When the Thatcher government set up an inquiry into discipline in schools in 1988, it was responding partly in populist style and partly following complaints from teaching unions about the dangers their members faced from unruly pupils every day – itself a tactic in pursuit of improved pay and conditions. As the then education correspondent of the Daily Mail, scarcely a week went by when I was not writing lurid tales of classroom violence.
The man the government appointed, Rodney Elton, Lord Elton, himself a former minister, could have been used as a caricature of the sort of battered teacher featured in the Mail’s line drawings accompanying my articles.
