About one hundred special schools have been closed in the past ten years. Brighouse School, the setting for Death of a Nightingale, would have been one of them.
Contemporary evidence suggests that if it had been, and if its pupils had been relocated in a mainstream school, many would have been bullied (blog 11) and their education would have suffered. Alternatively they would have ended up in another special school not designed to meet their particular needs. Follow the postscripts at the foot of the first page of this website, and you will see some of the evidence. Can you add to it?
How did all this come about?
Some people pursuing the policy of Inclusion thought that there were savings to be made. Others thought it was a matter of Equality and human rights. Many probably projected what they felt in their gut that they would want for themselves for everyone else. Earlier blogs show the danger of that.
Also, many of those who pursued a policy of Inclusion probably had no idea what a good special school was like and what it offered, and did not even know the range of special needs covered by the term special educational needs.
Death of a Nightingale fills the gaps in understanding.
It shows very clearly how diverse those special needs are. It also tries to give you a feel for a good special school, and what it is like. In particular it details why some children have a special need in the first place. Can you afford not to know these things?
As chair of governors of a special school – very good at the time – for over twelve years, I am well placed to reflect that to you.
It is far more digestible than some dry-as-dust, jargon-laden, academic dissertation shot full with “outcomes.” (See blog 3)More importantly, it is much nearer to the real world.
I urge you to read it.
From the Author’s Note
All of this may be easier to understand if SEN was called Special very different Needs.
Brighouse School caters for children who have physical disabilities and learning difficulties associated with them. There are very many of these disabilities. They include cerebral palsy, spina bifida with hydrocephalus, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, rheumatoid arthritis, heart conditions, osteoagenesis imperfecta, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and neurological disorders. There are also victims of road traffic and other accidents. This is the world of burns and fractures. There are sub-divisions of each disability.
But there are also many other quite different needs and other special schools cater for them, some with a national name and a national reputation. There are children with profound and multiple learning difficulties PMLD, emotional and behavioural difficulties EBD, with hearing problems, speech or sight impairment, sometimes total. There is also dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism. In other words, think of a fruit shop. There are apples, pears, peaches, grapes, bananas and so on. With apples alone, there are coxes, bramleys, and golden delicious et cetera. It’s the same thing with SEN. There are about 400,000 children with learning difficulties of one sort or another.
I will wager that many parents, children and staff of schools closed in the last ten years did not want it to happen. As they watch their school being demolished, this dialogue between pupils Tracy, Philippa, Johnny and Terry, the head teacher Margaret Williamson, Emma Kirk the music teacher and Anwar Fawzi, a parent, will probably sum up what many must have thought and mouthed when the school they were associated with was closed.
Act 2 Scene 7
TRACY It’s a crime
PHILIPPA It’s a waste.
JOHNNY I think it’s obscene.
TERRY They’re all shit.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON Terry, you shouldn’t use that word in polite company.
TERRY Very sorry miss. It’s those new pills I am taking. They don’t always work.
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.
Did those who draw up and administer educational policies begin to understand this? Did they feel any need to understand it? Phil Willis is a good example of a well meaning chap, but did he understand?
Notes & Quotes
Phil Wills MP, former Lib Dem spokesman for Education, said in the Commons on 20 March 2001: “Working in Chapeltown in the late 1960′s convinced me that unless we could educate the whole community together – wherever they came from and whatever their needs and disabilities – frankly we would breed dysfunctional communities. It is a point of principle to me and my colleagues that inclusive education goes to the heart of the education system.”
Visit a lesson in the school to begin to understand that meeting the needs of children should be at the heart of an educational system, not some dream from Never Never land.
Understand what a head teacher once said to me, and the head teacher in Brighouse School echoes: “The one thing that we can give to our kids is time”?
Act One Scene 1
Margaret Williamson is head teacher, Emma Kirk is the music teacher, Anwar Fawzi is a parent and Tracy, Johnny and Philippa are pupils.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON This is Tracy. She knows more about the school than I do. Been here since she was four. You know there’s a popular view that kids with special needs get on fine in primary schools but the difficulties may come later when they face a different world in the comp. But we are a real alternative even at the primary stage. We’ve got a highly skilled team here – carers as well as teachers. They put in the groundwork. It bears fruit in later years. Look at Tracy’s progress, and you’ll see what I mean. She is doing really well.
EMMA KIRK That’s very true. The older kids benefit as well for the same reason, and then they all go into the outside world. That’s where Inclusion really matters, isn’t it? And another thing. Those young kids are helped all along the way, seeing what the older ones can do, being encouraged by them. Saying things we can’t.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON You see it happening in the playground, or when they help wheel each other around.
ANWAR FAWZI You’re dead right. I’ve seen it on the school run.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON My philosophy is that there’s nothing our kids can’t do that mainstream kids can. We had some out abseiling just last week.
EMMA KIRK They can see for themselves just what’s possible with their lives, not what seems impossible. They see our kids leaving this school, getting jobs or going to university. This really gets the young ones trying to do just the self same thing.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON This School is certainly no dead end and there’s precious little bullying either. That’s a huge blessing.
EMMA KIRK Some people have described it as a ghetto.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON A ghetto – those people don’t know what a ghetto is – and they don’t know this School. We’re a great big family. That’s what we are. A great big happy family. I must tell you about Tracy’s great claim to fame. At one of our Presentation evenings – you know we have lots of fun and entertainment as well as prize giving on these great occasions – well, she caught my predecessor full in the face with a custard pie… she was supposed to miss.
TRACY He was supposed to duck. I paid the price the following year. I was asked to be Jack in the Box. I was inside that box for ages. He said he forgot I was there. Do you believe that?
MARGARET WILLIAMSON Do you believe anything in this world Tracy? That’s one of the lessons we teach you.
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.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON Johnny had a hard time. His mum took him away from school. It was so bad. Finally came here. You wouldn’t believe it. He wants to be a journalist. He runs the school newspaper, and the local paper has had him in the newsroom. In this school we believe that kids are capable of anything.
ANWAR FAWZI I can believe that. Have you heard of Fred Raffle? He’s a blind man who plays cricket with dried peas inside the ball so you can hear it, and a suitcase as the wicket. He learnt the game at a school for the blind. And my goodness, he now commentates on international cricket. You know, I heard him commentate when India played England. There’s guts for you.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON Fantastic. That’s exactly what we find here, and what we encourage. I hope mainstream schools find the time to do the same. The trouble is I don’t think they always do, and certainly their staff are not always trained to stretch kids. But that’s by the way. Here’s our athletic hero, Philippa. Tell Mr. and Mrs. Fawzi what you did last year.
PHILIPPA Competed in the Athens Para Olympics, the wheelchair 800 metres.
TRACY And won a Silver medal.
PHILIPPA Gordon won a Gold in the 4 x 400 relay.
MARGARET WILLIAMSON We had a team of three out there. Gordon Davis did fantastically well.
Fred Raffle is a real person by the way.
I will give you one other quotation from the book to illustrate what I am saying:
Act One Scene 3
Joan Errington, the English Teacher, Margaret Williamson, the head teacher, and Wendy Robinson a care assistant in the staff room.
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. And of course the physio isn’t full time. Will she be there when you want her?
JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, the great thing here is that our kids can get some stretching exercises between lessons, and when they want them.
WENDY ROBINSON Just how much time do physio’s waste just travelling from school to school? There’s not so many of them. And I’ll tell you another thing. There’ll be no-one like Mary Turnbull to show them how to bake tarts. No domestic science in the national curriculum. That’s the sort of education our kids need – how to manage when you leave school. That’s what our kids need, isn’t it?
MARGARET WILLIAMSON I share all your fears, I do, I really do, and I am afraid you’re right about those that go to another special school. They will end up in schools with PMLD kids, you know the ones with very low IQ, or with emotionally disturbed kids, and it just won’t be the right school for them. Oh yes, there’ll be some success stories, some great anecdotes, they’ll parade them like Lotto winners, but in today’s world no-one will want to talk about the ones that have gone wrong, will they? Now will they?
In my next blog I will explore where Death of a Nightingale points the way forward.