

Youth Horizons Trust has run excellent conferences and published research findings.

The Werry Centre at the University of Auckland has produced a research paper on workplace training for those managing young people with mental health issues.

As well, there has been a taskforce of policymakers from all the relevant ministries (including Education, Health, Social Development, Youth Affairs and Justice) working for more than a year to develop co-ordinated long-term strategies for dealing with this small but extremely challenging group of children and young people.

If these young people are properly managed and educated - especially at an early age, but even, although with much greater difficulty and expense, in adolescence - most can become coping citizens.

If they are not diagnosed and treated appropriately they will continue to be deeply dysfunctional people who cost those around them enormous emotional and physical pain - and cost the taxpayers for the criminal damage, employment incapacity, dependence and periodic or long-term incarceration.

That cost is estimated by Dr Graeme Scott, former Treasury head, at about $3 million for each such person over his or her lifetime.

So an investment of even $300,000 in early intervention and re-education for this small proportion of the population - about 1 to 3 per cent is a common estimate - is a wise and essential precaution for society to take.

One obvious need which emerges from all the research is for new kinds of teachers who can work in collaboration with family members or other caregivers, psychologists, social workers and others to ensure consistent and co-ordinated treatment from adults, and who can help a damaged learner to become a successful learner.

We have no hesitation in paying physiotherapists, in co-operation with doctors and others, to help individuals deal with physical disabilities, whether genetic or caused by accident or deliberate injury.

Equally, we need teachers trained and paid to work individually to help young people with damaged minds and emotions to learn how to heal or manage their disabilities.

This means new kinds of training programmes for such teachers, more usefully thought of as learning coaches.

But all teachers for the future need new kinds of training too. Many principals and teachers, especially the best of those who have taken the Resource Teachers Learning and Behaviour course, know how schools can create environments which safely include challenging young people.

These educators also know that the co-operative and inclusive learning programmes, real-life just-in-time learning activities, and individual education plans that teachers and schools need to implement, are of great benefit for all students, not just those identified as troublesome.

A modern inclusive school offering diverse personalised programmes can prevent many young people becoming difficult or disengaged and apathetic.

In Catching the Knowledge Wave?, Dr Jane Gilbert, of the Council for Educational Research, has written with clarity on ways in which our whole education system needs to respond to the challenges of 21st-century communication technologies and economic and cultural changes.

Many educators know that all our schools need to change the ways in which learning is structured to help young people become passionate learners throughout their lives, with new kinds of knowledge and skills, high-level ethical behaviours, environmental responsibility and the abilities to participate effectively in a democratic society.

The main obstacles to the improvement of education, whether for individually difficult students such as those with serious conduct disorders, or for the much wider group of challenging or resistant or just plain bored students, are threefold:

* The need for community goodwill towards the changes needed, including flexibility of timetables within extended school days and school years. And placements for students in different settings outside classrooms.

* The need for new approaches within existing teacher education programmes, and new programmes for different kinds of teachers and those who assist them.

* The need for more money to enable personalised programmes for all students, with intensive individual coaching and behaviour management rapidly implemented.

I look forward to the day when the spokespeople on education from major political parties sit down together and reach agreement on directions for our children's education.

Surely an accord on education for the young is even more important than accord on superannuation for the old.

It would have even more far-reaching benefits for our future.

* Charmaine Pountney, an educator from Awhitu, has been head of Auckland Girls' Grammar School and Waikato University's School of Education, and chairwoman of the board of trustees of Felix Donnelly College.