Here are some alarming facts. Forty-two per cent of prison inmates (figures from 2016) have been permanently excluded from school.
Fifty-nine per cent have truanted school. Fifty per cent are functionally illiterate, with a reading age of below 11 years. And an excluded child is twice as likely to commit serious violence within a year of being permanently excluded than a child with a similar track record who is only suspended.
QED children should not be excluded from school, and it is the fault of the education system that the prisons are full to bursting.
Or is it? This summary makes me feel like poor old Henry V before Agincourt: ‘Upon the king! Let us our lives, our souls, our debts, our careful wives, our children and our sins lay on the king! We must bear all.’
Why should we be the ones to ‘bear all’? Have these young people no parents? No families to steer them the right way? If they come to us as little criminals in the making, can we really undo the habits and attitudes they have imbibed at their mother’s breasts (or at the Tommee Tippee bottle)?
If, as is true in some cases, generation after generation in one family ends up in the clink, can it really be the fault of the many schools they have attended?
Of course we have responsibility for these young people while they are in our care. But remember we are also responsible for the other children, endlessly striving to achieve, sometimes with overwhelming difficulties in their way.
I always feel most sorry for those children who, not academically gifted but determined to succeed, spend lesson after lesson with the disruptive, disengaged ‘students’.
In our school, we have an area designed specifically for those older children who find school incredibly difficult and kick out at the system by disrupting. We are doing our very best not to exclude them, and to give them a tailor-made curriculum that might help them after they leave us.
Some of the other pupils, particularly those at risk of being excluded or sent to that department, call it the ‘colouring club’ or the ‘last chance saloon’. The first nickname is derogatory, and the second pretty much hits the nail on the head, but what goes on there?
Recently we had an extra curriculum day, when most children were sent on geography field days or to historical sites.
The teacher in charge of the last chancers took them to prison. Literally. He filled a minibus with those children most at risk of offending and took them on a prison tour. They were shown prison cells, given an idea of a prison day, heard those gates clang behind them and heard the keys turn in the locks. They were even taken to the (no longer used) execution room.
And how did they respond? They were, I was told by the teacher, most worried about the execution room, even though they were told it was no longer in service. Perhaps the very fact that it is still there, even if it has been mothballed, gave them a frisson of panic.
Did they, I asked, make any connections between their present behaviour and their potential future place of residence. He shook his head mournfully. Not really.
Perhaps they needed the statistics to be pointed out. Perhaps they really don’t care. Perhaps any place seems better than school.
