Doctor with prescription of discipline to cure the ills of British education

Dr David Robinson doesn’t like to talk about retirement.

It’s 50 years since he first stood in front of a chalk board and in the intervening decades he’s amassed an impressive list of achievements alongside an enviable pension pot. Aside from the sheer number of lessons he’s delivered, he’s also helped to drag a Bradford school out of special measures, introduced new technology to classrooms and managed one school budget so successfully that he managed to give the local authority £200,000 back.

After being awarded an MBE in recognition of his services to education – the framed medal takes pride of place on the wall of the dining room – most would have grabbed the first opportunity to put aside the lesson plans for good, but somehow Dr Robinson has never quite managed to leave. He’s 70 now and has lost count of the number of leaving dos of much younger colleagues he has been to and even after having said his own official farewells to staff at Bradford’s Queensbury School a few weeks ago he hasn’t entirely ruled out the possibility that come September he might well return.

“Let’s just say I’ve left the door open,” says Dr Robinson, who has spent his career teaching in Bradford and the surrounding area.

“I know there are a lot of people in this profession who can’t understand why I want to keep on going, but teaching is what I do, it’s what I love.”

So much so, that many of his holidays have been spent on sabbaticals to schools on the other side of the world. He’s been to Beverly Hills High, the Los Angeles school which alongside the usual playing fields also boasts its own oil wells, he’s seen how education works in Dubai and in Jakarta he watched teachers operating with the most meagre of resources.

However, wherever his travels have taken him, from the richest suburbs to the poorest neighbourhoods, he’s learnt the one thing you can’t buy is discipline.

“Children used to be frightened of teachers,” says Dr Robinson, who lives with his wife Corinne at the family home in Saltaire. “When I first started the deterrent was the slipper. Someone once said that all teachers are actors who do six performances a day and they were right. I don’t think I ever used the slipper on any pupil, but you’d brandish it some point early on in the first term and that was enough. What you were teaching them might not necessarily have been sinking in, but you always had a very quiet class.

“Society has changed, children no longer come into the classroom afraid to open their mouth, but it doesn’t mean you can’t still have discipline in schools. One of the things I always say is that rules for children need to be black and white. There has been a tendency towards negotiation in recent years, but it is completely counter productive, a complete waste of time.”

While Dr Robinson doesn’t go so far as to recommend a return to the days when all newly qualified teachers were given a cane and slipper along with their teaching certificate, he does say that schools need to recognise that pupils have to be given boundaries.

“At Queensbury we operate a yellow and red card policy,” he said. He may have just retired, but he can’t help but talk about his last school in the present tense.

“There weren’t endless rules, but every child knew what the consequences would be if they stepped out of line and it worked. It took a little while to get every teacher singing from the same hymn sheet, but once they did, the transformation was incredible.

“When I first went there, the corridors were a nightmare as pupils went from one lesson to another. It was chaos, but now they all know exactly what will happen if they are disruptive in lessons or answer back – they will be sent to the student isolation room. Perhaps more importantly, they also know that the outcome will be the same whether they misbehave in geography or PE.

“The fact is that some teachers are good at keeping order and some aren’t, so you need a system which is impersonal and works for everyone.”

If the idea of student isolation rooms sounds like a throwback to some Dickensian age, Dr Robinson insists it not and besides it was one of the initiatives which recently helped to lift the school out of special measures. The announcement by Ofsted was the result of many years hard work, but for many schools in the same position, the bad reputations lingers for long after.

“If a school is placed into special measures, parents vote with their feet. The intake goes down and then you have to start letting staff go. It’s like anything, it doesn’t take long to destroy a reputation, but it takes an eternity to build it back up again.

“Not all schools will be blessed with fantastic catchment areas, but it’s about making children feel aspirational. Of course not every youngster will be able to get a First from Oxford, but if education is about one thing, it surely has to be about showing youngsters that they not only have potential, but giving them the tools to exploit it.

“There are some children who clearly view education as a necessary evil, an obstacle that has to be crossed. They’re the kids who when they finish for study leave before their GCSEs immediately go looking for jobs. I’ve had students who start the course wanting to be a teacher and ended up saying they are going to leave as soon as they can and end up getting a bit of work with their uncle.

“You’re never going to stop some children from slipping through the net, but there are ways to stem the flow of children who move straight from school to long-term unemployment. One of the things we did at Queensbury was to get rid of home study leave, so they are now in school right up to their exams. We also begin teaching A-level courses in the final year of GCSEs in the hope of creating an overlap and preventing kids giving up on their education.”

Dr Robinson started his own limited company a few years ago and now works for schools on an independent basis. He was, he says, the country’s first self-employed teacher and while he began his career in the art room over the years he has specialised in getting disaffected children back into education.

“When I started teaching most schools didn’t have work schemes. I know some teachers from my generation think they are a waste of time, but honestly you can’t run a good school without them. I remember once when I was a deputy head being taken into a classroom where a geography lesson was going on. The teacher was clearly an expert on her subject and was teaching kids of 12 and 13 first-year degree geology.

“It was impressive stuff. They could identify every different kind of rock you could imagine and towards the end of the lesson I was asked if I had any questions. I did. Just one. I turned to the class and asked if they could tell me the name of the river which runs through Shipley. Not a single child knew the answer.

“You see that was the problem. The system allowed teachers to do exactly what they wanted and some of them indulged their own interests rather than thinking of the needs of their pupils. I know I’m in he minority, but if I had it might way, the national curriculum would be even more prescriptive than it is now.

Dr Robinson knows it’s a policy unlikely to be adopted any time soon, but as he reflects on half a century in teaching he has few regrets.

“I always wanted to be a teacher,” he says. “And I suspect a part of me will always belong to the classroom.”

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