Inclusion: ruining education since 1978



Sir Alan Steer has been poking his oar in again. From the genius that brought us gems like "Only 2% of UK schools have unsatisfactory behaviour" and "behaviour is no worse than it's ever been" comes a new report: 'Excluded teenagers who receive a minimal amount of home tuition are falling into a life of crime and drugs'. Who would have thought? This just in: Fire Is Hot.

Now Surallun seems like a very nice man indeed; I warm to him; I embrace his beardy jowls. But I suspect that if you were to unscrew his skull cap, fill the brain cavity with hard sweets, and somehow mount his lower mandible onto a spring mechanism, you would have a reasonable impression of a Pez Dispenser. Tony Blair's Behaviour Tsar (I had to settle for Guru. It's like a number plate: you have to put your name down on a list, and hope you don't get 'Behaviour Monkey' or 'Behaviour Fairy') has told a cross-party commons committee that children that get themselves turned out of schools often end up as bad lads, hanging round bus shelters and mocking authority.

I imagine the Committee must have fallen off their sedan chairs when they heard that: badly behaved kids often end up badly behaved adults? But Mr Steer! Surely it's the well behaved, high-achieving students that fill our high-security prisons? It's not? Then the world has gone mad! Once they composed themselves I'm sure they thanked Surallun and asked him if he'd mind closing the door on his way out. Seriously; who gets paid for these kind of homilies and home-truths? Who pays for them? Oh yes, us, cheers.
"We have children who are out of school who are receiving as little as an hour a week of home tuition, week after week, month after month," he says. Oh, the horror, the horror. As a teacher who is regularly asked to coordinate or provide work for pupils on temporary exclusions, I can happily report that the return rate of work provided hovers somewhere around the 1% mark. Obviously schools rightly have a legal obligation to provide work for pupils on fixed term exclusions, as part of their national entitlement to free and compulsory education (and we can get ourselves in hot water if we don't provide it).

If only there were some way, Surallun, of these children receiving proper tuition in a wide range of subjects, in custom built premises where they were surrounded by curriculum experts, given free materials, support, and a structured diet of mental and physical challenges that eventually led to qualifications and valuable life experience.

Oh wait, they already do. It's called school. These children put themselves outside of the mainstream community. As a society, we burn a healthy proportion of our GDP on education, and quite right too. The twentieth century saw a progressive increase in the age, gender and curriculum entitlement available to children in the UK, which you can add to Human Rights and the Enlightenment as pillars of Human Civilisation and progress. We try to get as many children into schools as possible for a huge number of reasons. And we mustn't pretend that they're all about the beautiful flower that is the child:

1. Children deserve to flourish
2. Society's values need to be passed on efficiently
3. Societies need skilled work forces across the social spectrum
4. More educated children tend to generate more tax, commit less crimes, and require less welfare commitment.

And so on. It's better to be explicit about our assumptions of the aims of education, rather than pretending that it's all about growing beautiful seeds into fabulous butterflies, or something, and let's hold hands and cry while we talk about how much we love sunrises.

Steer's comments, while being pleasingly tautological, offer us an insight into the apparent helplessness of our school systems to deal with wide-scale misbehaviour.

It isn't their fault- it's ours. Somewhere along the line, we have blurred the definition of responsibility. These children are now the helpless passengers of the school bus, driven to destinies over which they have no influence.

I'm sorry, I must have missed the memo. I teach a lot of Philosophy, which makes me pretty rubbish at most things that involve plugs and building anything useful, but I do know this: moral responsibility assumes the existence of Free Will. If you want to be a Hard Determinist, and speculate that there's no such thing as Free Will, then fine- good luck to you. But the society you envisage as a result of such a conclusion is very different to the way we normally view the human condition. At some point we have to accept that people are responsible for their actions. Children above 11 can be treated as criminally responsible; my pre-teen nieces know the difference between right and wrong. By the time they get to secondary school, their actions are their responsibility. Poverty isn't a necessary condition for anti-social behaviour. Children are responsible for their own behaviour, certainly by secondary. Teachers and schools are responsible for how we react to that behaviour.

All children should be included in mainstream education. Oh you bloody think so? This kind of thinking makes Astrology look credible. The initial aims of this policy were admirable; to make sure that children with disabilities (and I mean proper disabilities, not just 'gets a bit angry if he can't spit on you') weren't marginalised simply on the basis of physical impediments. I might add here that, for instance, provision for blind children in any kind of education wasn't made compulsory until ten years after it was made so for the able-sighted.

But this has evolved in the laboratories of simple-minded educationalist panjandrums to include all children, at any point on the behaviour spectrum, whether their 'need' is behavioural, emotional, social, or any other definition of 'disadvantaged'. Suddenly, somehow, children who exhibit extreme-spectrum behaviour aren't rude or aggressive any more- no, they have 'Emotional and Social Behavioural Disorders'. Pupils who kick off and swear are sent to 'anger management' classes, as if their behaviour was somehow removed from them as people, in much the same way as people with enormous beer guts sometimes pat them disapprovingly and say, 'I'll need to get rid of this,' as if it was something that had been sewn onto them without their knowledge.

Keeping really badly behaved kids in school has been a disaster for children for a generation now. It was the first thing I noticed the very minute I stepped back into classrooms after a twenty year absence, and my opinion hasn't changed. Which ties into...

The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. I have yet to discover a philosopher or educationalist who wouldn't die of shame if they were to try to justify this, but that's exactly what we do. We pretend that the child who brings violence or interminable rudeness into the classroom somehow has needs that must be serviced, even at the clear expense of the vast majority of the room. How many lessons are tied up, ruined and abandoned because some charmless oaf has decided to throw her toys out the pram? New teachers are particularly prone to this kind of attack on the classroom, because they haven't yet realised that the rules are no longer in their favour. The child has needs, to be sure: they need to shut the hell up and learn.
It should be as hard as possible to remove a child from school. And it is, it is. Not only do Government guidelines clearly express that schools should exclude permanently as rarely as possible, but schools with high levels of exclusion are judged as having unsatisfactory behaviour by OfSTED. So unsurprisingly, the vast majority of schools have resorted to the easiest way to turn down the dial: they exclude less. Which has the same logic as observing that a society with lots of people in prison must have high levels of crime; ergo, put less people in prison. Problem solved! Except it isn't. The causal relationship runs backwards in this uniquely backwards way of solving the problem. Or to put it another way: every time I go the doctor there's something wrong with me- so don't go to the doctor! Boom boom!

Keep them in! Let schools become a prison for all. As you might guess, I support streaming, because it allows children to be taught at a level appropriate to their ability. Mainstream comprehensive education is a noble aim, but we mustn't be blinkered by orthodoxy to place it beyond scrutiny or critique: it sought to overcome the obvious class divisions of the Tripartite system of grammar, technical and mainstream schools, but it incurred another problem; how do you pitch a lesson to a class of very mixed ability? Oh, there are ways, to be sure, but it's an enormous challenge to the working teacher, lesson after lesson. Almost inevitably, the middle ability gets catered for far more than the extreme spectrum children, which is why we have SEN and G&T inelegantly stapled on to lesson planning.

Incidentally, I have a solution to this mess; I'm not a doom-sayer ('Doom! Doom, I say!'). Bring back the Special Schools in an enormous program that creates meaningful, professional environments where children with genuine special educational needs (as opposed to a wheat intolerance) are catered for with a student/teacher ratio that actually makes a difference. You see, I'm not one of those that just wants the difficult kids slung out on the streets- I actually want them to land somewhere that will look after them with a combination of tough love and concerned structure and discipline. Mainstream classes are not the right environment for a minority of the children we 'teach'; teachers don't have the time, and the other kids can't afford the disruption to their lives and educations.

If Alan Steer really wanted to make a helpful suggestion, he could abandon the well-meant but hopelessly undermining attitude that behaviour isn't really so bad, and that kids will behave well if the lessons are more interesting, and instead tackle the main causes of the behaviour crisis in schools: inclusion, inclusion, and...oh yes. Inclusion.

Comments

  1. Very true and well expressed, and it's great to be reminded that it's entirely legitimate, even altruistic, to dislike inclusion - you don't have to be a heartless monster. As someone once pointed out to me, a really aggressive and disruptive pupil might be a nuisance to us, but be a cause of real, traumatic fear in his or her peers.
    Do you see any end in sight, or is it simply too expensive and heretical to change the system we have?

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  2. I was always amused by the term 'social inclusion' when what it really meant was 'anti-social inclsuion'.

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  3. 'Do you see any end in sight, or is it simply too expensive and heretical to change the system we have?'

    Not for a loooong time; I can't imagine how money could be found to recreate/ design a national system of Special Units that would be aimed at education as well as containment. These venues have to be staffed by trained professionals with skill sets that encompass subject knowledge, SEN, tough behaviour management, etc etc.

    What would be conceivable, easy and immediate would be an attitude shift between schools, LEAs, OfSTED and the DfE- agree that exclusions are no longer to be considered a stain on the school SEF (or whatever replaces that wretched, diabolical document) and issue guidelines that exclusions are an appropriate part of a whole school behaviour strategy, rather than a barely tolerated last-last-last resort of shame.

    I guarantee that, instead of flooding the streets and other schools with rebellious vandals, the vast majority of students would curb their behaviour before they got to that stage, because they would realise that schools mean business. As it stands, kids are very aware that the school has to tie itself in knots before an exclusion can happen. But if they were alive to the fact that the naughty tunnel actually leads somewhere they don't want to go, then all but the hardest nuts would do the maths and restrain themselves.

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  4. Francis said...

    I was always amused by the term 'social inclusion' when what it really meant was 'anti-social inclsuion'.

    And the ironic thing is that the policy was aimed at mainstreaming unfairly marginalised kids with disabilities. Including such notorious disabilities as 'rudeness' and 'lazy, selfish sod' to that category is an insult to people who struggle with genuine restrictions to their liberty, not made-up determinist fairy tales.

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  5. I've always found it an amusing aside in my head, to consider during school based conversations on inclusion how antisocial behaviour is dealt with in society as a whole and how it is forced to be dealt with in schools.

    More generally though inclusion only failed due to a complete lack of funding. Anyone can be included within society with the correct support. That support might be two sets of handcuffs and a ball-gag but it is possible.

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  6. Inclusion only works where there are strategies in place to ensure that students are able to change their behaviour to enable them to access mainstream provision. It is down to the individual to develop their behaviour however schools need to acknowledge that many children don’t know how to or have the support outside of school to enable this positive development. There are strategies that work and can be implemented. With these in place then surely inclusion is better than exclusion? As much as I fear you will baulk at having to take emotions into consideration, behaviour is the result of emotional responses and where a student has an unhealthy response to authority and loss of control then functioning well at school is incredibly difficult. Each traditional sanction and disciplinary measure just inflames that child’s issues with authority and their behaviour worsens. It isn’t difficult to work with a child and change this response. Children do exclude themselves from mainstream education and I guess it comes down to whether the school can utilise the opportunity to work with the child on this level to enable them to change or whether they have to be excluded in order to gain that support. One benefit from engaging with the child in this work is that the school can avoid the messy, drawn-out, disruptive path to exclusion because the child’s behaviour improves and surely that has to be worth it?

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  7. This is not entirely on the same topic as your behaviour issues but...As a parent of a child with severe disabilities (in Aus) I tried the mainstream approach but figured fairly early on that having a child in the same classroom as other "normal" children only means "inclusion" to those paying the bills and ticking the boxes. To my child it means she does not get the life skills etc that she needs most in her education. Thank goodness for the fantastic staff at our special schools!!!

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  8. @ Active Interventions. I fear we share more common ground than you suspect: I think that many children can be turned around in an environment that supports, encourages and nurtures, rather than clobbers, demands and bellows. But alas, mainstream education just isn't the place for such well-meant intentions. Putting it cleanly and clearly, teachers don't have the time to get to the emotional core of every student in a room of 25- the system is brutally ill prepared to allow us to do so. So until we have the funding to pay for specialists and properly maintained exclusion units, we have to make do with the resources and tactics that DO work. And that means clear boundaries, and predictable penalties for crossing them. That kind of structure is meaningful for the vast majority of students. And for the ones too damaged to respond? I submit that as a society we sometimes have no option other than to deal with the damage, rather than cure the ill. An imperfect outcome, but perhaps a pragmatic one.

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  9. I agree that we share common ground and fully support the fact that mainstream teachers don't have the time to get to the emotional core of behaviour issues. However I am perhaps more optimistic, based on evidence acquired through my own work, that students can change their behaviour within mainstream education with short term dynamic interventions. Having worked in specialist provision in addition to mainstream,I know that the opportunities provided within mainstream education are far superior and if we can change things from within rather than having to exclude these children then we would be providing them with a far stronger foundation in life. I do believe that children have to work to manage their behaviour to fit in with the 'norms' of society including education and that this prepares them far more suitably for the rest of their lives, including employment. It also means that they are likely to have a far more productive life and make a positive contribution to society. I know it's possible. It does require funding but far less funding than currently spent on the current pathway for these young people including Eduction Otherwise provision which often struggles to adequately support these young people, the cost of youth offending and long term unemployment. It requires a change in attitude and emphasis but as I said I'm an optimist so I believe it can happen.

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  10. . I might add here that, for instance, provision for blind children in any kind of education wasn't made compulsory until ten years after it was made so for the able-sighted. Difference Between Private and Public School Educations In Orange CountyEducation

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