What Concerns Teachers about their Pupils?

Any attempt to identify what concerns teachers about their pupils from an examination of the daily offerings of the national press or broadcasting networks in this country over the past decade might lead to the conclusion that the total concerns of our teachers were, and perhaps are, focused entirely upon the twin aspects of disruptive and aggressive pupils. The accompaniment to the media ‘hype’ of these two aspects was the unprecedented upsurge in the number of publications describing, detailing, packaging, and prescribing what teachers have done and/or might do to their disruptive, aggressive, disturbing, violent or hyperactive pupils. These literary acknowledgements were supported and encouraged by a plethora of surveys and research projects, which in turn fed or were fed by the mushroom-like growth throughout the 1970s and early 1980s in the number of special classes and units for disruptive and aggressive pupils (Topping, 1983), collectively known at that time by the derogatory term ‘sin-bins’, a name now thankfully itself consigned to the waste bin.