Exclusions: We shouldn't be SENDing kids home
My speech at The Great Expulsion Debate at Battle of Ideas, Church House, Westminster, London on Sunday 29 October
As a school governor, I don’t underestimate the challenges schools face with behaviour problems in the classroom.
According to the latest National Behaviour Survey, around two thirds of children said they had been affected by classroom disruptions over the course of a week. About the same proportion of teachers, reported losing between one and ten minutes for every half hour of lesson time as a consequence. In the 2021/22 academic year, there were 6,500 permanent exclusions and 578,300 suspensions. In nearly half of cases, these were a response to what is described as ‘permanent disruptive behaviour’.
As a parent, I’m in what can feel like a permanent state of quiet rage that a child like mine - my son has autism and ADHD - is at constant risk of being excluded from school. Children with special educational needs are disproportionately likely to be permanently excluded from school; and around four times more likely than their peers to be suspended.
Special Educational Needs
There are over one and a half million children in England with special educational needs. This number has been going up in recent years with 17% of school age children defined in this way. Of those with the greatest needs, the most typical need arises from an Autistic Spectrum Disorder; and, for the larger number with less serious needs, it is speech, language and communication needs that predominate. Young people with special educational needs can often experience difficulties that can impact on their behaviour or their ability to cope with the school day.
Autistic children tend to have difficulties with social interaction, struggle to empathise or become anxious in new situations. They may be overwhelmed or discomforted by certain stimuli, be it too much noise or brightly lit rooms; and can be obsessive about some things. They can be highly intelligent, and sometimes gifted, children. They can also be severely disabled and in need of life-long care. It can take autistic children more time to understand some things. While most attend mainstream schools, and many are able to cope (with a little support), others really struggle and need to attend special or specialist schools instead.
Of course, these children can (like any other child) behave ‘badly’. But they tend to behave in ways that get them excluded, because they are struggling to cope with the school setting or because they aren’t getting the support they need. The combination of their condition and the impact it has on their ability to cope with the circumstances they find themselves in, causes them such discomfort and anxiety that they act out - sometimes violently. They can’t control it. They are having what is called a ‘meltdown’. But it won’t say that on the exclusion letter.
Now is this ‘bad behaviour’ or a perfectly understandable, and even predictable, response from a distressed child in the wrong setting or without the right support in place?
Bigger picture
I think it's worth standing back and looking at what else is going on beyond exclusions in our schools.
There is the worrying rise, particularly since lockdown and the closure of schools, of persistent absences in schools across the country. It is perhaps a little perverse to find ourselves discussing kids being thrown out of school, when increasingly they’re not turning up in the first place. One in five children missed at least one in ten of their lessons in the Autumn and Spring terms of the 2022/23 school year.
There is also the ‘alphabet soup’ of categories and conditions associated with these children. My favourite of these is PDA (or Pathological Demand Avoidance). This particular diagnosis sums up, for me, some of the difficulties of applying a therapeutic outlook, which may make sense with kids with autism. But not so much with other kids who may just have behaviour problems. It ends up avoiding - dare I say, pathologically - wider concerns about a crisis of adult authority and problems with socialisation.
These days, kids are never just being naughty. They are ‘communicating’ something. While there may be something in this when we’re talking about children with special educational needs, I think we reach too readily for this particular framing of the problem. And it also infects the wider culture. Is it just me, or does every other child seem to have ‘sensory issues’ or to be wearing ear defenders?
Despite everybody from teachers to football coaches claiming to be SEND or Autism aware (because they went on a course once), it is striking how poorly understood these children still are. You might say that the more ‘aware’ we think we are, the less able we are to actually address their needs.
The system
As a governor at a small primary school with a high proportion of children with special educational needs, I understand the struggles schools have trying to accommodate these children’s needs; while also dealing with the disruption to other children’s learning.
It’s tough for everyone involved. There is a mismatch between these children’s needs and the available provision. Parents can face considerable difficulties in helping their children live normal lives. They need support, but services and schools are starved of both resources and expertise.
It seems to me, when I think back to my own childhood, that schools have become less accommodating of the kind of challenging and disruptive behaviour that some children with special educational needs can be prone too. So parents will often find themselves battling with the school or local authority, sometimes both.
Final points
While I’m not anti-exclusions, I do think clamping down without understanding the causes is unhelpful. It may even make things worse.
While there are all sorts of questions to be asked about the way schools do or don’t support these children, and whether the provision is right for them in the first place, this can’t be allowed to go on.
I run a Beaver Scout group and often joke about my regular Tuesday evening headache.
As Scouts we do try to work around a curriculum but much of our time has been eaten up by ‘crowd control’. The group is very diverse, we now seem to attract more than our fair share of children with additional needs, and now we’ve decided not to fight but embrace the cacophony: a ‘rope-adope’ approach!
Our Beavers can’t possibly be like this at school, they just wouldn’t survive, so we’ve understood that having sat still from 9am, and then ploughed through the obligatory ton of homework, by 6pm they just can’t cope any more!
We do FUN. Active, sometimes focussed, fun. My Tuesday evening headache is in fact a service to these kids, their parents and their schools. It’s a rod for my back but fuck it. 🤪
Good work! I do wonder what’s behind it. Are kids, particularly boys, just deprived of the opportunity to run around, get physical, find some space for themselves? Is it a lack of structure, meaning or authority? I know there’s more to additional/special needs, but it’s a cultural trend in my view far more than a ‘real’ one.