Teacher union backs cadet forces

Cadet forces can instil self-discipline and loyalty, it was said

State schools in the UK should have military cadet forces to improve pupil behaviour, a teachers' union has said.

Voice, at its annual conference, said this would give pupils transferable skills useful later in life.

Cadet forces - which Prime Minister Gordon Brown advocates - tend to be found in grammar and private schools.

England's Department for Children, Schools and Families said it regarded the Combined Cadet Force as "a genuine force for good".

At the Voice conference in Daventry, Northamptonshire, former south Wales secondary school teacher Peter Morris argued for the initiative.

"Cadet forces will inculcate some of the values which we, as a society are missing: self discipline, self reliance, loyalty in all sorts of different ways - to one's comrades, to one's unit and to one's country - courage, respect and integrity," he said.

Thrown

Mr Morris said teachers were continually complaining about indiscipline in schools.

"I have been present when a pupil has barred a classroom door, refusing to allow fellow pupils and the teacher to leave at the end of the day.

"I have seen a pupil lift a computer monitor above his head to throw it at a teacher," he said.

He said cadet forces could work for high achievers as well as the sort of students who might drop out of school into a life of crime or substance abuse.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "It is a genuine force for good for the young people who join, the schools in which they are based, as well as for the communities in which they live.

"Although Ofsted tell us that good behaviour is already the norm in most schools, the cadet forces can further instil a sense of discipline and decorum."

Step families

But Voice's general secretary, Philip Parkin, told the conference a "downward spiral" in the quality of parenting was behind a decline in children's behaviour.

He said society had been changed by a focus on the individual rather than the community and the changing pattern of families, with "many more step families" and an emphasis on parents going out to work.

He said he made no judgement on this - and he offered no answers.

"How do we deal with it? Do we build parenting skills into the secondary curriculum, which is already packed? Do we have pre-natal classes that we compel people to attend? I don't think we can do that.

"Somehow we have got to break this downward spiral of parenting skills."