I recently wrote a guest column for Teachwire and Teach Secondary magazine on the large numbers of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) being excluded from school. I’ve written sceptically about the rise of mental health problems in schools before and how normal childhood experiences are being turned into mental health problems. But this time around, alongside the usual analysis of the figures I sought to reflect on my personal experience as a parent and a school governor too. A little nuance can’t hurt. Or so I thought.
In the piece, I explain how official figures show that children with special educational needs are more likely than most children to be suspended or permanently excluded from school. The reason given is, more often than not, that they are displaying disruptive behaviour. I acknowledge that other groups - such as boys - are over-represented in the suspensions and exclusions statistics too.
‘Punishing children for something they can’t help’, I say, ‘is fundamentally wrong and needlessly cruel’. I allow for the strong likelihood - as I have in previous pieces I have written on the subject - that at least some, and perhaps many, of these children are wrongly diagnosed. And that there is a tendency to medicalise behaviours that would in the past have been considered disciplinary matters. Rightly or wrongly. I go on to list some of the conditions that are included in the SEND statistics. These range from the severely disabled attending special schools to very capable, and sometimes gifted, children on the autistic spectrum, struggling in mainstream. And I give the example of autistic children having ‘meltdowns’.
I talk about the struggles parents go through, battling with the school or local authority. And I also talk about 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. I point to the likelihood that there is a mismatch between these children’s needs and the available provision. But also note that despite there being a crisis of adult authority at large, most schools have become less accommodating of the kind of challenging and disruptive behaviour some SEND children can be prone too.
I also explain how these SEND issues are just a part of the story. There is also the worrying post-pandemic rise in persistent absences, and what I describe as the ‘alphabet soup’ of conditions with which children are presenting. I wonder if, by having an overly therapeutic outlook and desperately searching for labels, we are ‘failing to address needs that directly result from a lack of discipline or effective socialisation’?
I conclude that I am of the view that some of these new challenges in the classroom are as ‘cultural and social as they are practical’ or even to do with special educational needs. By implication, the solutions don’t lie solely with schools. Nevertheless, what is going on in our schools is impacting badly on children with and without special educational needs, and the exclusion of these children for behaviour they often can’t help should be a scandal.
This caused a bit of a stir … well, one rather robust response on Twitter. Andrew Old, teacher and author of Scenes from the Battleground blog, declared the article ‘massively misleading’. I ventured that perhaps he was being a little harsh as all I was doing was quoting the official statistics on suspensions and inclusions, and explaining - based on my experience - what this can look like in practice. ‘Exclusions are only for bad behaviour’ came back the response, alongside the accusation of my ‘outrageous’ stigmatising of SEND kids.
Helpfully, Old shared an article of his own in which he himself accepts ‘the exclusion rate for pupils with SEN(D) is much higher than pupils without SEN(D)’. But then goes into an extensive commentary on why the small numbers involved mean this isn’t such a big problem. It only affects a small minority of pupils and, therefore, expressed proportionally looks worse than it is. To which I might say ‘tell that to the parents whose SEND kids are repeatedly suspended or excluded’. But putting that to one side - and as I told him - he still makes an important contribution to the SEND exclusion discussion.
Looking at the breakdown of SEND exclusions - something I neglected to do - he discovers that …
the majority of excluded SEN(D) pupils are pupils with SEMH as their primary SEN(D) need. SEMH pupils are 18% of SEN(D) pupils, but 61% of permanently excluded SEN(D) pupils.
This is an important observation. By SEMH he is referring to children categorised with having social, emotional and mental health needs. ‘While it is intended to be a broad category’, says Old, ‘covering mental health difficulties and conditions such as ADHD, it is often associated quite explicitly with behaviour’.
Indeed so. It doesn’t appear to serve any role other than as some kind of holdall for children with behaviour problems. Though, it should be added, children diagnosed with ADHD don’t necessarily have behaviour problems. What about children with a ‘dual diagnosis’ of autism and ADHD? How are they categorised? Perhaps we should do away with the category altogether? There are all kinds of reasons why kids misbehave or act out.
But that is not what Old concludes. Instead, he says:
… we should throw out the label SEN(D), as it seems to encourage people to see almost all problems children have with accessing education as disabilities. It should be possible to provide support for pupils with behaviour issues, without implying that those issues are a result of a disability.
But sometimes ‘behaviour issues’ are a result of a special educational need or disability. That is why this category, in my view, should be retained and the SEMH category abandoned. The latter lumps together very different problems, some of which will be primarily behavioural, others which may be expressed behaviourally. Unfortunately, so does Old. He assumes these are just kids with ill-defined problems, and probably not SEND ones. I think it’s more complex, and the child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) waiting lists are infamously long.
Children with diagnoses associated with special educational needs, or awaiting diagnoses, can behave ‘badly’ but typically 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. Is this ‘bad behaviour’ or an understandable response from a distressed child?
Thank you Andrew Old for taking the trouble to respond.