To write these articles Davies under took much research and his initial investigations involved the reading of Policy documents, old newspaper stories and meetings with officials in the DfEE and OFSTED. His initial conclusions were in line with the Government’s, in that failure in schools was primarily caused by bad teaching techniques that had been left to fester since the 1960’s. He then, through delving deeper, read a thought provoking book by Martin Johnson, a teacher and president of NASUWT, called ‘ Failing School, Failing City’ started to visit the most affected schools and peered behind the veneer of
the DfEE at work and discovered a litany of problems centred around truancy, exclusion, disadvantaged and disturbed children where no solution seemed forthcoming. His attitude swiftly changed to contempt for the Secretary of State and his Department who he claims were habitually lying, cheating and presiding over a shambles. He soon realised that his initial findings were now over shadowed by the real and frightening truth of the state of our Educational policies.
His research centres on Sheffield and he states that his results are representative for the whole of Britain. This cannot be entirely accurate as it is evident even from the last league tables that a proportion of schools are achieving success. Blunkett replied to Davies’s criticisms with statistics stating that ‘667 schools in the country have been turned around’ and OFSTED reported that there were considerable signs of improvement this year across a wide range of functions. (Blunkett, 2001) However the problems that Davies highlights and Blunkett falls short of fully denying can nevertheless be seen in many areas.
The Secondary school in Croydon where I work has many of the failings mentioned, especially those concerning truancy and exclusion. I work in the Special Needs Department and have day-to-day dealings with the most disaffected children. Interestingly Croydon although suburban, has to cope with many inner city problems. Within the borough of Croydon there is at least one housing estate that is designated for rehabilitation of ex-offenders, another designated for sheltered families, while in central Croydon the Home Office immigration deals primarily with the influx of Asylum seekers into the South of England. These factors undoubtedly contribute to the number of disaffected children the borough has to educate. The school in which I work has at least 15% of this category of pupil. These children have dealt with traumas and events, some quite horrific, and yet have the burden of dealing with them whilst at school. Davies provides the public with plenty of anecdotal evidence of children’s experiences and why truancy and exclusion is a major problem in our schools. His article echoed what the public and many politicians already knew about our schools, but they were afraid to speak out and say themselves. He shows children who innately believe there is no point in learning, children who lack parental care and control and children who have to deal with the pressures of adult life at an early age, experiencing crime, abuse, and exploitation from their families and society.
The element of the Government’s policy to include disaffected children is known as the ‘Social Inclusion’ plan. Their strategy incorporates a series of initiatives that reward schools financially for attracting back truants and the previously excluded and ensuring pupils with the potential for future exclusion remain in mainstream schooling. By 2002, Blunkett wants to see a 30% reduction in the truancy and exclusion statistics. This is to be achieved in the main by schools receiving new pupil support grants that will allow them to set up support units as a nucleus for a continued support strategy and pay mentors to guide disaffected children. The LEA gets extended powers to prevent exclusions and the responsibility of paying for those that nevertheless get excluded. In conjunction the Police are empowered to return truants to schools and the Home Office is set to enforce parental fines for children failing to attend school. (DfEE, 1999)
Although Davies agreed that this strategy had merits in the sense that it was targeting extra resources on some of the poorest areas namely the main 6 Metropolitan areas of the UK, there were however two major problems, that he identified, which placed the schools in an unenviable position. Firstly, the introduction of support units and mentoring has not been tried and tested anywhere in the UK and in fact failed miserably when attempted in U.S.A. With the rapid closure of Special Schools, including Pupil Referral Units (PRU), by the LEA as a part of the social inclusion policy with it disappears the safety net that was designed to catch those pupils who inevitably will not reach the required behavioural targets that the Government’s strategy requires. Ultimately we could well be trapping the most difficult of children into our school system and may start to witness the kind of violence and antiestablishment traits that have so beset schools in the U.S.A. recently.
Secondly, Blunkett’s refusal to abolish the school league tables introduced in the 1980’s by the Conservatives, which tempted schools financially to exclude children to enhance their league standings and consequently their desirability amongst the more affluent parents. This will severely conflict with this latest strategy for receiving financial incentives for ‘inclusion’. Davies criticised this myopia in that it failed to provide a proper foundation for deciding a child’s future purely on grounds of education and behaviour.
The problems that could arise from this ‘Social Inclusion’ policy are quite concerning. One wonders how protected our children and school staff will be. Teachers will be confronted with the onerous task of containing more instances of violent behaviour in class towards them and other children, thus shortening the time that conforming children can be effectively taught. The lack of any sort
of punishment or disincentives in our schools only compound these problems further, allowing children to continually behave badly as they know that whatever they do will not lead to an exclusion, as the schools cannot afford to lose finances that a pupil attracts from the LEA. To combat this the schools must find innovative ways of purging uncontrollable pupils by, for example, impressing on parents the benefits of withdrawing a child from their school before permanent exclusion ensues, thus preventing any financial penalties being incurred by the school.
Davies suggests that the Government’s ‘Social Inclusion’ policy is being targeted predominantly at families trapped below the poverty line. The children themselves have become disaffected, as they have no role models within the family unit to measure themselves against. This is mainly attributed to an array of deep-seated social problems that have affected their parents since the 1960’s; their parents have become less ambitious and less responsible than the grandparents ever were, thus creating:
- Family life in run down council estates,
- Parents who would rather draw social security payments than holding down a job
- Parents with alcoholism or drug addiction leaving siblings to be raised by elder children
- Depression through lack of communication with any work colleagues
- Parents’ lack of self-esteem.
- Unwanted child birth
- Home environment that are often dirty, unhygienic and show no parental care
( DSCFA, 1997)
In response to the attack on poverty from Davies, Blunkett replied by commentating that he, himself, came from a family that had a lack of money but it had not prevented him from wanting to learn and better himself (Blunkett, 2000) However, interestingly, the Government is targeting the poorer socio-economic areas of the country, where the LEA are being offered grants of up to 75% to cover the costs of the schools employing relatively cheap teacher assistants in Primary education reception classes. This initiative is known as ‘Sure Start’ where the aim is to nurture a child’s early school experiences to enhance their future achievements and strengthen their belief in Education. (Docking, 2000)
The lack of money in these families is not the problem, however, it is the lack of parental care and love nowadays in these family units that prevent the stimulus for ambition and responsibility. The approach to disaffected pupils is frail and the approach to disaffected parents is even weaker. Children need support and protection; they need a scaffolding to life that they can hold on to until they are mature enough to cope with life’s hurdles (Bruner, 1977). The parents that are portrayed in Davies article appear themselves to be disaffected. The problem that first needs to be addressed by the Government is emotional and psychological help for the families not just to keep children in our schools. It is alarming to observe the Government attempting to use schools as therapeutic institutions to treat this problem instead of recruiting more educational welfare officers, child psychiatrists, and child psychologists to combat their increasing workload where current estimates indicate a roll call of 3000 children per specialist. (NFER, 2000)
Schools are being enticed to retain disaffected children with financial incentives - £ 70k p.a. in my school, for the introduction of a social inclusion plan. Ideally the Government wants school heads to develop inclusion units but there appears to be no real accountability for how this money is best spent. The staff that manage and teach in these new units are teachers, first and foremost, not trained child therapists. This leads to a heavy suggestion that the Government is promoting the exploitation of cheap and unqualified labour when specialist techniques would seem more appropriate and effective, given that initial figures imply that the children moving into the units are only receiving minimal quality time in one to one instruction and have little access to a full curriculum as there is no scope to provide individual subject teachers.
The Government probably intend to keep faith with the school league tables as they do at least provide an opportunity for schools to promote themselves. However they need to present a more accurate summary of how well a school performs in terms of the disaffected children it teaches. A reference to the proportion of disaffected children taught in relation to the GCSE results overall is needed. For example:
SCHOOL A 30% pass A-C grades with 45% disaffected
SCHOOL B 80% pass A-C grades with 10% disaffected.
Without this reference to the disaffected ratio it is inevitable that a spiral of events, as detailed below and illustrated in appendix I occurs.
- School A moves down league table
- Middle class families move into areas where School B exists
- School B attracts more motivated children
- School A fails to attract motivated new entrants & the financial incentives that accompany them.
- School A left with less money and/or less motivated children.
Without this emphasis on disaffection within the league tables, the DFEE will be presiding over a disintegration of the social mix in schools at the same time
that other Government agencies like the Department of Environment Transport and the regions (DETR) are committed to ‘ mixed and balanced communities which avoid 'social exclusions' (Ball, 1999) Findings from the Social Research Council stated that, “ When there is a concentration of children, disturbed or disadvantaged, there is a critical mass of children who will wreck the school”, (Mulholland, 1999) these findings will inevitably provoke a situation for schools to fail. Failing schools that require large inclusion units will be unable to lose the mantel of it being a ‘bad school’.
It is worth considering whether the PRU’s should have been re-evaluated by the Government, to identify how a better use of them could have been made before beginning a programme for their closure and placing the burden on the schools. The problem with the PRU’s is that they cannot supply immediate care that is invariably required. Children often wait several years, in some cases, before obtaining a place and in the interim the child’s social & educational problems are in effect left to deteriorate.
The advantages that ‘social inclusion’ policy offers in contrast to PRU’s are that there can be, if necessary an immediate transfer to the unit in school. This gives flexibility in the short term to reward a pupil’s good behaviour or work with temporary inclusion with the rest of their year in P.E., school trips etc. In the longer term this can lead to re-integration to normal lessons with their peers. The children will also be expected to attend the unit during normal school hours, unlike PRU’s which often only require attendance 3 days a week, so reducing the opportunity to be enticed into crime.
It is clear that if ‘social inclusion’ policy does not work, the Government will be seen to have stripped away the fabric behind the education system that had propped up the care and consideration for these children in the past. They will have taken away the ‘safety net’ that is so often integral to Labour’s ideology in policymaking and instead penalise the schools in the process, by taking away funds directly and indirectly. The Government are expecting schools to work miracles in such a short space of time, to correct social problems that have taken years to cement themselves in society.
In conclusion, I have shown how current Education policy was created and how complex a process that it can be. The reason why the Government has found it necessary to implement a policy for ‘social inclusion and truancy’ have been defined, it has become clear how New Labours Educational policies have more in common with conservatism than those of the left. A poem written by my daughter aptly shows how Education is seen from a child’s perspective.
(appendix, ii)
Nick Davies highlighted many problems with the policy of ‘social inclusion’ but clearly these are not happening in every school. However there is a cycle of disengagement and truancy that often leads to either exclusion from school and/or later exclusion from society. New Labour is trying to work proactively to try and change the inevitability that disengagement in society brings to those who have little to look forward to.
The Government have promised more on site attendance officers, awards for school and tougher fines on parents, all in the name of inclusion. If, as the Government says, on a school day, 50,000 pupils in England are absent without permission, surely the important question is why don’t they want to be there? While it might seem inclusive for the Government to have a target of 95% to get GCSE at grade G or above, (Judd, 2001) it must be soul destroying to have to attend school everyday knowing that that is all you can hope to achieve. Poor GCSE results define you as under performing, whereas playing truant or being habitually excluded at least avoids this definition. If the Government is serious about inclusion it seems clear that they must focus more on what it is seeking to include young people into, it needs to be firm, not only on truancy itself but also more importantly on the causes of truancy.
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