Classroom violence shows why we have to ‘save childhood’

This morning's Scotsman reports one in a rapidly-increasing range of indicators that all is not well with Scotland's children. In the last five years there have been 5,000 violent attacks on teachers in classrooms which have led to over 200 hospital visits.

It is a little difficult to assess how serious the increase in violence is; numerically, at the start of devolution there were 3,000 attacks on teachers – though about a third involved no physical violence and these are collected on a quite different basis.

For example, in 2000 there were 278 teaching days reported lost because of classroom violence. Over the period covered in the report there were 1,713 days lost in the Scottish Borders local authority area alone. This suggests that the real impact of violence has escalated.

Comparisons over a shorter timeframe may give a better impression, although the data is incomplete as not every local authority has responded to the Freedom of Information request on which this is based. Nevertheless, between 2019 and 2025 the indicators all increased by between two-fold and five-fold.

However by this stage we should perhaps be used to seeing evidence that something is wrong with childhood. If there is an indicator which either demonstrates or implies that there are behavioural, wellbeing and cognitive changes taken place among children then it is rising and most likely rising rapidly.

Common Weal has explained why this has happened and has been writing on it for a while. On Saturday we launched a new policy paper with a set of recommendation on what to do about this. Called Saving Childhood in Scotland, the report makes a crucial argument – that this is a public health emergency and that it cannot be addressed through narrow measures alone.

Much of the focus on behaviour has revolved around screen time – and this is crucial. But it is not sufficient. It is not enough alone to explain what is happening and there is little reason to believe that narrow based bans alone would resolve the problem.

The environmental factors which are altering childhood behaviours and experiences are not just about 'toxic' content on social media, it is about the entire childhood experience. It is about social fragmentation and the loss of unstructured play, the failure to invest in structured clubs, organisations and hobbies, poor social infrastructure.

It is about lack of regulation of the commercial targeting of children, about low levels of support to parents and inconclusive guidance being provided by risk-averse politicians. It is about failure to find ways to develop emotional and social intelligence, emotional regulation, relaxation, rest and downtime.

And it is about the failure to allow children's minds to wander in non-guided activity. It is perhaps counterintuitive but boredom is now much better understood to be a crucial element of neurological development. If our mind is constantly being directed in a series of highly-controlled tasks (this is what the online environment does) then it doesn't create the non-instrumental thought processes which help brain development.

Put another way, our ability to be creative and to solve problems and engage with our own emotions and feelings needs us to be experienced in finding ways to think about a problem which are not highly-directed. Solving the carefully-designed puzzles contained in computer games has a real neurological benefit, but it is a completely different kind of activity than the abstract creativity humans often rely on.

That is why Saving Childhood combines a range of direct regulation of and protections from social media and the online environment – but only in combination with a range of other actions which encourage real-world socialisation and changes to the curricculum to prepare children for the world in which they will live.

Because that is another important conclusion from the report; much as we might like to return to a 'before time', we can't. The world is changed and it is changing childhood. It is for public policy to shape and rebalance that change as best as it can – and to prepare children to be as well as they can be in the new environment. Read Saving Childhood here.