Violence in our schools is the elephant in the classroom.

The wild brawl that occurred at Berwick Secondary College on Tuesday was difficult to read about on the front page of the Herald-Sun today. But to say it’s shocking would be a stretch. In fact, it’s not even surprising.

We’ve known for some time now that violence, aggression and poor student behaviour is on the rise in our schools. It’s a scourge and the cost of it is no longer tolerable.

Most estimates run at around 75-80% of instances of student violence in our schools being between students, but what is alarming is that we’re now out at around 12% of instances where the victim of this violence is a school employee.

Principals and School Leaders are increasingly becoming the targets of this violence and the Berwick SC example where a student, merely for trying to break up the brawl, placed an Assistant Principal in a headlock isn’t an isolated one. The fact that a student also ended up in a headlock doesn't even the ledger.

Principals in Australia are now at commensurate risk of physical injury at work as firefighters and commercial fishers. 

43% of Australia’s Principals say that they are personally experiencing violence at school and it’s literally killing them.

Not only are they 2.2 times more likely to experience sleep issues and 1.6 times more likely to experience complete burnout. But they are now amongst the very highest risk groups in terms of suicide.

So ok, we know that there’s an issue. We also know that it’s damaging our school staffs, that it’s woeful for the mental health of our students and that it’s deeply concerning for our parents. Now what?

There’s a temptation here to do what we usually do in such situations. Crack down. We need to resist that temptation. As Einstein said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Doing what we’ve always done is what got us here. While it’s highly appropriate that police lay charges against the students in circumstances such that Principal Kerri Bolch is currently enduring at Berwick SC, it’s our school-based responses, not our judicial responses, that need to change.

Student behaviour is not improved by punishment – it’s improved by thought. If you are to change the behaviour of exercising in the morning before a healthy breakfast, it’ll be some thought about results, process and commitment that gets you there. Nobody reading this woke up this morning startled to find themself already on a treadmill.

Crackdowns - hallmarked by detentions, suspensions and expulsions – generate the wrong kind of thought. Kids in detention don’t sit there contemplating their actions and it’s impact on others. They plot revenge.

They scheme about how not to get caught next time and they invent better lies. They develop Machiavellian plans to get back at the teachers and students who so wrongfully imprisoned them and they key the cars of Principals when the leave the grounds.

The thinking we’re generating is driving the wrong behaviour. 

Look, I get it. We look back to a bygone day where kids respected teachers more and conclude it must have been due to the teacher having the weapon of corporal punishment in their holster.

The truth is that our kids were more respectful, more empathic and more responsible because more were raised in homes where these traits were modeled.

Less were raised with the effects of trauma, with physiological afflictions such as ADHD, without mental illness and where there was room and time to make amends if you messed up. 

Us oldies, we grew up with higher respect levels, despite the existence of corporal punishment – not because of it.

So once more, now what?

Sure we can crackdown and soothe our outrage while more of these disrespectful little so-and-sos are detained, suspended and charged. 

Or we could, finally, do something different.

If we can park our outrage and see that the absence of respect, responsibility, empathy and productive thought is what got us here, then that’s what we need to reprioritise.

Our schools need to be supported to build cultures where these commodities are a joint community imperative. They need help, training and time to bring parents and teachers back onto the same page about how we are building better citizens out of our kids.

It might not be popular to suggest that we need to abandon our punitive practices at this juncture. But popularity matters no more.

We cannot abide the insanity of doing the same things over and over and over again if the cost to all of our school stakeholders is so monumental.

It’s time that we did something different. Deep down and even within the research around other successful jurisdictions such as Scandinavia, we have examples to follow.

The only question is, do we care enough about our kids to end this infatuation with punishment that we’ve become so destructively nostalgic about?