One good thing about spitting is that it helps to pass the time. It’s morning, about nine o’clock, and down on the streets of south London the school buses have dumped their loads and the playgrounds have gone quiet. Up here, on the top floor of the tower block, the day has started, as it always does, with Karen and Philly and Annie May and the others, sitting slouched on the black-tile floor by the liftshaft, staring at the scorch mark at the top of the rubbish chute and smoking fags and watching the minutes go by and practising their spitting.
In the past, they’ve tried hanging out in the shopping malls, but the old Bill hassled them. It’s the same on the streets, really. Sometimes, they go round Philly’s house – his mum doesn’t mind, she’s in bed all day. But mostly, each morning they sit here in the block and, if it gets too cold with the wind blowing in from the open walkways, they go down onto the estate and, in amongst the dog crap and the flower tubs filled with fag ends, they find some litter and bring it back up here and light a fire on the landing, and then they sit and watch the smoke. A day in the life of a truant.
It’s better than school and, as the morning passes, they sit and sometimes talk, but not too much. When they first started coming up here, they used to play in the lift. It wasn’t much of a game: push the button, wait for the lift to arrive, get in, go mental – jump up and down as hard as you can and batter the fuck out of its walls and floor with your feet and your fists – then wait for someone else on another floor to call the lift and hope it doesn’t work. There used to be a youth club, near the bottom of the block, but it closed. Down on the ground floor, there’s a food store. Annie May says she’s seen them picking their noses with their fingers and it’s disgusting because then they go back in and touch all the food. She says one of them tried to shag Karen and another girl, and now Karen’s got to give evidence on video. She says it’s better in summer. They go up the fire escape onto the roof and then they can look down at the streets below and spit on them.
Up here on the block, with half a dozen subdued children, it is easy to imagine that this is a small problem. At first sight, the official statistics confirm this. The Audit Commission says that there are some 12,000 children each year who are permanently excluded from school and a further 150,000 who are excluded temporarily. Which is not ideal but it is a tiny fraction of the whole pupil population. The commission also says that each year, a million of the eight million children in our schools will be absent without authorisation. But many of those absences are for only one day.
The numbers conceal as much as they reveal. They say nothing about the children who are ‘cleansed’ – pushed out of schools by headteachers who avoid officially recording them as exclusions. They say nothing about the children who turn up at school to be registered and then walk straight out. Most of all they ignore all the children who are out of school but who do not qualify to be counted. There is an apparently vast reservoir of students whose absence from school is authorised by parents who want them at home as carers for siblings or who just cannot be bothered to send them. And there are untold thousands who are not registered to any school at all because they have fallen through the system, usually because of their families’ unstable lives: their parents are homeless and stay away from the authorities for fear of having their kids taken into care; they move and cannot cope with the bureaucracy of a new LEA; they stumble from one disastrous estate to another, and the education authorities simply lose track of them; they are among the 2,500 children of refugee families who, according to the Refugee Council, are being illegally denied an education; they are the children of travellers; they are in jail.
But this is not about numbers. You really begin to see the scale of the problem only when you first catch a glimpse of what lies beneath it, when you see that the politicians who talk about ’sin bins’ and who see this all as a matter of discipline are ignoring or concealing two central truths: first, that the children who spill out of school have bubbled over the edge of a boiling cauldron of trouble and that this has far less to do with discipline than it has to do with an epidemic of emotional damage, particularly among the 30% of British children who live in poverty; second, that these children are the most visible part of the central problems of our schools, how to teach the new mass of disaffected children who see no point in learning, how to give any reality at all to the once vibrant idea that education is the natural escape route from poverty. It is a riddle whose solution in this country has been lost and buried in deep-seated structural problems which are being left almost entirely untouched and unchallenged by current government strategy.
Come back to the block. By noon, a few of the faces have pushed off to play on the buses. That’s not much of a game either. You get on the bus without a ticket, see how far you can travel before you get thrown off, then you walk home or maybe catch another bus, if you can be bothered. Other faces have arrived now. They all have the same kind of faces, with the shine rubbed off, and the same kind of stories. Listen to Karen, sitting with her back to the liftshaft wall, listless, aimless, hopeless, the kind of truant who gives David Blunkett nightmares – she’s not been to school regularly since she was eleven, and she is now fourteen. Her story is very simple. When she was seven, her father started using heroin and crack cocaine and fairly soon he got her mother on to it, too. Until then, life had been OK. They had a nice house, there was food in the kitchen, she was going to school. Once they started using, the mother and father slid downhill fast, taking Karen and her three younger sisters with them.
Her dad used to take her out thieving. She used to knock on the door, a little girl with gaps in her teeth, and if there was someone in, she’d ask for a glass of water and run along; if not, her dad would smash a window and they’d get inside and take whatever they could. She got arrested for that eventually, when she was eleven, and spent 36 hours in a cell. By that time, she had long lost sight of normal life. She says there was no food in the house, and to feed her sisters as well as herself, she’d go and borrow money off friends or eat at someone else’s house or nick things from the shops or scavenge in rubbish bins. They had no light in the house, and no heat either. Her mum and dad just did drugs and watched the time go by.
She became the stand-in mother, feeding and caring for the three younger ones. At first, when she stopped going to school, she still took the others, but then it got too much and so they all stopped. From time to time the welfare officer used to come round and bang on the door ,and Karen says her mum just told them to blank it and keep quiet and then the welfare officer would go away. If there were letters about it, they just ignored them. Eventually, her dad got sent to jail – four years for robbery – and her mum was left on her own with four children and a heroin habit. And that’s the way it still is now.
So why does she not want to sit in school? Because she is too sure there is no point, too scared to be caught out failing, too determined to advertise her indifference, too angry and too cynical – too emotionally damaged. When they are not up here in the block, Karen and the others spend most of their time in some old railway arches which have been converted into a kind of refuge for young people. They are run by a psycotherapist called Camila Batmanghelidjh who was taken to court by her building society because she stopped paying her mortgage and used the money to set up this day club for the kids under the arches.
Batmanghelidjh reckons that one in three children in the inner cities have some form of emotional or behavioural difficulty. Several hundred children a day find their way to her arches. Most of them are more or less out of school. They live, she says, in a state of ‘emotional coldness’. This is the hidden core of what the politicians dismiss as mere truancy and exclusion.
Last year, the Office for National Statistics reported that ten per cent of Britain’s children suffer from mental disorders – anxiety, depression, obsessions, clinically-significant behaviour disorders and hyperactivity – but that figure (which is worrying enough) masked the real story, which is the concentration of mental disorders among the children of the poor. The ONS found, for example, that among the children of families where both parents are unemployed, some 20% have a mental health problem. They also found that children with this kind of illness were four times more likely to truant than others. They were also three times more likely to have specific learning difficulties, three times more likely to have special educational needs and ten times more likely to be in trouble with the police, all of which are linked to the kind of behaviour which leads to children being excluded.
Unhappiness always has its reason. One of the fourteen-year-old girls who moves between the block and Batmanghelidjh’s arches has started working from time to time as a street prostitute. It seems she is doing so at the behest of her mother, who needs the money. There is an eleven-year-old boy who lives with his aging gran because neither of his parents want anything to do with him; a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother died of cancer years ago, whose father is preoccupied with selling drugs, who has been in and out of care and who had her first abortion at thirteen (she has not been to school for two and a half years); another thirteen-year-old girl who is gives money for sex by an elderly man; two brothers, aged seventeen and eleven, both of them drug runners; a twelve-year-old girl who recently found her father after he had overdosed and who has now been sent to live with her mother, who makes no secret of not wanting her. On and on it goes: the fifteen–year-old boy who had been through four prisons and eight children’s homes before he was discovered to be suffering from undiagnosed Tourette’s Syndrome; the eleven-year-old boy who suffers from severe anxiety and who has just been turfed out of his sixth school. His nine-year-old sister has a hearing disorder, anxiety attacks and she wets her bed; the two of them live in a room with a concrete floor with a mother who grew up in care, who is said to have no idea how to look after children (she has forbidden them to have any toys). You don’t have to diagnose the damage; you can weigh it.
The strategy of the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, is all about ‘inclusivity’. He has introduced a complex package of sticks and carrots to persuade schools and LEAs to divert truants and the excluded back into the classroom. By 2002, he wants a reduction of 30% in both statistics; every secondary school and every LEA has been given a target. He is paying new Pupil Support Grants so that a thousand schools can set up Learning Support Units to help them to reach the targets. If they miss the targets, he will withdraw their grants. Some schools will also receive money to pay for learning mentors to help disaffected children. He has given LEAs new powers to join appeals against exclusion and made it their responsibility to pick up the bill for the education of those who nevertheless are excluded. Finally, the Home Office has introduced new fines for parents who fail to send their children to school and new powers for police to pick up truants on the streets.
It is important to recognise that this strategy has its merits. Although Mr Blunkett refuses to acknowledge the real importance of poverty, he is targeting extra resources on some of the poorest areas . Funding for learning mentors, for example, is being delivered through the Excellence in Cities programme which is focused on six metropolitan areas. And although the press (including the Guardian) constantly describe the new Learning Support Units as ’sin bins’ – ie places where you throw away bad people – it is a term which the DFEE rejects. Behind all the rhetoric about discipline, the reality is that many schools are now are attempting to tackle the underlying problems of the most disaffected children.
However, Mr Blunkett’s strategy is also riddled with risks, some of them quite alarming. In general, there are two problems. First, the tactics of the new school units and also the DFEE’s particular version of mentoring are, at best, untested and, at worst, proven failures. If these schemes fail to change the way in which these children are behaving, we will have locked into our schools a group of the most delinquent and difficult children and we will start to see the kind of violence of student against student, student against teacher which has become part of the currency of daily life, for example, in some inner city schools in the United States; those who neverthless end up on the streets will find less provision than ever. Mr Blunkett is crossing a precipice on a bridge made of balsa wood.
The second problem – which runs like blood through the DFEE’s veins – is that Mr Blunkett’s decisions are polluted by politics. In key respects, as we will see, he has, on the one hand, made moves to persuade schools to deal with disaffected children, and then with the other hand, launched politically-inspired initiatives which undermine those moves. Beyond that, his strategy suffers, like almost every other step he takes, from his political decision to leave in place the whole package of reforms introduced by the former education secretary, Kenneth Baker, in the late 1980s.
As this series has previously shown, this structure penalises the most disaffected children: they perform badly in exams; their schools tumble down the league tables; middle-class families use their professional skills and their strength in the property market to take their motivated children away to schools with a less disaffected intake; when they do that, they take funds away with them; the struggling school is left with even fewer motivated children and even less money to educate them and so it spirals downwards. In short, the children of the poor get the schools with the poorest budgets, an imbalance that is not corrected by the available subsidies for needy children which notoriously are rationed, inefficiently distributed and inadeqate in the first place.
Furthermore, these schools have had a direct financial incentive to exclude the most difficult children in order to improve their position in the league tables. As the Baker reforms took hold, exclusions rose five-fold in five years. Leaving Kenneth Baker’s system in place, Mr Blunkett has now introduced counter-measures to try to give schools a financial interest in not excluding children. The problem is that neither structure simply provides a neutral framework in which a school can decide a child’s future purely and simply on grounds of education and behaviour.
If you visualise class differences in this country as a steep slope, Kenneth Baker came along and built a house which reproduced the whole slope, so that every floor was at a steep angle, tipping the weakest children downwards. David Blunkett bought the house, refused to admit it was crooked and now runs around nailing the furniture to the floor and yelling at everyone else every time his dinner slides off the table.
More than that, in the specific area of emotional damage, the bad structure goes beyond Kenneth Baker’s schooling plans. Come back to the block and to Camila Batmanghelidjh’s arches. The morning is past, the afternoon is wearing on and, up in the block, where Batmanghelidjh is not in charge, finally they have found something to do. They are smoking hash. Batmanghelidjh knows they do it. She knows it is part of the daily routine, for as long as they can afford the hash. And worse. She has one twelve-year-old who had rocks of crack cocaine found in his pocket. She has urged them not do it, but she is not about to hammer them for it, because she knows why it is happening: “They use cannabis to control their moods”. And why do they do that? Because just about nobody else is doing anything to help them with those moods. The ONS can tell the world that 20% of poor children are mentally ill. Nobody quarrels with the finding (which has been replicated by other studies). But this country’s strange and terrible reaction has been to shake its head and then to offer virtually no care at all.
The Audit Commission last year found that less than half the health authorities in the country even had a policy for child mental health and that, amongst those who did, there were all kinds of gaps and overlaps where different agencies were failing to work together. The ONS similarly, having recorded the scale of mental illness among children, also found that 30% of these children had not been seen even once by a specialist, or even by a GP, let alone been effectively treated. At Young Minds, a national charity working to promote the mental health of children and young people, Deb Loeb told us: “The waiting lists and lack of resources are just desperate.”
There is a national shortage of child psychiatrists. Four years ago, the NHS executive was recording increasing concern about “the fragmentation and reduction in child and adolescent mental health services around the country”. This month, the Department of Health told us it has only 180 child psychiatrists in the whole country and that most of those are in the south east.
There is a national network of educational psychologists, 1820 of them, but everyone who works in the field says that they have become overwhelmed with the bureaucratic business of assessing children for ’statements’ which entitle schools to extra money to help them. Brian Harrison Jennings, secretary of the Association of Educational Pscyhologists, said: “We are so busy seeing the next child being referred to us that we don’t have time to implement the very course of action that we recognise they would benefit from. All we can do is to refer them to someone else and, for the most part, that someone-else may not be able to see them either.” A South London parent whose school has 115 children with special educational needs, of whom only one has so far been statemented, told us: “Round here, educational psychologists come round about as often as Haley’s Comet.”
The ’statementing’ of children has itself become part of the problem, subverted by spending cuts and overwhelmed by demand. The Audit Commission last year found that only 48% of draft statements are prepared within the statutory timescale of 18 weeks; one in ten trusts could not offer an appointment within six months of referral, and in five areas, the average wait for an assessment was more than a year. Even if the child is assessed, its appeal for money goes to the local Special Needs Panel, whose funds have been so rationed that frequently they will cover only a minimal number of hours support in the school. Baroness Warnock, whose 1978 inquiry introduced statementing now regards the system as a disaster. (Mr Blunkett might note that in the TES last December, she said it was ’strikingly absurd’ that her inquiry had been forbidden to count social deprivation as in any way contributing to educational needs.) Last month (June), the government withdrew plans for a new bill which was intended to re-organise the whole area of special educational needs.
The only other specialist support for disaffected children comes from Educational Welfare Officers. Like the educational psychologists, they have become overwhelmed, each of them responsible for an average of three thousand children, according to the National Foundation for Educational Research, who found EWOs were frequently too busy with the paperwork of truancy even to begin to deal with its causes.
For the most part, the damaged children are left with their parents, who often are part of the problem; and with their teachers, who have very little time and even less specialist training. Researchers from the National Association of Social Workers in Education recorded in a 1998 report the voice of a single damaged child who spoke for the thousands: “I was having troubles at home, I was having troubles in the school, and the troubles that were in school were coming home and I wouldn’t say nothing to the school because I didn’t want any more trouble.”
It is easy to imagine that there is a safety net somewhere else, that the children outside the liftshaft in the block are unusual. They are not. All over the country, we found children out of school whose lives were grossly disfigured and who were receiving no effective help: an eleven-year-old girl in Kent who was spending her evenings in a van while her mother, a prostitute, pleasured punters in the back (no school for 18 months when we last heard of her); a 14-year-old girl in Hammersmith who had been living in a car with her homeless parents; an eleven-year-old boy, also in Hammersmith, who was found abandoned at Heathrow Airport; a diaspora of Somalian children, some of whom have seen their parents killed; a 15-year-old girl in North Wales who was sleeping on a bench outside the local Social Services office and still could not get help.
Now look again at David Blunkett’s strategy for truancy and exclusion. The whole structure rests on the effectiveness of the various in-school projects which will attempt to cope with these damaged children. If they fail, the whole thing collapses in disarray and disorder. The biggest scheme – and the only one which is being nationally co-ordinated – is the introduction of mentors as guides and role models for difficult children.
The idea comes from the United States where researchers have found that the Big Brothers Big Sisters movement has had real success, but the same researchers warned that “these findings do not mean that the benefits of mentoring occur automatically”. Although the DFEE has quoted this research in support of its scheme, it has failed so far to introduce the kind of rigorous screening of volunteers, training, supervision and support on which the American scheme relies. When the DFEE commissioned its own research from the Centre for Social Action, the result was a loud alarm bell.
Echoing the warning from the United States, the CSA reported that “mentoring
is not a panacea that will magically cut crime long-term, reduce exclusion
and reduce youth unemployment at a stroke”. It warned that the DFFE needed to invest heavily and when they looked at one project in detail, they found signs that the DFEE had failed to create effective schemes on the American model: “The mentoring relationships created are too shallow to make a difference and only have value to the young person as a means of avoiding lessons and the opportunity of a free trip.” The CSA concluded: “What is regrettable is seeing the potential of this form of practice wasted through insufficient planning, lack of money, lack of communication and lack of a philosophical base that values young people’s participation.”
And yet, the Schools Minister, Estelle Morris, this May claimed that there was already evidence that the DFEE mentoring was having “a positive impact on pupils’ behaviour, attendance at school and attitudes to learning.” Her department made no mention of the CSA findings but said that the minister was referring to evidence which had been produced by the National Foundation for Educational Research. We checked. In fact, the NFER report produced no statistical evidence whatsoever of any improvement in attendance or any other aspect of pupil behaviour. Oddly, the NFER researchers decided not to interview any of the children involved nor to use questionnaires which some of them completed. Instead, they quoted positive anecdotal comments from some of the organisers and then revealed without comment the startling fact that the average time which children spent with their mentors was only one hour a fortnight during the academic year, ie 21 hours in a calendar year. Set this beside the conclusion of the US researchers who studied schemes where children were spending 120 hours over 15 months with their mentors and concluded: “The time together does not seem sufficient to offset poor school performance, negative influences on self-esteem and 14 or more years of living in poverty. While mentors can teach responsibility and values, discuss the importance of education and trying one’s best, they cannot be expected to completely neutralise the harsh conditions in which many of these adolescents live.” Estelle Morris added: “The results under my Department’s programmes speak for themselves.
So far as the myriad different in-school projects are concerned, there is simply no evidence at all of whether they will succeed or fail. Clearly, they are well intentioned, and, although some are simply exercises in policing to catch truants and bring them back to school, others are imaginative efforts to tackle children’s problems: Circles of Friends, where schools use the peer pressure of successful students; Behaviour Support Teams, which pass behaviour-management techniques on to teachers, support staff and parents; Nurture Groups, which separate difficult children and attempt to teach them how to be students. Some schools are reporting encouraging signs of progress.
However, almost all of these schemes suffer from a potentially devastating weakness. They rely on the same overstretched network of specialists who are already struggling to find time to work effectively and so they attempt to delegate skills to teachers and parents and others, none of whom has any specialist training at all. As a result, they cannot be and do not claim to be therapeutic in any meaningful sense. Teachers are not therapists.
Mr Blunkett’s strategy leaves the gaping void in the care of emotionally damaged children quite unfilled. There are a few genuinely therapeutic schemes in schools. The Place To Be, for example, sends trained counsellors into 28 schools in the London area and is supported by the DFFE. And there are private schemes, like Camila Batmanghelidjh’s arches, which struggle to survive without any statutory funding from the DFEE or anyone else. The rest is at best a shot in the dark and at worst a shot in the head for school staff.
If the approach to disaffected children is frail, the approach to disaffected parents is even weaker. Jenny Price of the Association for Education Welfare Managers, told us: “Fewer truant in the traditional sense, ie absenteeism without people knowing. What is more common is parents who don’t care if they go to school or not, or allow them to stay at home to look after the house or after the kids. There is more of that, and it is more difficult to deal with.” In a sweep on the streets of Sheffield last month, officials found 200 children who should have been in school, 75% of whom were absent with ‘flimsy excuses’ from parents (One family suggested it was the only convenient time when they could buy a hamster). EWOs say that where once, any absence at all would have been investigated, now a parent who writes letters can keep their child off school without much fear of being investigated. If they do get a visit, we were told, all they need to do is to hide behind the door: the EWO is going to be too busy to come back very often, particularly when they have unauthorised absences to deal with.
To deal with this, the DFEE is relying on heavier fines and the new home-school contracts which were introduced last year at a cost of £1.6 million with clear political benefits but without any obvious impact at all on the problem parents. We met truant parents who had been sleeping with their children in a playground, who had fled their homes under siege from violent neighbours, who were addicted to drugs or alcohol or crushed by depression or who complained bitterly that their children were too terrified of gang-bullying to go anywhere near their school. When we asked them about the effect of the new fines and the home-school contracts, they just shrugged.
This profoundly fragile structure has then been undermined by decisions which appear to be political rather than educational. The Social Exclusion Unit and the Audit Commission both studied truancy and exclusion and both stressed that government strategy must be ‘joined up’, involving all of the different local agencies who might be able to help. In October 1998, David Blunkett adopted this view and asked LEAs to prepare three-year plans involving all their agencies, to take effect in April 1999. However, in July 1999, just as his officials had finished approving all the plans, he changed his mind and, as part of his political drive to divert power and money away from the LEAs, he announced that schools would have to take over the job; he gave them only six weeks over the summer holidays to comment on his change of direction.
This devolution not only caused short-term chaos but posed a long-term threat to the idea of a ‘joined-up’ approach by putting all of the other agencies in a secondary position, relying on schools to come to them with money, instead of being a directly-funded part of an LEA plan. The Local Government Association has warned education ministers that their inclusion strategy has been “seriously jeopardised by compulsory devolution”. SEU officials also are said to have complained bitterly. Mr Blunkett has been unmoved.
One particularly worrying part of this devolution has been the attempt to make Educational Welfare Officers work for schools instead of their LEAs. Can an EWO criticise a school which is also an employer? What cover will there be if the EWO is off sick? How can an EWO work effectively with a family whose children are separated in different schools, or maintain a link with a child who moves school within the area? The LGA complains that “policies have been adopted wholesale before they have been evaluated.” The move contradicted advice from the Audit Commission who favoured a central organisation. Under pressure, the DFEE has agreed that it will review the policy after a one-year pilot.
Mr Blunkett launched a further political initiative which also threatens to damage the chances of success for his in-school units – Performance Related Pay for teachers. The object of all these units is to work with difficult children and then to reintegrate them back into the classroom as soon as possible and, at the very latest, according to Mr Blunkett’s guidelines, within two terms. The history of units for difficult children, in or out of school, is dominated by the difficulty of this kind of reintegration.
We spoke to a specialist educational social worker who had worked in a successful therapeutic unit in the past. She told us: “You can build up wonderful relationships with the kids, that’s the good side of it, but you can’t integrate them back into the system. I worked for two or three months with this boy to get him to a point where he would go back to school. He arrives on the first morning and after two minutes some teacher pulls him up and says ‘Where’s your tie? Go back home and get your tie.’ And it all falls apart. And all I can say to the teacher is ‘Fuck you.’ I mean it. That is what I said.”
The new deal on performance-related pay will give experienced teachers a bonus of £2,000, but only if, among other things, their results improve. This adds a new financial incentive to reject the reintegration of a student who is likely to perform badly and to disrupt the class. The result is that at the same time as he is trying to negate the school’s incentive to exclude difficult children, Mr Blunkett has introduced a new incentive for teachers to do precisely the opposite of what he wants. The result of all this is that, on the ground, a crooked extension is being built on the side of the crooked house.
You have to understand that the DFEE’s new investment disguises a simultaneous cut in the education of disaffected children. For years, truants and the excluded have been offered a safety net of 320 LEA Pupil Referral Units outside schools. This network is notoriously inadequate, catering for only a fraction of the needy children with some eight thousand places for the tens of thousands who might need them. There has been nothing unusual in a child waiting a year between a permanent exclusion and a place in a PRU. When finally it comes, it often involves only a few hours of teaching each week, usually in an inadequate building and without any kind of specialist resources to tackle the child’s problems. One PRU teacher told us: “They tell us we have to teach them Macbeth and we say ‘But they can’t read’ so they say ‘Well, play them the video’.” Now, this safety net is to be cut.
In Mr Blunkett’s plan, LEAs no longer have a statutory responsibility for truants outside school. Pregnant schoolgirls and young mothers similarly will be dropped by the PRUs. If they chose to, LEAs are now free to make substantial savings by simply closing any out-of-school unit that was helping truants or schoolgirl mothers. They must continue to provide for any student who is excluded for more than three weeks – but many are cutting back even these units on the assumption that all of their schools will succeed in hitting their targets for retaining these pupils within school walls.
According to LEA documents, Sheffield, for example, will now provide only “the minimum necessary for compliance with statutory duties”. This means: getting rid of 16% of its PRU teachers; completely closing the two units which deal with truants; closing the unit for pregnant girls; then reducing the time available in units for the excluded. The remaining out-of-school units will provide limited short-term help for excluded secondary children (“The aim of the LEA is that all excluded children below Key Stage Four will be reintegrated into school.”) and nothing at all for excluded primary children (“The target for primary-aged pupils is that they… will not be excluded.”). The provision of regular therapeutic care in these units will continue at its present level: ie there will be none.
Alongside these reduced PRUs, Sheffield is providing learning mentors in every secondary school, new Learning Support Units in nine of them and a Pupil Inclusion Team to track pupils and offer advice to schools. This is an improvement in one sense: in-school places are cheaper and they are being subsidised by the DFEE, and so the in-school units can cater for more children than the old PRUs. But the whole strategy relies on one thing – that the schools will hit their targets and succeed in keeping the children within their walls (“The reorganisation of the PRUS reflects those targets”). The LEA documents admit that this will be tough: “It will be difficult to foresee exactly what remaining central needs will be, as the task of inclusion is extremely challenging.” In addition to the cut in the national PRUs, children are being gradually shifted out of the 1,148 special schools and into the mainstream.
The key question for the future is: what happens if the schools miss their targets? What happens if under the cumulative strain of the profound shortage of effective therapy, the weakening of the ‘joined-up’ strategy, the reverse incentives of league tables and now Performance Related Pay – what happens if the entire balsa-wood bridge starts to collapse? If the truants still walk out of the school gates and find nothing, if the excluded are still pushed out of the gates and find even less of a safety net than there used to be, more and more of them will end up on the streets: more child crime, more prostitution, more street gangs, more aimless, listless, hopeless kids on tower block landings.
On paper, the DFEE have an answer to this: schools will hand over their Pupil Support Grant to their LEA who will then make provision. In practice, however, LEA officials warn that schools are going to be very reluctant to hand over much-needed cash and, even if they do, LEAs will no longer have the PRUs to deal with the children.
And what will be happening within the schools? If the in-school units do not succeed in rapidly recycling disaffected chidren back into the classroom, they will fill up and impose a strict gate-keeping policy. Only the most disaffected children will be able to use them, making it particularly difficult for staff to succeed with them. Back in the classroom, teachers will wrestle with those who should be in the units but cannot find a place. For some children, the new system actually provides an incentive to rebel: if they know they cannot be excluded, they may be tempted to be even more disruptive; if they know that there is no unit to scoop them up outside if they play truant, they may be even more likely to walk out of the gate. And this is only the first phase. Remember that if any schools fail to hit their targets for cutting truancy and exclusion, the DFEE will withdraw the new money which it is giving them. They will hit a downward spiral.
And there is no mystery about which schools are most likely to slide down that spiral. It will not be the middle-class schools with their well-motivated intake, it will be the struggling ones, who are overburdened with difficult pupils and who are already suffering the financial penalties of Kenneth Baker’s reforms. Down they will go again, with the DFEE pushing their heads under the water like a swimming-pool bully.
We do not have to guess what this could mean. LEAs and governing bodies are already reacting to the Mr Blunkett’s package of sticks and carrots by fighting headteachers who try to exclude difficult pupils; LEAs are pressurising some schools by warning that their exclusions might be challenged in court and that the LEA would not support the school’s legal costs. The future is already happening. One of the teacher unions, the NASUWT, which has been campaigning against the DFEE’s strategy, compiled a list of incidents in the first four months of this year, where teachers had been ordered to teach children who would otherwise have been excluded. A sample: “Cumbria: 13-year-old boy, last year indecently assaulted welfare assistant, excluded but returned on appeal because of ‘procedural errors’, now boy indecently assaults girl pupil in PE lesson… Lincolnshire: 14-year-old boy, reinstated by appeal panel after permanent exclusion following repeated instances of verbal and sexual abuse of women staff… Oxfordshire: 14-year-old boy, permanent exclusion following three violent incidents including assault of Deputy Head, parents appeal, appeal allowed on procedural grounds… Greater London: 14-year-old boy, history of violent conduct, elbowed teacher in stomach, permanently excluded, LEA overturned exclusion… Rhonnda: 15 year old girl, history of substance abuse and violence to other pupils, threatened woman teacher, permanent exclusion overturned by Governors advised by LEA… Hertfordshire: 10-year-old boy, history of violence and disruption, attacked another pupil and woman teacher who intervened, head reluctant to exclude fearing might be overruled by LEA… Tyneside: 15-year-old boy, excluded from previous school for violent behaviour, attacked teacher with screwdriver, head reluctant to exclude permanently…”
The NASUWT is warning not just that these incidents are occurring but that they are increasing in frequency. So far, this country has seen only one headteacher killed by his students; we don’t have firearms in our schools, but we do have knives; gang fights are relatively rare, but we do have assaults and extortion; rapes are rare, but sexual harrassment in the playground is not; drug syndicates are rare, but drugs are not. All this is sitting out there, waiting for us.
* In order to protect their privacy, the identities of the children in this story have been disguised.
Additional research by Helene Mulholland
