Maria Assumpta Girls' Secondary School in Hamrun has a population of 700 students. It excels in artistry, dance and stagecraft, but it is, in a certain sense, also a school with "specific teaching difficulties".

It can be considered a mixed ability school, catering for mainstream achievers to a cohort of scholastically less motivated students. Our woes stem mainly from a big part of our student intake area where the social fabric is problematic. At present we recruit our students from a varied intake area ranging from Attard to the rural villages of the south such as Zurrieq, Qrendi, Ghaxaq, Mqabba and Gudja, as well as the inner harbour area of Valletta, Floriana, Marsa, Hamrun, St Venera and Qormi.

Students from these areas bring to school a sub-culture that is not compatible with curricular regimens and is many times at odds with school discipline. This facilitates neither teaching nor learning. Nor does it help us reach other school targets.

Often enough the teacher has to overcome obstacles of class-control before he or she can get down to his or her pedagogy. This is a situation that is as stressful to staff as it is frustrating to the student.

On the bright side, once issues of personality relationships and class dynamics have been negotiated, one finds that most of these students will respond positively to care and affection. Invariably for some others, the problems will remain.

As pushing the thresholds too far would have it, misbehaviour threatened to come seriously to a head during the last scholastic year when a combination of system overload and breakdown resulted in some conflict and dwindling satisfaction.

Both the Directorate of Education and the MUT responsibly assumed an equally pro-active and supportive role and contingency measures were effectively applied. A youth worker was immediately enlisted and a more far-reaching plan of action was implemented.

The experiment of the youth worker paid off in the short term. Disruptive students were withdrawn either individually or in small manageable groups.

Flustered staff were placated and the motivated students were allowed to receive the education they were entitled to.

Youth work in itself could well be a good bet for getting out of a situation of behaviour management, but over a prolonged period it could also send the wrong messages, so caution is in order.

It may be pertinent to muse at this stage that in situations of crisis management it is heartening to meet the educational hierarchy on a collegial level, enabling one to feel their professional empathy rather than their authority. This empathy was freely expressed, and credit is due to the central Directorate for effectively addressing both the short and long term strategies.

The University's Department of Psychology was roped in to take up the project of 'challenging behaviour' with the Maria Assumpta staff, keeping the school's particular problems well in focus.

So in September last year the scholastic year kicked off with the school being looked at by Professor Paul Cooper from the University of Leicester, well known for his contribution in behaviour management in schools, and Dr Carmel Cefai from the University of Malta, no less a specialist himself. A three-day in-school seminar was held whereby the school staff worked in intensive brainstorming exercises and generated a discussion to prioritise remedial targets.

Initially the workshops appeared chaotic, the discussion heated and fingers pointed in various directions. There was simply no end to conflicting opinions - typical teacher stuff and animated staff-room politics. By and by the energy generated gathered force as well as direction, until spin-offs were becoming evident.

There was synergy in this and targets were identified. Of course there will always be the sceptic, the cynic, the inevitable pockets of resistance and the dragging of feet. However, once stock was taken of the situation, an advance was in order and the following five simple resolutions were reached by consensus.

(a) That at school we are all equal, differences should be respected.

Only the form of the message was subtle and elegantly politically correct. The drift of it was made starkly clear: bullying would absolutely not be tolerated and the sanctions were to be severe for defaulters. The administration had never brooked any nonsense over this one and the regime of zero-tolerance was here to stay.

Eventually there would also be the input of the child support services after the sanctions have been served. Discipline here is always well tempered by humanity but it needs to be shown as strong nonetheless.

Maria Assumpta has also taken care to cultivate a user-friendly pastoral ethos where a problem is rolled out and addressed, involving other agencies and personnel, always with the consent of the student herself.

The roots of bullying problems often spread deeper into unstable family background, broken self-esteem and lack of aspiration - a tall order for the guidance-teacher, who takes it on board whatever. As it turns out, the child who bullies needs as much support as her victim but her attitudes can hardly be condoned in any manner. That is the crux of it.

(b) Keeping the environment clean and classrooms in order was the other resolution prioritised, followed by

(c) To be punctual for lessons

(d) To bring all the textbooks and material needed for the day and

(e) To always ask for permission to be anywhere around the school.

The feedback data suggest that the five-point behaviour policy was well received by all the school community. The resolutions were put to work, sanctions were applied, albeit with variable intensity, but targets always kept in focus.

Six months later, on their second leg to the school, Cooper and Cefai could notice a significant improvement in overall behaviour. An analysis of data on student disciplinary exclusions indicated that the number of exclusions between last October and February this year was at least half that of the same period during scholastic year 2005/06, and that it targeted the same few culprits.

A difference was certainly being made, so much so that even the parents perceived discipline as one of the mainstays at Maria Assumpta.

The school conducted an open-ended among parents and students where they were asked to freely identify five strengths and five weaknesses of the school and to volunteer their comments.

In the survey 22 per cent liberally listed 'discipline' as a strength as opposed to 14 per cent who deliberately listed it as still a weakness. The rest of the respondents freely listed different strengths and weaknesses, perchance implying that discipline management was taken in stride.

The students reported in general that they found the resolutions helpful and that cleanliness in the school had particularly improved. Bullying nevertheless remained an issue, especially with the first and second formers. They also aspired for the prefects and other student-leaders to show more initiative and role-modelling and in turn they should be respected more by their peers.

The senior students agreed that the rules went some way in improving general behaviour and found that the easiest resolution to follow was to bring all the lesson material. They found that the most difficult was to be on time - grooming in front of the toilet mirrors was still too much of an indulgence.

They also wanted to keep the rules for this and the next scholastic year. The students seemed also to appreciate the positive reinforcement in the form of certificates awarded to the class that managed best to keep to the rules.

There is, of course, an amount of bureaucracy that had to be introduced. Record-keeping on the part of the students was a long and tedious affair to sustain and student self-evaluation was not always the desired honest-to-goodness exercise one had hoped for. In fact it was not very effective among the more difficult classes.

The positive spin-off of the record keeping was that the head of school could immediately identify the classes that were lagging behind by looking at a few statistics. A number of students expressed the fear that subtle if not overt bullying still intimidated them and that they would be happier at school without this negative peer influence - so would all of us.

There is still more hill to scale but there is already so much that we have already climbed. The hydra-headed obstacle to a successful holistic education remains the dysfunctional family and the broader 'underclass' that will not subscribe to school values. One can hardly bask in the ignoble satisfaction of serving well students who are motivated by their families, at the expense of other students who come from homes that don't know any better.

Yet, and unhappily so, if discipline is not strong enough, coupled with equally strong corrective action, the same sub-culture would reproduce itself in school, and this would perpetuate failure and the wide social gap. It is this vicious circle that needs be broken. Other-wise one would have to resign oneself to the view that the emancipating potential of a formal education is only a utopia.

Mr Vella has been head of school at Maria Assumpta GSS since 2003 after having been head of the neighbouring girls' secondary for the previous two years. The two schools have since then been merged into one.