JUST WHY ARE HOPES CONTINUALLY BLIGHTED HERE AND ELSEWHERE?
I had always thought, as I wrote Death of a Nightingale, that there was a case to be made out for special schools even in an Inclusive environment, as an alternative to mainstream schooling for children with special needs.
As I have written and re-written this post – as I considered the amazing growth in numbers of classroom assistants that I am sure was never anticipated when Inclusion was first mooted, but which has subsequently been found to be needed to facilitate it – and as I addressed this in the context of a special school in Gateshead near to where I live, which I was led to believe was under threat of closure, I have crystallised my thoughts still further.
Have we reached the end of a noble dream?
Is there now any case, any good case, for closing another special school? I feel this even more strongly today. As I put it in my book, I am not suggesting that you turn the clock back. We do not need an old clock. We need a new compass.
Some people – and they will be in all political parties, in academia and in central and local government – may be unwilling to go quite that far. They all endorsed a policy that led to the closure of over one hundred special schools in the last decade. U turns in thought are even more difficult that U turns in action.
I call such people “Termites”.
I need you to understand me as I say this.You may think, as you read these posts, that I have nothing good to say about the world. You will see as you read on, this is far from true. You may also think that I am obsessed by Termites. That is true.
If you are joining me for the first time “Termites” in human terms, are those who are programmed to build and defend their nests – yes, I know that everyone tries to do that – but these people are quite incapable of moving on. Richard Dawkins promotes the view that all creatures evolve. These don’t, unless some become super Termites. (Revisit Post 1)
Put another way, they start their life, probably in their ‘teens, with a point of view. As the years go by, they store in their memories everything that confirms that early opinion, and bin everything that conflicts with it. They then end up precisely where they started from, neither wiser nor better informed.
To find them, look no further than politics and academia in no- longer-quite- so-Great Britain. It is one of their favourite breeding grounds. They do no favours to this country at this time.
I did not however expect to see these Termites in Gateshead.
Hitherto I had only good things to say about the Local Authority there. If you want to know how to be a local government authority with vision I always said look at Gateshead.
The Metro Centre, the first out-of-town shopping Mall in the UK, the “Angel of the North”, the £18m improvement to Saltwell Park, with tall cameras to make it safe for young and old to use and enjoy, the £46m project transforming the former Baltic Flour Mills, a disused 1950′s grain warehouse, into one of the biggest and best contemporary art spaces in Europe, the “blinking eye” pedestrian bridge over the river Tyne – the most beautiful curve in creation short of a rainbow, especially beautiful when illuminated at night and, of course, Norman Foster’s Sage which, for me and for many, has given music a brilliance and a clarity of sound I never thought I would hear, and certainly not in the North East of England.
Yes, all is not black. In Gateshead, it is positively in Technicolor. The “blinking eye” bridge at night certainly is.
When I wrote this Post for the first time I said with regret that the Termites had “gotten in” even here. In Gateshead they were intending to close one of their special schools. However I gave the Local Authority an opportunity to challenge this.
Make a note of the day. It is 23 September 2009.They have just said that they have no such intent. Maybe the Termites might not have “gotten in” here after all.
I have just received an email from the Director of Learning and Schools in Gateshead saying that the Council had never “indicated any intention or desire” to close the school that I name – “Cedars School.” And he took exception to my description of him and his colleagues as “Termites”, and rightly so if I was wrong.
The fact that they never “indicated” it, doesn’t necessarily mean that they never had it in their contemplation – a first thought born out of a long-ago bitter experience – but I will bin my doubt, and fully accept that it is not there now.
I do not object to being corrected. In fact I am delighted. If the discussions on the future pattern of SEN provision in Gateshead over the past three years have left some with the wrong impression, and I have been misinformed, I welcome it as will others.
I shall stop pointing an accusing finger at Gateshead, and present my apologies, but I shall leave the opening of this Post as I wrote it.
I shall retain the favourable reference to Gateshead to demonstrate, as I said at the outset, that I do not have an entirely jaundiced view of life in North East England and all the work of local government. Reading my Blog may give you that false impression. It is amazing how easily false impressions can be created.
I say it for one other reason.
Were it not for the recession that now casts a cloud over so many, it would be difficult to improve on the quality of life now on offer on both sides of the river Tyne, as against any other town or city in the land.
What concerns me is that children with special needs should get the attention in their schooling that meets those needs so that they too can share in it, and enjoy it here and elsewhere.
The evidence is piling up that the policy of Inclusion, that led to the closure of over a hundred special schools in the past ten years, will lead many not to achieve this.
There may not be Termites in Gateshead; I write what follows because the same is not true elsewhere. The policy is enshrined in the Statute Book, and there are those who feel that no further thought or attention need now be given to it.
If you read Death of a Nightingale you will see that I know why central and local government adopted this policy in the first place. It was very enlightened at the time. Certainly it seemed so. Read Act One Scene 2 of Death of a Nightingale and you will see that I do understand that.
Today I ask “Wasn’t it all just a noble dream?”
If you are a Termite, you won’t agree with that. You will ignore the world as it is, and continue as though it is the world you would like it to be, even though that demonstrably cuts across the grain of human behaviour. More and more facts are piling up to establish this.
You will deserve the lambasting that I must provide in this Post.
The noble dream was to advantage the disadvantaged, give them the “right” to a mainstream education and to save money at the same time. I am sure that the Treasury was helping to drive the policy.
The cost per pupil in a mainstream school for children with special needs appeared less than the cost of a pupil in a special school, less that it is until you start to employ this new army of classroom assistants to help the teachers out, and then suddenly more expensive, much more expensive. But no-one realised that back in the 1990′s.
The escalating cost of “amiable mums”
The last time I looked at classroom assistants they had grown in number from about 50,000 to about 100,000 as they had been engaged to facilitate Inclusion. Now I read on the BBC website that they number 180,000. Even though they receive about the same amount of money as a cleaner, the calculator on my Blackberry registers £2.7e9 as the cost, £2,700,000,000,a £ or so either way.
As the Mandarin, James Harrington, says in Death of a Nightingale. “Money is where money needs to be.” As long, that is, as the Chinese are prepared to lend it to you.
But these “amiable mums”, as I heard them described only recently, are not trained teachers. They are certainly well intentioned and they are not nothing. But they receive only a modicum of training. They are helpers not teachers.
When you are dealing with children with special needs, and very, very different special needs – never forget it – you need to be highly trained and skilled as well as loving your job, in short, a professional not an amateur. The difference – listen to a great violinist, or even just a good one.
I urge you to read the BBC website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8236705.stm
The first few lines say it all. “Pupils receiving help ‘do worse’. Pupils who receive help from teaching assistants make less progress than classmates of similar ability, a government-funded study suggests.”
Let me give you one or two other quotes to give you the flavour of the study.
“The researchers were so surprised by the results of their study, that they repeated it for 2007-8 and came to the same conclusion.”
“About two-thirds of the support staff in this study had not been educated beyond GCSE level.”
And read this – ” Lead researcher Professor Peter Blatchford said the results could not be explained by the lower attainment, special educational needs, family backgrounds and behavioural problems of those pupils who had help from teaching assistants as those factors had been accounted for.
He added: “This is not something that we should blame on teaching assistants – we are not saying they are a bad influence.
“It seems to be about the way in which they are deployed and the way in which they are managed.
“The main explanation seems to be that support staff tends to look after the children in most need. They can then become rather separate from the main curriculum.
“The more time pupils had with support staff, the less time they had with the teacher.”
If you need further recent confirmation visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8276991.stm
Surprise, surprise. I was not surprised, but then I am not a Termite. Nor indeed do I see myself as a clairvoyant. It’s just that I see people as they are, not just as I would like them to be.
Deprivation has now become a greater challenge than disability
That is why I wrote in Death of a Nightingale
The Prologue
Teachers may have too little time and sometimes too little training as well. Supply teachers are here today and gone tomorrow. Teaching assistants don’t always know how to stretch children in the way that trained teachers do and, in many cases, do not improve attainment. Ironically they can create a sense of exclusion in an inclusive environment, stigmatising pupils in the process. Teachers are not always trained to relate to them. Thousands more teaching assistants have come on stream since 1997, quite a number of them supporting children with special needs.
Did anyone anticipate this – and calculate the cost? In addition, there are too few therapists and money is still short. But then the policy of Inclusion was never properly costed by anyone in the first place. Thus, cost benefit analysis is a totally alien concept.
I back this up in Note 5 of Death of a Nightingale with a quotation from Braham Norwich and Narcie Kelly writing in 2005 that “for special school pupils … only about one in six had mainly positive views of mainstream education.”, and in Note 8 a quotation from a Research Report to the DfEE in 1998 “…an analysis of cost and outcomes cannot properly be used to determine questions of rights.”
And I write this little dialogue too
Act One Scene 3
Margaret Williamson, head teacher, Joan Errington, English teacher and Wendy Robinson, a non-teaching care assistant are the Staff room at this moment talking about the price of Inclusion.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON I’m afraid you’re dead right about the bullying. The problem is chronic despite all the efforts to put a stop to it.
JOAN ERRINGTON Read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to understand. It’s the dark side of some kids …and some grown ups too. I’m afraid it’s the beast in them, and it’s always going to be there. Putting our kids into mainstream schools simply gives them more kids to bully. That’s why the problem, if anything, is getting worse.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON It’s not surprising some kids truant, is it? And their mums and dads are taken to court.
JOAN ERRINGTON And if they don’t truant they will have to manage with supply teachers who don’t know them, teachers who haven’t enough time for them, haven’t been fully trained for them, and teaching assistants who don’t know how to stretch them.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON And at what cost? They don’t come cheap.
WENDY ROBINSON And what about training? Will all the staff know how to lift and carry? And what about health? You don’t find a school nurse in every school, now do you? I can just see teachers wanting to give valium anally as nurse does here.
But children special needs are not just disadvantaged in mainstream education, they are hurt. It is actually cruel to exclude children after they have been included, as the recent study I have quoted above shows, and they are damaged, as most are, by persistent bullying which goes on despite best endeavours to prevent it.
Doesn’t this help to explain why truancy levels are at an all time high? A report in the Times 21 October 2009 states that children took 8m days off school last year, and rising. Does anyone know how many are children with special needs? Don’t just point an accusing finger at the children and their parents. Some people should look where their other three fingers are pointing.
The Scourge of Bullying
For very many children with special needs bullying is a living nightmare in mainstream schools.
Again this has come as a great surprise to some people when they should have anticipated it.
I quote here from Notes and Quotes in Death of a Nightingale.
6 The Bullying of Children with Learning Disabilities – ENABLE Scotland 2007
Our work with our Young People’s Self Advocacy Groups has revealed that bullying is also an important issue for children and young people with learning disabilities. We joined forces with Mencap to undertake UK wide research to find out the scale and nature of the problem and most importantly to tell us more about how to stop it.
We knew that bullying of children with learning disabilities existed. We knew that it is widespread and has a significant effect on children’s lives. However, we were shocked by the results that the survey revealed. We could not have predicted the scale of the problem.(My underlining)
” The sheer numbers of children who were bullied
” The persistence of bullying throughout childhood
” The failure of adults to stop bullying when it is reported
” The range of places where bullying takes place
” The effects bullying has on the emotional state of children
” The social exclusion faced by children who are afraid to go out
93% of children with learning disabilities have been bullied.
(Revisit Post 11 “‘Bullying defeated’ Where did Mr.Aaronovitch get that idea?”)
See the other damning figures that come with this quotation.
Again you will note the surprise of the researchers.
Even in the last few days the scourge of the bullying of children with special needs has made the headlines yet again. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8264251.stm
And there’s even more bad news for Termites
Browse
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7530895.stm. Read at the end of the article the unpleasant experiences of parents of children with special needs in the UK today.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7543774.stm. Read who are the “low achieving pupils” in the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8224551.stm Sixty seven percent of people in England think Labour has not delivered on its promise to put education at the top of its agenda, a poll suggests.
And, visit Post 11 “Lady Warnock, thank you for being so honest.” She has confessed that “possibly the most disastrous legacy of the 1978 report, was the concept of inclusion.”
The birth of the “Super” Termite?
All three parties, and academia too, have boobed, an honest boob maybe, but boobed all the same. Isn’t it high time they all faced up to this?
Let me stop using the word Termites. If there are any who still want to close Special Schools let me spell out what they are. They are amateurs, and rank bad amateurs at that. No, sorry, on reflection it flatters them to call them “amateurs.” The “super termite” will have arrived.
I close this Post with an extract from the last scene in Death of a Nightingale.
Act Two Scene 7
Anwar and Judith Fawzi, parents of Harry and Emma Kirk the Music teacher are watching the death of the nightingale, the bulldozing to the ground of Brighouse School.
ANWAR FAWZI I hate them. Kids have just one chance, and they spoil it for them with their big ideas. And I hate them for something else. They try to make us feel guilty doin’ the best for our kids, givin’ good schools like this a bad name as a reason for pulling them down. I hate them.
EMMA KIRK They don’t understand. Schools like this have the gift of healing, and they engage the spirit. That’s what’s so good about them. They just don’t understand.
JUDITH FAWZI I really do wish someone would expose the lousy, stinking, hypocritical charade of those who put it about that they care. They say the rights of you kids are paramount. Words. Empty words.
In short, today there is no good reason why any more special schools should be closed, but there is no shortage of bad reasons.
GET A WET TOWEL AND READ ON.
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PS I do not want to be too negative here. There is an old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t mend it.” But what if it does work, and works extremely well?
I heard a talk recently from Alec Coles, Director of Tyne and Wear Museums and discovered something that does work, requiring a high degree of professional administration and regional co-ordination and co-operation. It is Tyne & Wear Museums.
I said at the outset that there are some good things around. I have already listed a number of them in Gateshead itself. I add to that list “Tyne and Wear Museums” and its mission statement. Visit http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/about/ourmission. They have just opened the Great North Museum in Newcastle, their latest of many achievements.
Yes, here is something that does work. Copy it to administer special education, and take it out of the dead hands of Local Education Authorities. You might even save some money too.
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