That kind of stuff in the lived experience of many people listening to this programme was what discipline in schools looked like.

And it's interesting that when you do talk about horrible things like that, and you mentioned behaviour or discipline in schools, a lot of people automatically revert to, well, that's what you must be talking about.

You know, how severely can we punish them? How can we punish them into goodness? Which is not something that typically works.

And mild sanctions are fine as a part of a greater system.

That's why we have parking tickets.

But that's not how you get people to drive well.

And you do much more than that.

Is

Yeah

... there's a real frustration in Ulf that he doesn't get the castle, he doesn't get the horse, he doesn't get the women, he doesn't get the quail, and it pisses him off.

And then people start, people are still treating him like shit-

Yeah

... which is h- that has been his entire life.

People have trodden on him.

And he thinks, "All right, now it, now it has to change," and it doesn't change, because the higher-ups are still treating him badly.

I remember once sitting with a kid in the secondary school I used to work in.

This was a really rough environment, Bethnal Green, a very rough school in a rough part of town.

And there was a kid there.

He was really, really difficult.

I mean, he was really challenging.

He used to get in trouble all the time, and every single teacher used to say, oh, God, not him again.

He's also the lead behaviour advisor to the Department of Education and is sometimes referred to as a government's behaviour czar.

I mean, there are some children in the classes I was teaching who were ages from about 11 up to about 18 who were, you know, functionally illiterate.

Tom Bennett is the founder and director of ResearchEd.

It is an enormous weeping emblem of shame that a single child gets through school, gets to the age of 11 and can't read.