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Ex-serving drafted in to beat school violence

Does anyone know anything about this nonsense, which seems more likely to be a fantasy spin story leaked from Whitehall?

From the Sunday Mirror:

http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/...694&headline=war-on-class-yobs-name_page.html

WAR ON CLASS YOBS

Apr 24 2005

By Paul Gilfeather Political Editor


TOUGH Army veterans will be sent into Britain's schools to wage war on classroom thugs who terrorise teachers.

The news of "Operation Blackboard" comes as shock figures reveal that assaults on teaching staff have rocketed over the past 12 months.

Desperate ministers at the Department of Education - inundated with complaints from terrified teaching staff - sent out a distress signal to Ministry of Defence officials.

And the MoD responded with a "guns for hire" offer which will see retired officers parachuted into hundreds of classrooms around the country. Fifty teams of ex-Army, Navy and RAF personnel have signed up.

As well as playing bodyguard to staff, the military men will drill 6,000 of the worst offenders in discipline and motivation.

A Whitehall source said: "Staff have enough to contend with without the added threat of attack hanging over them.

"Drastic action is needed and tests have shown that sending in hard men from the Forces really works."

Ofsted inspectors have drawn up a hit list of 200 problem schools. The worst troublemakers will be forced to drop two GCSEs, freeing up time for special lessons on how to behave. Another option being considered is to send disruptive pupils to boarding school
 
Skill Force looks like an excellent project.

Sadly it appears as if this is being spun in response to the unruly classroom debate likely to be fuelled by an undercover TV programme next week.
 
Paper tigers spring to mind. As a threat they will be useless as they obviously have no power to touch the little darlings, unless they want to be in court next week for assault. As mediators they will be useless too, as fewer social groups are further apart than modern streetwise teenagers and retired army officers.

The plan is arrse. As usual.
 
You can hear it now... "you there, the one in the hoodie,,, stand still when i'm addressing you" .... "blow it up yer arrse dicked (chave style)"

Nothing like a huge generation gap eh!!??

Blair's Britain... my arrse.... lets all turn out and change it.
 
tomahawk6 said:
Whats wrong with the police ? Cant they have a cop doing school security ?

Because you can get a Skillforce instructor for 22 grand with minimal overhead and no pension, overhead factor probably no more than 50%, as opposed to 25 grand plus for a copper, with probably a 150% overhead factor.
 
tomahawk6 said:
Whats wrong with the police ? Cant they have a cop doing school security ?

Been there, done that, worst year of my life and surprisingly scarey (and I policed premiership football for a decade)

C==p idea because the education heirarchy cry fowl when the little darlings get nicked, therefore pointless.

Good luck to anybody who gets tied up in this.

Trotsky
 
MrPVRd said:
Does anyone know anything about this nonsense, which seems more likely to be a fantasy spin story leaked from Whitehall?

From the Sunday Mirror:

http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/...694&headline=war-on-class-yobs-name_page.html

WAR ON CLASS YOBS

Apr 24 2005

By Paul Gilfeather Political Editor


TOUGH Army veterans will be sent into Britain's schools to wage war on classroom thugs who terrorise teachers.

The news of "Operation Blackboard" comes as shock figures reveal that assaults on teaching staff have rocketed over the past 12 months.

Desperate ministers at the Department of Education - inundated with complaints from terrified teaching staff - sent out a distress signal to Ministry of Defence officials.

And the MoD responded with a "guns for hire" offer which will see retired officers parachuted into hundreds of classrooms around the country. Fifty teams of ex-Army, Navy and RAF personnel have signed up.

As well as playing bodyguard to staff, the military men will drill 6,000 of the worst offenders in discipline and motivation.

A Whitehall source said: "Staff have enough to contend with without the added threat of attack hanging over them.

"Drastic action is needed and tests have shown that sending in hard men from the Forces really works."

Ofsted inspectors have drawn up a hit list of 200 problem schools. The worst troublemakers will be forced to drop two GCSEs, freeing up time for special lessons on how to behave. Another option being considered is to send disruptive pupils to boarding school

The worst offenders will be forced to drop 2 GCSEs? Oh that'll hurt them.

Boarding school? At who's expense?

Drill? Where do they get this sh*te?

It's not a policing problem, it's a parental problem. Stop the excuses and get the parents in court.
 
Any treatment of the symptoms will merely be palliative and will suffer from spin, so that any genuine benefits will be lost in the noise.

What is missing is an attack at the root causes. These children arrive in secondary school ready to kick off and with no moral, cultural or social reference points. For too many years we have been "tearing down barriers" and searching for the Holy Grail of "equality" and in the process removing some of life's key waypoints; like respectful behaviour, concern for one another and an interest in improving it all just a bit for everyone, rather than espousing the cause of "p1ss on the fire Jack, my toast's done".

Parents are highly to blame and even the parents of "nice" kids need to put the freaking hours in. My sixteeen year old boy came out of public school last summer with a monstrous attitude and contempt for everything, including himself. He moved in with me and left his liberal step-father and mother behind. Six months down the line he is off weed, has a nice girlfriend and a job - which he puts more effort into than he ever did school.

What turned him around? Well certainly not the contact counselling he qualified for after ripping into his step-mother, although I think that focused his attention somewhat..."hmm these people care what I do, say and think.." Good old-fashioned family values in the main - we are church going but not rabidly so, we eat together as often as possible but particularly Sunday lunch and Friday supper, we insist on politeness and decent behaviour, we are quite careful what we watch, we have pets, we go to things as a family, he is "included" in our friends party guest lists...I could bang on but the point is that if you don't have something to guide your life - church, work ethic, loved ones - then it doesn't really matter because you are just flailing around out in the ooloo.

This government has not only continued the work of previous regimes in dismantling these structures and rubbishing these values. They have rolled up their sleeves and with a hearty "Two-six lift!" gone at finishing them off like a speed-freak Rottweiler with a steak and kidney pud! So fancy initiatives like this are really not going to work.

It's like treating brain tumours with aspirin because it means you can't feel the pain...ooh I am so cross now. I think I'll go and take some Brufen, it may stop the red mists and the incessant chatter of the voices which keep telling me to climb a book-tower with a mail-order Winchester and blat a few Cabinet Ministers. Coming mother...
 
Any treatment of the symptoms will merely be palliative and will suffer from spin, so that any genuine benefits will be lost in the noise.

What is missing is an attack at the root causes. These children arrive in secondary school ready to kick off and with no moral, cultural or social reference points. For too many years we have been "tearing down barriers" and searching for the Holy Grail of "equality" and in the process removing some of life's key waypoints; like respectful behaviour, concern for one another and an interest in improving it all just a bit for everyone, rather than espousing the cause of "p1ss on the fire Jack, my toast's done".

Parents are highly to blame and even the parents of "nice" kids need to put the freaking hours in. My sixteeen year old boy came out of public school last summer with a monstrous attitude and contempt for everything, including himself. He moved in with me and left his liberal step-father and mother behind. Six months down the line he is off weed, has a nice girlfriend and a job - which he puts more effort into than he ever did school.

What turned him around? Well certainly not the contact counselling he qualified for after ripping into his step-mother, although I think that focused his attention somewhat..."hmm these people care what I do, say and think.." Good old-fashioned family values in the main - we are church going but not rabidly so, we eat together as often as possible but particularly Sunday lunch and Friday supper, we insist on politeness and decent behaviour, we are quite careful what we watch, we have pets, we go to things as a family, he is "included" in our friends party guest lists...I could bang on but the point is that if you don't have something to guide your life - church, work ethic, loved ones - then it doesn't really matter because you are just flailing around out in the ooloo.

This government has not only continued the work of previous regimes in dismantling these structures and rubbishing these values. They have rolled up their sleeves and with a hearty "Two-six lift!" gone at finishing them off like a speed-freak Rottweiler with a steak and kidney pud! So fancy initiatives like this are really not going to work.

It's like treating brain tumours with aspirin because it means you can't feel the pain...ooh I am so cross now. I think I'll go and take some Brufen, it may stop the red mists and the incessant chatter of the voices which keep telling me to climb a book-tower with a mail-order Winchester and blat a few Cabinet Ministers. Coming mother...
 
They giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other...

From the Scotsman:

'Uninformed' ministers closed youth project

HAMISH MACDONELL
SCOTTISH POLITICAL EDITOR

Key points
• Report to criticise ministers over decision to close Airborne Initiative scheme
• Ministers did not visit youth rehabilitation project, says report
• Report states ministers' decision swayed by local objections and the media

"When ministers were faced with calls for its closure (due to a combination of local ‘nimbyism’ and the perceived negative effects of the first few episodes of the Chancers series), coupled with the desire to switch funding away from residential solutions, they lacked first-hand knowledge of what courses and trainees were like in reality" - Independent report

EXECUTIVE ministers will come in for stinging criticism this week for closing a flagship programme to curb re-offending without taking the time to find out what the initiative was all about.

An independent report into the closure of the Airborne Initiative, which was shut down by the Executive in February last year, will be published tomorrow.

The report, a copy of which has been obtained by The Scotsman, is highly critical of ministers and the way they approached the groundbreaking residential project which attempted to prevent re-offending among high-tariff young male offenders.

The report was co-authored by retired KOSB Colonel Clive Fairweather, former Chief Inspector of Prisons, former SAS officer....a man that would surely know a thing or two about discipline and other such matters!
 
MrPVRd said:
The report was co-authored by retired KOSB Colonel Clive Fairweather, former Chief Inspector of Prisons, former SAS officer....a man that would surely know a thing or two about discipline and other such matters!

Look I think I'm as macho as the next man - unless he happens to be Don Emilio Juan Sanchez de l'Estemadura y Hidalgo de los Palmos Dolores del Rio of that ilk - but honestly!! It is one thing to discipline highly motivated soldiers in SF or to restrain heavily controlled prisoners in one of HMPs. It is quite another to discipline children when you actually have no sanction whatsoever. These days expulsion usually means putting them somewhere quiet to play computer games on the same school site.

Frankly I do not know Colonel Clive but I am sure he is as aware of the absurd rationale behind these initiatives as I hope we are. To think that putting ex-mob guys into schools will change the price of fish is absurd, unless they think that having pulled their chestnuts out of the fire overseas for so long we ought to be applied to the domestic agenda. Unless they really do want these children taken out by Bravo 20??

ABI, to be fair, was a brilliant concept and should never have been let go by the authorities - but they probably doubted that the values being inculcated would be compatible with a 1000 years of Neue Arbeit...
 
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