ABSTRACT
The issue of disruptive, challenging behaviour by students in schools and what kind of measures might address it is long-standing. Indeed, challenging behaviour has a history ‘as long as mass education itself’ (Furlong, 1985). The Roman poet, Horace, for example, recounts how the early morning air in Rome often resounded to the cries of schoolboys being beaten for some form of misbehaviour or failure to complete the required work to the requisite standard. In the seventeenth century in Britain students were often armed and occasionally took part in violent mutiny (ibid.). There appear to be recorded instances of students destroying all of the most famous public schools at least once (Ogilvie, 1957). Galloway et al. (1994) have noted how, during the early nineteenth century, prior to compulsory education, delinquent children whose parents were poor or dispossessed and considered socially undesirable were sent to workhouse schools or ‘ragged’ schools with their focus on the ‘depraved’ and ‘vicious’ poor in the inner cities. There is a record from the late nineteenth century of the schoolteacher in a primary school on the Isle of Wight requesting money from the school managers for shin pads for himself. His students, the children of poor farm workers, hated school so much that every time they came into the classroom they kicked him (Wearmouth, personal communication). They would rather have been earning money working on the land.
