This blog is written in cold anger, not for myself but for the thousands of children with special educational needs who day after day and month after month are bullied in mainstream schools. This is not an argument against mainstream education for children with special educational needs. It is an argument for special schools as an approved alternative; and there are many more reasons which I shall record in my next blog.
David Aaronovitch, a normally well-informed columnist ,wrote in the Times on 17 March 2009 that bullying had been “defeated.” I refer him and you to the following that I quote in Notes & 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’slives. However, we were shocked by the results that the survey revealed. We could not have predicted the scale of the problem.
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. Bullying is not just a part of growing up. ENABLE Scotland believes that no child should have to put up with bullying and that we all have a responsibility to speak up to ensure that this stops.
Report Summary – Headline Results
93% of children with learning disabilities have been bullied
46% of children with learning disabilities have been physically assaulted
Half have been bullied persistently for more than two years
“Western Culture and the Christian Gospel” published by Marantha (www.maranthacommunity.org.uk) records that 19,0000 10-18 year olds attempt suicide every year. Daily Mail 8.6.99. And one in four of all deaths in the 15-24 age group is by suicide. 48% of children who call Childline contemplating suicide cited bullying as the main cause. 50,000 pupils play truant every day. Could bullying have some part in that?
The first time I realised the link between disability and bullying had nothing to do with SEN. It had to do with my cousin Grace Rein. She must have had a difficult childhood. She was born without one ear and with a facial deformity. Her father was killed in the first world war. Despite all of this, and in what was then very much a man’s world, she qualified as a pharmacist and together with her husband ran a small chemist shop in the Pallion district of Sunderland, one of its poorer districts. She was loved by her customers. In my eyes she was a true heroine. But she was terribly bullied at school, and in her own eyes until her dying days she never saw her true worth. Tough she must have been, but she never lost her feeling of insecurity. She never quite found happiness outside the comfort zone of her own home and the kinship she and her husband shared with Lake-land hikers. Her life was blighted by bullies right to its very end.
When I became a governor of a special school and heard parents and pupils describe bullying as something that they had to contend with I began to realise the scale of the blight on children’s lives that it brought about. I saw children whose lives were rescued in a special school after they had been bullied in a mainstream school. I will give you a few separate quotes from my play to give you the feel of this:
MARGARET Harry’s had real bad luck. You have only to look at his bones and they break. He had just mended his leg – broke it when a bully tripped him up on the stairs – and now he’s broken his arm, just moving from one lesson to another with a crowd of kids, and he slipped on some chewing gum. He’s an accident waiting to happen. Kids tease him like mad. Say he’s always “plastered.”
***
JOHNNY (voice from liberator) I was locked in a cupboard in my old school. Some classmates they were. The cleaners let me out. It was awful. They called me old crackers box.
***
PHILIPPA’S LETTER TO THE PM I first went to a primary school but I was called “old wheelie bin” there and that was not very pleasant. Some friends of mine were called “spackers.”
Words can be very cruel, and now we have cyber bullying too. It doesn’t have to be physical. One parent said to me that she would gladly let an LEA official look after her son for a week so he could see what it was like, dealing with its consequences.
All of this may help you to understand why I wrote the following in the Prologue to the Play
Social reformers have not always grasped this. I suspect that many have looked at this simplistically, seeing it as essentially society’s difficulty not an individual’s and, with the very best of intentions, projecting what they felt in their gut they would want for themselves for everyone else, a not uncommon mistake. Even disability organisations that have done so much to help the disabled may have fallen into the same trap. That is why they may not always have seen the quite different and varying needs that some children and their parents actually have, and a not always pleasant reality they have to deal with every single day. Very simply, some do not want an open door. What they want is a helping hand and the comfort zone of their own company. For them change is a worry and a threat.
Inclusion is a concept that is absolutely wonderful in the libraries of the mind. It is not always quite so wonderful in the classrooms of the real world, especially if vulnerable children are excluded when they are supposed to be included, made to feel unwanted and, at its worst, shoehorned into a hostile environment. Today classrooms are populated by far too many bully boys and girls….
It also explains why I suggest that you can care too much if it blinds you to uncomfortable reality. You do not see. You do not feel. Therefore you do not understand.
If you haven’t read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, I urge you to do so. Bullying starts in the nursery, and I am not sure that it ever stops.
We are told that the authorities know about it in schools and that they are dealing with it. They have appointed a Bullying Czar. There are school “buddies.” And it is a learning experience kids all have got to go through. “It is not a good reason for preferring a special school.”
If that is what you think, bully for you.