You're with Cape Salt as John Nathan one Oftenoon drive.

Some months ago, the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that the South African Council for Educators must impose stricter, more appropriate sanctions on teachers who assault pupils.

There were a couple of instances that they had a look at a seven year old pupil at a Lumpopo school whose teacher hit him on the head with the plastic pipe.

The child needed emergency surgery for a brain hemorrhage.

The teacher apparently went to the hospital to threaten the child don't tell anybody, otherwise you'll be in more trouble.

And ev Angela Maguena was fined fifteen thousand rund by the Council of Educators and her name was removed from the Register of Educators, but she was allowed to keep her job because that sanction was suspended for ten years.

A Johannesburg teacher also landed up in court for hitting a pupil on the head, leading the child needing to be hospitalized.

That teacher also allowed to keep their job and the SA said no, that's not good enough, and the South African Council of Educators has now formerly worked in child focused disciplinary measures that consider the best interests of the learner, input from victims and parents, and rehabilitative measures such as anger management training and instruction in non violent discipline techniques.

Lucy Jamison is a senior researcher at the Children's Institute at UCT.

Lucy, Good afternoon, Good afternoon, Do these make sense to you.

We were given an opportunity by the court to work on the sanctions, so yes, we were.

You know, the court actually ordered the South African Council of Educators to work with us and the Center for Child Law.

So a lot of the things that you've just mentioned were preparposals that we had made in terms of reforming those sanctions.

And have the proposals been implemented to the degree that you proposed.

So it's very difficult to be able to assess that because obviously, you know, you would need to take a look at disciplinary keering records and to review those, and we don't have access to them on a kind of case by case basis.

We do know that since they've been implemented, disciplinary committees have been referring educators to what we called rehabilitation programs so where they can learn skills about anger management or for themselves, or to equip them with the skills to manage their classroom.

So that's managing the behavior of the learners without resorting to violence.

There are shades of violence, Lucy, And some people would argue that any kind of corporal punishment, whether it's a ruler on the hand or a cane on the bum or whatever it is, is assault.

But when it comes to the kind of guidelines that you and the child law people proposed, what were you thinking in terms of the levels of violence at which various proposals kick in.

So the way that the system works.

I don't know if you or your listeners are familiar that the Status aid producers or publishes statistics on what they estimate are the levels of corporal punishment.

I had an interview about that a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, yeah, so you know we saw that there.

You've got you know, one in five learners in case idin experiencing corporal punishment.

So you know, plus minus, you're looking at a million children a year who are experiencing violence at the hands of teachers in the classroom.

How many of those make it to disciplinary committees on average are two hundred a year.

So the way that the system works is layered.

You make a you know, complaint to the principles, to the Department of Education and your province, and the safe disciplinary hearings are you know, typically those cases where the misconduct has been more severe because they can be matters can be dealt with or less serious matters can be dealt with at earlier stages in the process.

That makes sense.

It does because you think about eighteen point five percent corporal punishment in Kuaizula NATWEL, and the national average, if I remember the stats correctly, was roughly seven in one hundred children are subjected to corporal punishment.

And I mean obviously, if you're hitting somebody over the head with a plastic pipe and that results in a brain hemorrhage, or you hit a child on the head with something else and that child needs to be hospitalized, that's a different sanction from somebody who routinely hits the girl child on the hand with a ruler.

So I mean, these things are and this is why those disciplinary committees those sanctions, they decide from the list, you know, what is appropriate for that particular incident and with that particular educator, and they have to do that by taking into consideration the views of the child and the caregiver, because you know that even just witnessing corporal punishment can create fear then acts as a barrier to learning.

Distress as a child has a traumatic impact, but that does vary from child to child, and what we need to make sure is that our system is responsive.

The ultimate aim is to diminish the number of cases of violence in our classroom.

And part of the problem is that we have a culture of violence that's embedded not just in our schools but in our society.

So it's very difficult to hold individual teachers responsible for what is essentially collective behavior.

So we do need strict measures for people who are very violent, but we also need to shift that culture.

It is one of the questions that I asked my guest when I was talking about those stats essay figures, and for which I didn't get, particularly for me anyway, comprehensive answer or comforting answer was around the degree to which teachers are offered training on alternative disciplinary methods.

And so the new policy includes things like anger management and training a nonviolent discipline and I go, why do you have to wait for somebody to be guilty of violence against a child before you teach that person about managing anger in the classroom and about non violent alternatives.

It seems that you are putting the cart in front of the horse if you do it only when And I didn't get a sense that this is something that teachers are given a lot of help in prior to potentially acting violently against a child.

So you're absolutely one hundred percent correct.

You know, the best thing that we could do is to incorporate these kind of methods, skills, and programs into teacher training when they go to university or college.

It should be a core part of the curriculum.

Remember though, that many of the teachers who are currently in classrooms are getting older.

The average age of our teachers is increasing, many of them now in their fifties.

And what we know today about how to manage discipline, whether using corporal punishment or other violent methods, is very different to you know, the state of our knowledge twenty years ago and the cultural norms.

You know, we although violence and school's corporal punishment was band in nineteen ninety six, you know, those teachers training colleges programs have been very slow to catch up, and in part that was because as university and researchers we haven't put a or evaluated what was effective.

We do know that now it should be part of those curriculums and it's up to both universities, training, education and the authorities, but also provincial governments.

You know there are teachers out there who are asking for help and we shouldn't.

They shouldn't have to wait, as you say, until it's too late.

Lucy Jameson, thank you very much for talking to us as senior researcher at the Children's Institute, which is based at UCT