ABSTRACT
At first glance, responsibility for pastoral care of pupils would seem quite separate from that part of a teacher’s work concerned with discipline and classroom control. Pastoral care, after all, deals with the general welfare of the pupils and their integration into the school and the wider community. It deals with ‘personal’ problems which arise from the social background of the pupil or emotional difficulties experienced by the pupil at school. In practice, however, pastoral care almost inevitably includes some specific involvement with discipline and control problems as well. One reason for this is the fact that the kind of behaviour which is symptomatic of a personal or emotional problem is also the kind of behaviour that the classroom teacher tends to regard as a discipline problem. As Docking (1980) points out, pupils who seem unable to cope with ‘stressful situations’ and those who find it difficult to ‘develop meaningful relationships with school staff are not only a problem in terms of their own welfare and development but also likely to pose a problem in terms of orderly classroom behaviour and teacher control of the situation. Another reason, and one explored more fully in this chapter, is that the system of pastoral care officially established in a school can find its aims being adapted, it not perverted, to meet the demands created by staff who choose to use the pastoral system quite deliberately to deal with control problems. Because teachers evidently face a number of practical problems in their efforts to implement the pastoral care system in connection with long-term emotional problems and because the system can be used effectively to cope with difficult pupils, teachers can be encouraged to incorporate the pastoral care system in their efforts to maintain classroom control. Used in a particular way, in fact, the system would seem admirably suited to helping teachers’ efforts to get a smooth, orderly classroom life and to their not unreasonable wish to minimize the fatigue, the time, the frustration and the risks of getting through a normal day’s work.
