Educating Essex, the documentary series currently running on Channel 4, recounts a familiar story: about how some young people in our schools behave in ways that are challenging and occasionally unmanageable.

To this it adds repeated demonstrations of the high level of care that the staff at Passmores School provide for children in distress: Sam the ‘rebel’ who has given up on maths and is taking out his frustration on Dean; Vinni who cannot control his rage; Ashley who has been ostracized by her friends; Brad who wants to smash up the boy now going out with his ex.

Leaders, teachers and support staff are clearly determined to keep students on task so that that they, and all their peers, can leave Year 11 with the qualifications they need if they are to take the next step in their lives.

In an early episode, the ubiquitous deputy head Stephen Drew worries that people watching the programme will think they are a ‘spineless’ bunch of idiots for not excluding difficult children. Predictably, the Daily Mail used an article on the programmes to call for the return of ‘firm discipline’, going on insultingly to suggest that the occasional four letter word muttered under their breath by teachers was a cause of their problems, rather than a reflection of the humanity they are seen repeatedly deploying to make an emotional connection to their charges.

The series opens with, and continuously returns to, scenes of Mr Drew standing at the door to greet students, confiscate hooded jackets, comment on inappropriate shoes, pick up on other infractions of the dress code and identify any children who are showing signs of going off the rails. It is a scene that will be familiar to many who work in secondary schools.

Mr Drew explains his stance as being intended to provide young people with ‘very strong guidance’. There is, he reflects, ‘a constant wish to treat young people as autonomous, to always give them opportunities to express their opinions, to always let them be able to make decisions’. This, though, he considers ‘detrimental’.

Such an approach is in line with the recommendations of Charlie Taylor’s behaviour checklists, recently published by the Department for Education. What struck me was the ritualistic nature of the infractions and the enormous amount of energy expended in responding to them. ‘If you choose to be very intent on these things,’ Mr Drew himself observes, ‘you have to accept that things are going to be quite relentless.’

I started to wonder whether the deputy head’s remorselessly revved up condition got in the way of evolving ways to achieve even more by doing much less: more specifically by building up the two things that seem to be missing from the world of the school as it is presented on the screen.

The first of these is recognition of the need to help distressed young people find the words that will enable them to describe the world from their perspective. Adults continuously tell them about the losses they have experienced and how this makes them feel – sometimes sparking further irritation. They then try vainly to persuade these young people to accept the given line. “I need you coming in with the right attitude and frame of mind,’ someone says to Luke, whose grief at the death of his grandfather stands powerfully in the way of him hearing this message.

Too often, it seems that adults fill with their own words the space created by the difficulty young people are having in understanding their feelings and finding a way to deal with them.
The second thing we never see is young people themselves being offered the opportunity to find better ways of sorting out the difficulties that some them are having. We know there are systems available for this, because Grace is stripped of the badges she wears as Peer Mentor, Peer Listener and Anti-bullying Counsellor after she has been found out sending vicious text messages to the head girl Gabriella – thereby powerfully communicating the uselessness of these systems. All responsibility for managing the school community, it seems, must lie with stressed, time-pressured and sometimes exhausted members of staff.

Many viewers of the programmes will believe with Education Secretary Michael Gove that teachers will be respected more if they are allocated greater ‘powers to punish’, and children are no longer treated ‘like adults’.

But there is another way: recognising that children’s capacity to take responsibility grows when they are given real responsibility, that respect grows much stronger through dialogue, and that it is much easier for people to abide by rules they feel they have had a role in shaping.

This weekend I attended a conference in Brasov, Rumania, to talk about PROGRESS and explore its potential value for educators in that country.

The event was billed as an opportunity to look at ways of preventing violence in schools. This is not, of course, how we bill PROGRESS. We do, though, recognise  that giving people a democratic voice is the best way of defusing aggression.

My preference for promoting positives rather than reducing negatives was a habit I shared with the other delegate from England, Colin Moorhouse of the Metropolitan Police, who spoke before me, about the strategies being adopted across Europe to promote ‘safer schools’.

Many came up after our joint workshop to say how much they enjoyed, valued or were excited by what we had said. But when two of them described the proceedings later in a plenary session, their repeated references to ‘preventing violence’ suggested a disconnect between what we had said and what they had heard.

I found myself wondering why violence was people’s main preoccupation here. Was it a response to a few dreadful incidents, or was violence rather an undercurrent that ran through their everyday experience of school? What links, if any, were there to the violence of the Ceasescu era that ended in 1989, or their more recent exposure to batterings from the market economy?

A researcher from the Institute of Educational Sciences in Bucharest observed that many aspects of how schools are organized can stimulate aggressive feelings and actions. Another speaker talked about how teachers themselves provoke violent acts by their own aggression, and it was tempting to wonder how much aggression on the part teachers derived from the lack of status reflected in their already miserable salaries, which have recently been cut.

But, given the theme of the conference, it was intriguing that almost the only reference to actual violence came from a local gendarme as he described the shocking behaviour of Liverpool football fans on a recent visit to Bucharest. It felt as if the real issues around violence in Rumanian schools were too raw for anyone to properly address them.  ‘We don’t have a problem with violence here’, said the Principal of a High School we visited before the conference. ‘Our interest in the subject is purely preventative.’ I found myself wondering why he could not be more honest.

In the space between the sessions, I talked to teachers about the extreme pressures on young people that come from their being regularly graded by their teachers, both on academic performance and behaviour. A consistent low grade on the latter apparently rules out a job in the police or the military – a strangely self-defeating rule.

The teachers in our workshop were intrigued to hear that our comprehensive system means students with widely different abilities are educated in the same place. How did teachers manage a class? they asked. What did a typical lesson look like? In Rumania, students are segregated on the basis of their grade performance over three years.

Like teachers in France, Romanians are very focused on their subject specialisms. The Chief Inspector for Brasov said it was difficult to develop a curriculum that felt relevant to students, because teachers prefer sticking to the subjects they know, not finding out what and how they students want to learn. Those trained during the dictatorship find it particularly difficult to embrace notions around student voice and interactive forms of pedagogy.

Another intriguing discovery was that headteacher in Rumania have very little scope to develop a team of teachers; jobs are assigned through a complex points system, and headships are generally political appointments. But someone remarked that heads did have freedom, it’s just that they are not generally disposed to use it.

Some insight into their key preoccupations can be gleaned from the questions they hoped that Colin and I could help them answer:

• What aspects of the British system would you recommend for Romania?
• What are the most important motivations for teachers?
• How can we impress on politicians the impact that teachers have society?
• What do teachers in England do to recharge their energy?
• How long does it take for teachers participating in Antidote’s PROGRESS Programme to have a positive attitude to collaborating with each other?
• How can you persuade headteachers to admit there is a violence problem in their schools?
• What has the most powerful impact – work between children, or work between children and adults?

As the conference went on, I became increasingly convinced that PROGRESS had a great deal to contribute in Romanian schools, but less clear about where it might find a foothold. Then, at the final lunch of the conference, the person responsible for inviting me suggested he might ask schools in his own region of TImisoara if they were interested in  trying out PROGRESS. When he saw how enthusiastic I was, he said he could also propose it also to schools in Hungary, Serbia, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

So watch this space to see if PROGRESS finds a foothold in Central Europe.