We need to stop fighting old battles in schools and focus on the war that is taking our teenagers.

I spend a lot of my working weeks in schools, or working with teenagers, parents, teachers and head teachers in my counselling room. I provide counselling to staff in three schools and am the parent of an 11-year-old girl who is in the final months of primary school. 

I also have two eyes and two ears and see and hear the realities of school life throughout my working days and beyond - from many perspectives. I pay attention. I listen. I see. I care.

This is the room I use in one secondary school when working with students

I am not claiming to be an expert, or someone who knows more than the next person who works in education, but my views are forged through experience and listening to those who spend their lives in schools. I think a lot about the experiences I hear in my sessions with clients, and about my experiences of walking down corridors in schools. This listening, seeing and thinking leaves me deeply troubled.

I am troubled by the pressures on teachers and headteachers, and the pressures facing teenagers from exams to social media, to society’s expectations of being a boy or girl in 2025, to the relentlessly competitive nature of the world young people are growing up within. But I am even more troubled that schools are often operating as if it’s 1925 or 1975, not 2025. I am troubled that schools are fighting a losing battle to impose standards, values and behaviours that belong in a time long ago - and in times that are not coming back. 

I am troubled by the cost that this is having on the mental health of young people - and the opportunity cost of the time that could be spent on the life and death stuff that young people are actually facing today. The life and death stuff so brilliantly and brutally explored by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne in Adolescence. 

What am I saying that schools need to change?

In short, schools need to stop the focus on the trees and see the wood. This means stopping the almost obsessive focus on uniform, make-up, hair styles, jewellery, nails, the length of school ties and school skirts, lip gloss, trainers (“they’re not shoes”), coats being worn on corridors, being called “sir” and “miss” and forcing students (at pain of detentions) to sit up and keep their hands and arms still (what they call “active listening”) which is happening in at least one school near me as one of my clients who has ADHD - and can’t keep his hands still any of the time - tells me. 

Instead, I believe that schools should focus on the toxic cultures (plural) that our young people are facing in their online and real-life worlds. I know the argument that flows from schools about the things they do focus on - it’s about standards and discipline. Get these things right and we get others right too. If children don’t follow these rules we cannot get them to follow the rules of grammar, algebra and other GCSE and A-level essentials. That may have been true when I was at secondary school (1989-1994) but that ship has long since sailed, and was given a final shove out to sea by the pandemic and the message that was in inadvertently sent that school was optional and not as important as staying at home. Respect for institutions has been falling for years: schools, police, banks, churches, parliament, the BBC - the list goes on - and respect for our elders is no longer a given - it needs to be earned by respect and understanding being offered first.

I know too that schools say they do focus on the issues I am outlining - in Guidance and/or PHSE and across the curriculum - that they are trying to do both these things and the “standards” that I am saying they should care less about - but it is not working. Not at all. Not one bit. The results are clear - not just from the four episodes of Adolescence but from the evidence of our own eyes, every day in schools. 

If the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again looking for a different result, and that when you’re in a hole you should stopping digging, now is surely the time to stop and put the spade down.

We need to change our focus and our priorities.

In almost every session with a student or an adult involved in education, I hear about the time spent - and the battles that follow - from the focus in schools on the “standards” stuff. It creates large resentment, wastes even larger amounts of time, and just gets in the way of building trust, rapport and relationships between teachers and students. It is trust and relationships that help us to educate - to help young people learn from our knowledge and experience and to help keep them safe and help them to thrive. The chances of getting a positive response from a student in a discussion about self-harm, drugs, sex, county lines, domestic violence, online image sharing, masculinity, safety on social media, knives, consent, having healthy relationships, sexuality, racism, eating and exercise and many, many other things in which lives and futures are stake, increase exponentially, if the previous one-way “discussion” in the corridor or classroom wasn’t an exercise in power and authority - with rules about why a second earring or lip gloss needs removing to support the student’s learning. 

These rules - these “standards” - are not helping anyone. They are barriers to trust and relationships. They are part of the problem not part of the solution. More relaxed uniform policies, for example, - everyone wearing PE kit every day - BTW there is no need for anyone to wear a tie in 2025 - will produce a more relaxed atmosphere (e.g. less tension, aggro, conflict, raised voices) which can produce more relaxed relationships and more listening and understanding. Having fewer rules: turn up to school and lessons on time; no raised voices; be nice; don’t be a dick; put your phone away during the day, and more two-way time to listen and talk would make a massive difference. It would allow us the space to focus on the stuff that is taking teenagers away from themselves and the path to happiness and safety.

The length of a tie or a skirt, is much less important than the length of time students are spending hearing hate-filled, misogynistic content online. 

It’s 2025. It’s time for us to meet the challenges of 2025, not 1995 or even 2005.

We need to fight today’s huge, life and death battles affecting teenagers, and not waste time on the battles of the past. Not only does this stuff not matter, but it’s getting in the way of the stuff that really does matter.

It is 2025 and there isn’t a moment to waste. If Adolescence shows us anything, it’s that the clock is ticking on a time bomb which is going off in communities up and down the country every day. We need to act. Now.