More discipline in the classroom is needed to prevent white working class children falling behind - Sarah Todd

While watching Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson on the news over the weekend it was hard not to be distracted by her harsh hairstyle and its resemblance to that of her farmer-hating colleague from the Treasury, Rachel Reeves.

However, once the thought that they look like sisters whose mother has got a ruler and the kitchen scissors out had been banished to the back of the mind, it’s important to give credit where it’s due.

She is absolutely right to flag up that parents must do more to tackle children’s bad behaviour; backing it up with figures that one in ten of the poorest white working-class pupils is suspended from school every year.

She should be congratulated for acknowledging that the wider school system had “resolutely failed white working-class children”, saying that by the time they reach their early 20s, youngsters who were suspended from the classroom were three times as likely as their peers to be on sickness benefits. Those who actually do end up getting a job but were persistently absent from school as children, earn on average £10,000 a year less than those they grew up with by the time they are 28.

In this correspondent’s mind these children are long overdue having their moment in the spotlight. Their lives are something our country should hang its head in shame about.

The traditional - once proud - working class of this country has been failed by successive governments. Now they are an ethnic minority, often living an underbelly existence where a hard day’s graft and ambition to better themselves have been replaced with benefits. No jobs, no hope, no nothing. Rather than sweeping them under the carpet, pretending they don’t exist, we need to acknowledge them and the fact that not everyone can be shoe-horned into doing an airy-fairy degree and ending up working in a call centre.

The system fusses over others, but the naughty lads with shaven heads of this writer’s schooldays (who were incidentally sorted out by a headmaster with a slipper and a tight-knit community who made sure mum and dad at home got to know) have been ignored for decades. Mostly left-wing female teachers, often no father figure at home, there is no wonder they flounder. Training strong men in suits to be constants in staffrooms so often made up of an insipid cardigan-clad stream of women would be a start. Figures from the National Behaviour Survey show that seven minutes out of every half-hour lesson are lost to classroom disruption.

A sensible step would be for teachers to be able to discipline children who misbehave without fear of losing their jobs.

Respect with a deliberate capital R is so sadly missing. Unruly pupils seeing schools stand up for their staff - that the teacher is always right (so shut up and sit down) - would be a great starting point. Teacher training should start churning them out looking like they mean business. Sorry, back to those cardigans.

Now this is the sort of issue that this correspondent would like to see the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, waving his staff about.

Instead, he has been criticising Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for promising mass deportations if he ever gets his hands on the keys to Number 10.

In conversation with Sky’s Sunday morning programme the country’s current top clergyman urged us to look at the “big issues” driving people to risk the English Channel crossing, adding that “we should actively resist the kind of isolationist, short-term kneejerk ‘send them home’”.

A seasonal church goer - Easter, Harvest Festival and Christmas along with random moments as needed (such as when The Daughter broke her back in a riding accident) - his words have done nothing to make this member of the flock up attendance anytime soon.

He should keep his nose out of politics. Who is the Church of England to lecture when they can’t even get a new Archbishop of Canterbury sorted? Come November and it will be a year since Justin Welby resigned and his successor, if one is ever named, will not be starting until next spring at the earliest. It’s impossible not to be impressed with the speed of the Roman Catholics, who managed to appoint a new Pope within 17 days.

Imagine leaving the country to the Archbishop and his colleagues? To use a Yorkshire term, nowt would ever get done.