Crime, anti-social behaviour and schools — key themes

How children and young people behave in and around schools is an issue of enduring public and policy interest. Most people are likely to have a view on the matter, including a view about whether the behaviour of young people is changing (Hayden, 2010). Educationalists and criminologists have a different, but overlapping, concern in this respect. For educationalists the main focus is on ‘pupil’ behaviour and whether it gets in the way of other pupils’ learning and teachers doing the job of teaching (as the above quotation illustrates). Government enquiries (DES/WO, 1989) and reviews (Steer, 2009), as well as most academic education research in the United Kingdom on behaviour in school concludes that it is the low-level disruption and general rudeness that saps the energy of teachers and gets in the way of children learning (Hayden, 2009). Criminologists, by definition, generally focus on the most problematic behaviour, which may be seen as ‘anti-social’ or is clearly ‘criminal’ (in the sense that it breaks the law). For criminologists (and criminal justice agencies), schools are often the site on which data are collected from young people (see, for example, Smith and McVie, 2003; MORI, 2005; YJB, 2009a, b), with the focus being on victimisation and offending. However, since the late 1990s schools have explicitly become part of a wider crime prevention project, in which the psychological discourse of ‘risk’ and ‘protective’ factors is liberally used as justification for a range of interventions focused on pupil behaviour. The interests of educationalists and criminologists now overlap more explicitly than previously in the United Kingdom. At the same time, this difference in disciplinary focus inevitably means some tension in how the two disciplines construct the problem and the language they use to do this (Hayden, 2010).