In pursuit of greater discipline, the education secretary, Michael Gove, this week advocated tougher sanctions: the picking up of litter and the writing of lines as punishment. Setting aside the paradox of using handwriting as punishment in an educational setting and community service as a sanction rather than a moral duty, one wonders what he hopes to achieve. Are our educators so thick that they can't work out how to apply sanctions, and need the minister's rescue?

His concerns are legitimate. Pupil violence is manifesting itself in younger students, and in some schools teachers are struggling to maintain control. As the school leaving age increases to 18, physically bigger pupils will pose greater challenges.

Even though we are reluctant to admit it, punishment is fundamentally the delivery of legitimate revenge. The violated regain power by violating. It makes them feel better because, in expressing power over the offender, they reassure themselves that they have regained control, a prerequisite for a sense of personal safety. Some element of humiliation is an added bonus, as the punisher is reminded of their supremacy by generating servitude in the offender. What would the street cleaners of Britain make of the minister's use of litter collection as a punishment?!

But despite the emotional rebalancing, punishment actually doesn't work. It's effective if offenders are removed from the opportunity to commit a crime, that is imprisoned or permanently excluded, but it rarely leads to improved behaviour. The evidence is there for all to see. Across the world in youth offending or custody programmes, there are consistent recidivism rates of 78-80%.

With Kids Company's therapeutic and social work programmes across 48 schools, I've noticed that children who can obey rules on the whole stick to them, and those who don't defy punitive strategies and are excluded from schools, sometimes illegally, and in a way that exacerbates inequality between social classes and further reduces opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Initiatives like the Andrew Reed debate series aim to find solutions to overcome child deprivation.

Ofsted has raised the alarm and, as some of the schools involved in illegal exclusions are part of government flagship programmes, the education secretary has the muzzles out for it, too.

Persistent bad behaviour involves pupils with complex psychosocial needs who exhibit antisocial behaviour for good reason. Society finds it hard to accept the rationality of bad behaviour and, consequently, ends up suppressing it as opposed to exercising curiosity to resolve it.

A portfolio of neuropsychological and psychiatric research has begun to shed light on the logic of antisocial behaviour in disturbed children. This has found that a combination of maltreatment and neglect leads to structural and functional changes in children's brains, rendering them more impulsive and less able to appraise situations calmly. They attribute to a neutral face the intention to attack; they can't hold eye contact because they find the human glance unbearable; some of them have frontal lobes which no longer activate when exposed to violence. For children like this, punishment doesn't work, because they have disorganised thinking. They don't register learning through sanctions, and when punished they despair and do worse.

However, governments tend to use less than 1% of research to inform policy. Failures in discipline are predominantly generated through failures in social care. Pupils affected by damaging care environments arrive in school unable to regulate their emotions. Staff are poorly resourced to deal with the scale of the problem.

Ofsted has said that more than 60% of children's social work departments are failing to address the needs of vulnerable children. Gove, however, avoids the interplay between poor social care and failures in schools. It's too big a job. It requires a radical rethink and moral courage to make children's services fit for purpose. So instead he goes for the easy option: a portion of the cake he can cope with becomes defined as the whole cake. He opts for the appearance of potency by generating delusions of order and power. He gets to be the minister with punishment as the answer, attributing to himself decisiveness, supremacy and competency.

The victims of his repression are vulnerable children who can neither challenge him nor hold him accountable. Their only objection: defiance. Surely the children of this country deserve better leadership than a politician proclaiming potency through punishment.

• This article is based on a speech Camila Batmanghelidjh gave last night at the inaugural Andrew Reed City Debate