School Refusers
A Hastings-based teacher reflects on academy chain schools
People are very sensitive about labels these days. Take to social media any day, and you’ll find people arguing about the language you should or should not use around sex, class, race, disability – any category humans can fall into, really.
When I was a kid, there were ‘special’ school students who were called ‘maladjusted’. I don’t know if that term is still in use but I suspect it would make sense to academy companies’ system designers. A lot of what those companies do revolves around something that looks horribly like behaviourism to me – the notion of adjusting the people to fit the system you’ve created, rather than designing for humans in all their variety. You certainly hear the phrase ‘behaviour management’ a lot, and most teachers will tell you they have detailed instructions on how to deal with ‘inappropriate behaviour’ – to the extent that there’s very little leeway for your average teacher to make intelligent, personalised responses to trouble in the classroom.
Consequences
A popular system in academies is the ‘consequences’ table. You’ll hear teachers punctuating lesson delivery with cries of “C1, Darren!”, “C3, Penelope!” It’s a version of the USA criminal justice system’s ‘three strikes and you’re out’. C1 and C2 are generally just warning shots, 3 and 4 will be things like detention, isolation or exclusion. To me, there are two huge problems with this. The first is a headache for the teacher, and for any of the kids who like a quiet life. It’s an insurance system for mischief-makers. There are 30 kids in a class, and each has two opportunities to disrupt the lesson before serious consequences kick in. In total, that gives leeway for 60 disruptions per hour. One a minute.
The second is what can happen to troubled students. Consequences generally escalate from “See me after the lesson” through detention and isolation to exclusion. Exclusion can come in the form of a week’s suspension from school, a ‘school to school’ (which has had some of the rowdier kids on a tour of the town’s academies) to permanent expulsion. It’s one thing having a system of sanctions available to teachers, it’s another to create a sort of escalator of consequences, that leads a kid who’s out of sorts – perhaps due to troubles at home, or relationship problems – to step on the escalator of sanctions. That in itself is unsettling and in turn can exacerbate the very reasons they have ended up being punished.
Carrots and sticks
The purpose of profit-based companies is to make money. Academy companies make profit by delivering what the government has asked for – bums on seats and good GCSE results. The problem with delivering services like education via a profit system is that the motivation of the company is not human. A local authority school would be staffed and managed by people whose goal was happy, successful teachers and students. Some might have been more successful than others, but that was their goal. Although academy companies enthuse about happy successful staff and students, what they spend their energy on is those quantifiable results – high attendance figures, high percentage of GCSE results – and all too often, those results can be attained by ushering ‘difficult’ (maladjusted?) kids out of the school, or dissuading ‘high risk’ students from trying for too many GCSEs. If they are not entered for many exams then there is less risk of their low grades affecting the whole school’s examination success.
If I were to pick out one thing that turned me off academy companies above all else, it’s their attempts at attendance ‘carrots’. Most schools have ‘pride’ or some other virtue-points system that works like supermarket loyalty cards, except that there is what kids perceive as a deeply unfair league of application. A child who does ‘wrong’ things that mess up the school’s stats will be awarded points daily for succeeding in turning up for a lesson or two. A kid who’s no trouble would have to produce a degree-level piece of homework to get one, because no-one’s too concerned about them.
And then there’s the excruciating Powerpoints – in assembly, or in the morning ‘tutor group’, there will be excited little videos that look like game shows or holiday camp jingles which attempt to ramp up suspense and excitement over things like which class, or which student, achieved 100% attendance last week. It’s not really the Powerpoints themselves that are unendurable. It’s the expression of long-term endurance on the faces of both staff and pupils while the videos go through their entirely unconvincing rainbow-flash, fanfare-filled ritual.
So who are the ‘school refusers’?
Maybe they have a low exasperation threshold but most often, the ‘refusers’ seem to be the kids who were the target of bullies’ ‘C1 and C2’ disruption opportunities, or kids whose toleration is low due to problems at home, or personal challenges such as ASD or ADHD, but there are two other kinds of school refusers that we should also urgently be thinking about.
Four ACEs is bad
School staff training is full of information and procedural advice about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). The category includes serious illness, being a victim of bullies, of sexual abuse or domestic violence, family break-ups, hunger and homelessness. The official advice is that four ACEs is enough to permanently derail a person’s education and career path, so the aim of schools (institutions that are largely expected to stand in for our much-depleted social services these days) is to ensure that no child suffers four ACEs. The problem of course, especially for a child from a chaotic household, is that those C4s (exclusions, school-to-schools, expulsions) tend to create an upheaval at home and at school that is close to being an ACE in itself, or if it isn’t, could easily lead to one.
The patience of saints
The other category of school refusers we should be considering are teachers. Is anybody applying their attention to why ‘teachers are getting younger’? This isn’t the long sought-after miracle of reversing entropy. This is teachers getting out of the profession as soon as ever they can. A recent report stated that 1 in 11 teachers left the profession last year.
Most education professionals these days see their stint in front of a class of thirty rather like young men used to see national service. It’s an experience, it’s great on your CV but heck, you wouldn’t want to make a life out of it. Perhaps the group of school-refusers that is causing most of the trouble in school consists of teachers. Perhaps we need more patience, more wisdom – more maturity – in the classroom, and perhaps academy systems just don’t lend to that kind of behaviour, and therefore we don’t have many teachers over 30.
If society has now decided that ‘maladjusted’ is not a category of child but a slur, perhaps we should consider making the same decision about ‘school refusers’. They aren’t a type of person. They are a logical consequence of a school system that isn’t a good fit for most humans – students or teachers.
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