OFSTED: Hidden Agendas and No Way to Complain

“I will not be writing this in the report,” the lead inspector paused in his feedback to governors and looked round the table. “But governors may wish to consider whether inclusion in the school has gone too far.”

And there we had it, on the table in the open. Or rather, not in the open because this wasn’t going in the report. Our school “Requires Improvement” (RI) because we are too inclusive. At the time of that inspection 14% of our pupils had EHCPs. An EHCP (Education Health and Care Plan) is a recognition that a child has Special Educational Needs (SEND) which require resourcing significantly above that normally available to schools. This figure of 14% was by far the highest in our Local Authority and 10 times the national average. Several other pupils then in the school would also go on to be given EHCPs in the future.

These children were no kind of burden. They enhanced our school. They helped all pupils to become tolerant, patient and caring; they allowed our teachers and support staff to gain skills and experience which made them better teachers. The inspectors looked hard at whether the presence of so many pupils with SEND harmed the progress and achievement of others. They concluded that it did not.

But the one thing inclusion rarely enhances is academic results. One year our two highest performers at Key Stage 2 SATs both had EHCPs but they were exceptions. Many children with EHCPs have barriers to learning and in our school pupils with the greatest need were disproportionately represented in the older age groups, having joined us in years 4, 5 and 6. These had a noticeable impact on our published results. In addition, the more abstract reasoning required at KS2 SATs means some who succeed at Key Stage 1 are unable to achieve age related expectations at 11. This is the case, for example, for children who decode text extremely well but are totally lost when it comes to inference and deduction. So being inclusive skews data for both achievement and progress. Which is the point the lead inspector was making to Governors. We could not be rated “good” because the numbers in our data could never be good enough. Inclusion, had ”gone too far” for that.

When I complained, Ofsted told me I had “misinterpreted” the inspector’s remarks to Governors but did not offer an alternative interpretation. They pointed to the praise for inclusion in the report which said our “very inclusive approach” ensured: “pupils are nurtured and cared for well”; “pupils respect and value the faiths and cultures of others”; and “pupils enjoy being in classrooms”. It also highlighted that parents really liked our inclusive approach: “Many bring their children from outside the local community because they value the school’s caring, inclusive culture.” The view that inclusion had “gone too far” was not just absent from the report; it was contradicted.

This seems the very definition of a hidden agenda. In public the report praises inclusion; in private the lead inspector tells governors inclusion has “gone too far”.

That Ofsted report was strong in its praise for many other things: our work with children with special needs; behaviour, which at the first team meeting was described as “outstanding”; a “rich, varied curriculum” which “meets the needs of pupils well”; the “strong” extra-curricular and enrichment activities… Over the two days the inspectors found more and more about the school they liked. I fed back to staff that things were going well.

Then I was blindsided.

Note: in the latest edition of the Inspection Handbook, the word “should” becomes “will”.

The handbook for inspection stated that if there were a possibility of a school being graded as “Requires Improvement” the head should be told on Day 1 or during Day 2. (The latest 2021 handbook replaces “should” with “will”.) Thus alerted, a head may provide further evidence. Instead, at the final team meeting where the head is an observer not a participant, out of nowhere I was told the school would be declared RI and the issue was progress.

Stage 1 of Ofsted’s complaint process is to address your concerns to the lead inspector. I wrote him a 3 page letter. His reply was 4 sentences long and translated as “tough”.

At Stage 2, Ofsted appoints an “investigator”. Any implication that there would be something approaching an investigation is misleading. I was not asked for any evidence; no witnesses were spoken to. My complaint was put to the lead inspector and his word was taken. The response evaded some of the issues I raised; addressed others I hadn’t mentioned and included one downright and easily disprovable lie.

For Stage 3 I reiterated many of the points made at Stages 1 and 2. I pointed out the direct lie; this was ignored. I asked again about the inspector’s words at feedback to Governors; I was told again I had “misinterpreted” the meaning. The reason I was not told of the possibility of an RI judgement until the final meeting was because the evidence “was not clear”. I was asked to believe that by the afternoon of the second day there was no clear evidence until it suddenly emerged at the final team meeting.

Stage 3 is the end of the process but I wrote twice more to Ofsted, copying my letters to Amanda Spielman and Sean Harford. I got two brief, dismissive replies.

Ofsted carries out more than 5,000 inspections of maintained schools every year: in 2017-18 there were more than 6,000. In the five years from 2013 to 2018 more than 2,000 complaints were made about inspections: precisely five resulted in a change of judgement and all five were changes from Good to Outstanding: three in 2013-14 and two in 2014-15. For the three most recent years in this time period, in over 15,000 school inspections, Ofsted did not once admit to a mistaken judgement. No organisation could ever genuinely be infallible like this, but the cavalier, disingenuous and mendacious dismissal of my complaint at every stage illustrates very clearly why judgements are rarely successfully challenged.

The figures in the last paragraph came from a Freedom of Information Request I made in 2019. After this blog post was originally published, my statement that in recent years no judgement was changed on appeal was challenged by someone from the Advantage Schools MAT. During 2020, a school which is part of this MAT successfully appealed against an Ofsted judgement and its rating was changed from Good to Outstanding. The CEO of Advantage Schools was a frequent adviser to the DfE in 2019. I am still unaware of any successful challenge to an RI or inadequate judgement before the tragic death of Ruth Perry in 2023.

Ofsted judgements have huge consequences. If we had been judged inadequate heads would have rolled, including mine, and we would have lost our autonomy and been forced into a MAT. But a judgement of RI was bad enough. We had to give up leading our highly successful School Direct teacher training consortium; we no longer had access to funds and opportunities available to good or outstanding schools, their staff and pupils; staff were placed under huge pressure… and other schools were discouraged from being inclusive. The praise for inclusion in the report was irrelevant: few read a report. Only the judgement is noticed. Our school was well known to heads and chairs of governors across the Borough for its ethos, and again and again over the next few months I was asked if the judgement of RI was because we had so many children with special needs. One school withdrew its bid for a specialist resource as a result of our inspection judgement.

For myself, I would scrap Ofsted completely and move to a system of support for schools without grades. But while it exists, and with so much riding on the judgements, the very least we deserve is a proper system of complaints and no hidden agendas.

Note: The paragraphs in this blog post which set out figures for successful complaints were edited in 2021, and again in 2023.

Better Together

I knew Peter almost half a century ago.  He was a cretin.  It said so on his medical notes: an underactive thyroid resulting from a severe lack of iodine at a crucial stage of early development, possibly even before birth, had left him, in his thirties, little more than three feet tall, non verbal, but wearing a permanent cheerful smile on his face.  (Neither Peter nor any other name in this post is real.)

I met him during the six months before starting my teacher training when I worked on site in what, in those less euphemistic times, was termed a “colony” for “mentally handicapped” men.  These were not intended as demeaning words, though inevitably they became so and, like “cretin” itself, they have rightly been removed from polite conversation.  “Mentally handicapped” was regarded as merely descriptive, while “colony” was supposed to bring to mind a group consciously set apart in their similarities, for mutual support: the artists’ colonies of St Ives and Newlyn for example. 

Peter enjoyed spending time with Wilfred, a man who suffered from hormonal imbalances which caused him to develop Gigantism.  He was abnormally tall, with very broad shoulders and extremely large hands and feet.  I have a photograph of Peter and Wilfred side by side, grinning at the lens of my cheap Instamatic, an apparent study in contrasts. 

There were about a hundred other men in our “colony”.  Charles spoke French as readily as he did English but nuance and implication escaped him in both languages; Harry was in constant, jerky motion, scurrying from side to side of whatever room he was in, oblivious to his surroundings and to anyone else who might be around; gently affectionate Gerard liked to shadow me wherever I went, though always at a distance.

The stories that came off the pages of their records told of desperate parents, denial and frantic searches for treatments.  One mother had sought a cure in Mumbai and San Francisco before settling in rural England.   Yet these very sad tales were far from the most poignant aspect of that “colony”. 

A few hundred yards from the houses where the men lived, there was a purpose built school with well equipped classrooms of quite recent construction.  It was deserted.  In truth, this colony had not been planned as a permanent home for people in need of care.  It had begun life as a residential school for boys, who got older, and then had nowhere to go next.  Today I can only imagine the bureaucratic hoops someone had to jump through to achieve this re-purposing; fifty years ago as a teenager I didn’t think to question it.

The colony was a happy place.  The men were well cared for; there were activities, parties, sports and days out.  We took them on holiday to North Yorkshire and the Lakes (not all together, of course).  They had purpose, and were economically active.  At weekends, many of their parents came to visit.  Yet despite all this, the empty school was an eloquent witness to the fact that none of this had been in anyone’s vision either of excellent education or first class social care.   However kind the intention or caring the home, people should not live in institutions simply because we cannot think what else to do with them.

Years later, after the Warnock report urged that children with SEND should be in mainstream schools, a new policy of “Care in the Community” emptied that colony.  That must have been an immense challenge.  Men, by then in their forties, suddenly required to cope with a completely different, more independent life, but however hard, to me it seemed right. 

Society was on the march from the segregation which meant that, growing up in a medium sized city, I was never personally aware of anyone, child or adult, who had significant special needs, to the vision so well expressed in UNESCO’s “Salamanca Statement” in 1994. 

“Regular schools with this inclusive orientation are the most effective means of combating discriminatory attitudes, creating welcoming communities, building an inclusive society and achieving education for all; moreover, they provide an effective education to the majority of children and improve the efficiency and ultimately the cost effectiveness of the entire education system.”

What worries me about the current direction of education in England is that now we are marching away from Salamanca. The Conservatives’ manifesto from 2010 pledged: “to end the bias towards the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream schools.”  Inevitably, inexorably, that direction leads to the blind alleys of schools with no outcome.  It also denies all of us the opportunity to enjoy the company of people who are different from us, and to learn from them, something I wrote about in my first ever blog. 

As we look towards the future of education post Covid, let’s build a system in which all our children are served.  Not one where we turn away from inclusion, but a system where we do it properly for the benefit of all of us.

Looking at my photograph of Peter and Wilfred I am struck not by the odd juxtaposition of two men who were abnormally tall and abnormally short, but by their smiles.  These are real people, with feelings, talents and senses of humour.  They deserve to be treated as people, not given labels and hidden away.

CLA5: The Campaign

In the last two weeks 9 Local Authorities (LAs) have written to me pledging to process all in-year admissions for looked after children within 5 days, or to ensure that all such children are in school within 10 days, or both.  I call this the CLA5 commitment.  In addition, 3 other LAs have not made the commitment but pointed out that in practice they deal with these admissions within 7 days (2/3 in one case), and 2 Anglican dioceses have committed to encourage the schools they control, and which are their own admission authorities, to meet these timescales.

This is important because literally thousands of these very vulnerable young people are missing out, or have missed out, on months of school at a time.  I wrote about some children I knew personally who were in this position, here, and about the general problem here.  

If a parent takes a child on holiday in term time the law says they should expect to be fined.  We believe their right to an education is being infringed.  Yet we turn a blind eye to the fact that many children for whom local authorities assume the role of parents (CLA) seem to thereby lose their right to schooling.  Somehow these very vulnerable children are expected to cope, where others who are more secure and perhaps higher achieving, cannot.  The Schools Admission Code says CLA children should be the top priority: they go to the front of every queue; schools may admit them even if the school is full or an infant class is already at 30.  CLA attract the highest pupil premium funding. But all this is window dressing, because the simple fact is that many of these children are losing out by not being in school.

Writing a blog or two seems a completely inadequate response to this situation.  I wrote to the Secretary of State, to Ofsted and to the Shadow Secretary of State, because only the Government could solve the problem completely, but even if it chose to do so the wheels of Government grind slowly, so I decided to ask individual LAs, Church Dioceses, Multi-Academy Trusts and schools to make the CLA5 commitment.  

The letters I wrote, and the responses I have received so far, are set out on a blog which can be found at cla5.org

The education community could solve this scandal by welcoming children without delay.  I know for a fact that in most circumstances this isn’t hard to do.  As a head I never delayed giving a response about the admission of a looked after child and never turned one away.  My wife, who ran three schools where I was responsible for only one, did the same.  And we are not exceptional.  Many, many headteachers have exactly the same approach.

There are particular strains in some areas.  Literally dozens of young people are sent to Kent when they are taken into care, and some school leaders here complain that they are asked to shoulder a disproportionate load.  It was for this reason that I wrote to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, asking that schools which are welcoming to CLA should be given credit for this in inspection judgements.  Of course, someone should be looking at why this is happening and trying to solve this issue. But whether or not either of these are done, I would ask school leaders to remember that the situation is never the children’s fault, and before they turn up at your gate they have already been through an experience which may well have left them traumatised.

Thank you to Cheshire West and Chester, Devon, Hillingdon, Kensington and Chelsea, Leicestershire, Norfolk, Nottingham City, Reading, Swindon, Warrington and Westminster LAs, as well as the Dioceses of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich (Suffolk) and Exeter.  To really help Looked After Children we need every Local Authority, every Diocese, every MAT and every school in the country to make the CLA5 commitment.

If you agree with the aims of this campaign, and would like to help, please consider asking your own LA, Diocese, MAT or school to make the commitment.  There are more than 20,000 state schools in the country.  It will take me a while to contact them on my own and I would be grateful for some help.

There are further details about all of this, including a sample letter/e-mail on cla5.org 

A coda to my New Year Challenge

Last week I wrote a blog about looked after children.  Today I met a former colleague for lunch and listened open-mouthed and with growing anger as she told me what happened to a family of four children taken into care at the start of last term. 

First, of course, they were split up.  Few placements will take four siblings together.  Then they were sent, separately, to foster carers in distant counties.  The eldest boy ran away several times, and each time attempted to reach his home.  After six weeks the parents regained custody and the children came home.  None of the four had spent a single day in school in the entire six weeks.

I know these children.  The three youngest are hard-working, quiet, sensible and keen to please, the eldest is confused, unhappy and sometimes needs coaxing.  None of them has any special needs; they would not disrupt a classroom, or hold back anyone else’s learning.  In short, there is no reason why any school should hesitate before offering them a place.

At the worst time in their young lives, when their family life was ripped apart, their friends and comfortable routines were torn from them and left far behind, our system decided to hammer these children further by damaging their education and harming their life chances. 

In my blog I urged school leaders to open their hearts and the doors of their schools to vulnerable children like these.  Please.  Let’s do it.

A Challenge for the New Year

This New Year, let’s resolve to do what we in education can to make the lives of vulnerable children better.

Within weeks one summer, we said farewell to a looked after child in Year 3 who left for a new life on the east coast, and welcomed a Year 5 who joined us from a city fifty miles to the south.  There are 30,000 children in care, 41% of the total, who are placed outside the area “they would call home” and “Pass The Parcel”  is a shamefully apt name for the report on their experiences published by Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, on Christmas Eve.

For a child, being placed in care is traumatic.  I have known children removed from their families for all sorts of reasons: after child pornography was found on a parent’s phone, for example, or parents were arrested for drug offences.  More than one child I know has suffered the anguish of finding a parent unconscious after a suicide attempt, and several times children themselves disclosed sexual or physical abuse.  Almost forty years ago, a boy I taught was held at gunpoint by his father in a stand-off with police.  But whatever the immediate trigger, being in care is NEVER the child’s fault.

In emergency, the social workers look not for what is ideal but for what is possible.  So it’s no surprise that initial placements can be miles away.  But, as a report from the Children’s Society revealed in September 2019, a long term placement at a distance adds to the children’s distress and brings with it huge dangers.  

11,000 children are in care more than 20 miles from their former homes and 2,000 are a hundred miles away.  “Record numbers” of these “are going missing,” the Children’s Society says. We don’t know how many, because the DfE doesn’t publish the figures, but there are more than 70,000 “missing incidents” annually, and the number is rising.  Many looked after children run away because they are unhappy – often trying to run home – others are enticed away to be exploited. 

Of the children in care placed out of their area, 52% have special educational needs and almost half of these (24% of the total) have social emotional and mental health identified as their primary need.  And moving area compromises both educational chances and treatment on the NHS.  These highly vulnerable children are often left without a school place for months on end, and while children typically wait many months for a CAMHS appointment, those who move district go to the back of the queue every time.  The Children’s Commissioner’s report comments: “We heard teens casually talking about having to move home 10, 11 or even 15 times (numbers which we know can go much higher).  We found that over half of children placed out of area have 2 or more moves within 2 years.”  The wait for therapy which was already far too long at months, becomes years, and sometimes never.

There are good reasons why some children have to be placed in care “out of area”.  For example, some children have to go for their own safety as they are being targeted by others locally. But too often the problem is simply a lack of placements, which comes down to a lack of resources. Bluntly, some authorities are trying to save money by exporting what they see as a “problem”, and as with everything, some areas are more affected than others (Kent and Lincolnshire import four times more children in care than they export).  However, as the Children’s Society declares, this “is a national scandal”. Vulnerable children “are suffering additional trauma because local authorities – the very people tasked with keeping them safe – are sending them away.”.

“Pass The Parcel” has several recommendations, most of them for action by the Government.  But we, as educators could do our bit, starting in January.  Without delay we could make some children’s lives immeasurably better with three simple steps.

1. School leaders, open your arms.  The Admission’s Code gives theoretical priority to children in care and those with EHCPs.  Make this theory a reality and stop putting barriers between vulnerable children and school. 
2. Ofsted, stop penalising schools which take in vulnerable children: reward them instead.
3. Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, drop your objection to children being placed in schools that Ofsted describes as Requires Improvement.

Shockingly, some of the young people spoken to for “Pass the Parcel” believed that their experiences were so awful they were “punishment” for things the children themselves had done.  Let’s end this national scandal in 2020.

A Tale of Three Exclusions

Should the Governors have a role in exclusions or should an independent panel hear appeals?

The penknife had a two and a half inch blade, a bottle opener and a corkscrew.  It was a holiday souvenir with a picture of the Eiffel tower on one side, and the family kept it in their kitchen for opening bottles.

One morning David (not his real name), in his fourth week of Year 7, took it to school.  On the bus he showed it to a friend who warned him he would get into trouble if anyone saw it, so David put it away.

At break two girls told David there were people saying he had a knife and asked to see it.  He refused.  The girls continued to ask until David took it out of his pocket and showed them.  He did not open the blade.

The girls went straight to their head of year, reported that David had a knife and said it made them feel “scared, trembling and shaking”.  The penknife was confiscated.  David was placed in isolation for the rest of the day; his parents were sent for, and that afternoon he was permanently excluded.

A former pupil of ours, David was a high achiever and a model pupil.  He started in Nursery, so I knew him for more than eight years and never once had to speak to him about his behaviour.  When his mother and he came to tell me what had happened they were both in tears, but they did not come to ask me for help; they came to apologise that David had let our school down.

Of course I rang the secondary headteacher.  He was not to be swayed.  “I am quite comfortable with my decision,” he told me.  Possession of a knife was an automatic permanent exclusion. 

The family appealed.  I went with them to the hearing which lasted over two hours.  The head attended with two other senior members of staff and all three argued vehemently and uncompromisingly that the exclusion must be upheld, but despite this the governors decided to reinstate David.

Last year Emma Knights, chief executive of the National Governors’ Association, said governors should not be involved in exclusion panels.  She suggested they could feel pressured to support a headteacher’s decision, and exclusion, she argued, is a “technical and legal matter” not a governance issue; appeals against it should be heard by an independent panel. 

As it happens, a few months either side of David’s appeal I was involved in two other exclusion appeal panels, both times as a governor of another local secondary.  For the first of these, when the papers arrived I saw that there was no violence involved; the pupil had infringed uniform requirements repeatedly and was abusive to staff who attempted to correct her.  Her attendance was just over 60%.  I also noted that she was another of my former pupils and I immediately rang the head to discuss whether it was right for me to participate.  “To be honest,” I told her, “you don’t want me on this panel.  I already know I wouldn’t be upholding the exclusion.”  We discussed the matter for a while, and the head promised to think about it and get back to me. 

I had, and have, tremendous respect for that headteacher and the job she did in very difficult circumstances, and when she rang me back a few days later she demonstrated again why she was such a great school leader.  She had thought about our conversation, she told me, and had gone to the pupil’s home, with one of her deputies, to apologise to the child and her mother, to rescind the exclusion, and to discuss what support the school could offer to help that pupil succeed.

The second panel involved a boy in year 9 who had verbally insulted another, smaller boy in class.  Hours later he walked out of an after school detention and rode around the estate on his bike, going in the opposite direction to his home, until he found and set upon the other boy, knocking him to the ground and punching and kicking him repeatedly, until two other boys who were passing dragged him away.  There was no claim offered that the victim had done anything to provoke his attacker, and it was not the assailant’s first violent offence. 

We upheld the exclusion and as we did so I was able to look that boy’s mother in the eye and tell her: “I think if another boy had done this to your son, you would not now be sitting here asking for him to be re-instated.”  She had the grace and the honesty to agree. 

Decisions that appear arbitrary or unfair and against which there is no effective appeal can quickly undermine public confidence.  Effective appeals are transparent, easily accessible, and have the authority to overturn the original decision.  For exclusions it is important that governors are part of this process because they represent not only the institution but also the local community in a way that an independent panel never could.  And that’s vital, because far from being mere “legal and technical” matters, the number of exclusions and the reasons for them, are very powerful expressions of a school’s ethos.

How to Manufacture a Twitter Storm

In July 2018 a 15 year old former pupil wandered into our school summer fair and crossed the playground to me.  He smiled and said: “You’re Mr Cosgrove!”  I had no beard the last time he saw me, which makes sense of this comment and also his next one, delivered in a mock American accent.  “Hot damn!”  He said.  “That’s a lot of white!”  We both laughed, then chatted about what he was doing and how he was.

For the past 36 hours a small group of people on Twitter has been trying to stir up a storm accusing me of psychologically damaging and emotionally scarring that young man.  Well, he clearly bore me no ill-will, and he didn’t look or sound scarred or damaged.

On Saturday I wrote a blog about exclusions. (For anyone who hasn’t read it, it’s immediately below this one.)  I tagged a few people who I thought might be interested and was pleasantly surprised to see the re-tweets, likes and positive comments coming in quite quickly.  I posted it at 8.15 and it soon reached 100 views.  

On Sunday morning I saw the first adverse comment.  When I returned from church there were several; by 11 that evening when I returned from a visit to the theatre, I found literally hundreds of tweets waiting to tell me I was “unfit to teach”, I had “emotionally scarred” a 6 year old whom I had threatened to “remove from his family,” “kidnap,” and “falsely imprison.”

There were a few comments from what I would term genuine people, praising the thrust of the blog, but querying my tactics in one particular.  I was, and am, very happy to explore the issue with these.  I have no monopoly of wisdom, am capable of making mistakes like everyone else, and enjoy debate.  Unfortunately, the majority of the negative comments – some of which were very personal and quite vile – came from about 10 or 12 people whose only interest seemed to be to vilify me and manufacture faux outrage: presumably to discredit my point that some schools exclude too easily.

I found some of the tactics really quite amusing in their childishness.  Someone who had previously blocked me, unblocked for the sole purpose of piling in; someone else left several unpleasant tweets to which I was unable to reply because she then blocked me!  Clearly these two were interested in sensible debate!

For the rest, how do I know their outrage was manufactured?  Well for four main reasons. 

First, my blog had been viewed more than 250 times before anyone made any unfavourable comment.  The view that I had behaved disgracefully was very clearly not shared by the vast majority of teachers.

Second, the critics all concentrated on one small passage of the whole.  They ignored the main thrust and had nothing to say about the other three children I mentioned; they took the anecdote out of context; they exaggerated what I had said; they assumed a knowledge of both the context and the characters involved which they knew perfectly well they could not have had; and they expressed themselves in the most extreme terms.

Third, they accused me of scaring a child into behaving appropriately – for two full years!  That would be some mighty powerful scaring, except none of them really believed that of course.  They couldn’t have.

And finally, the clincher: while accusing me of emotionally scarring a young man, scaring him, psychologically damaging him, and abusing him, not one single member of this bloodthirsty pack of twitter jackals had anything whatsoever to say about the real abuse.  This child spent almost the entirety of his first two years of full time school being denied any education.  Worse, he was effectively taught to hurt people in order to get his own way.  That abuse deserved to be condemned, but my critics were entirely silent on it.

This is very sad.  Exclusion is far too important a topic to be treated in this sort of playground name-calling way. 

For those who are genuinely interested, I am pleased to have contributed to debate: my blog has now been viewed 1,700 times. 

As for the silly twitter jackals: grow up!

The Last Resort?

(All names have been changed)

Exclusion is a last resort, we are told, and justified because, “You can’t allow violent and disruptive pupils to stop others from learning.”  This is true.  Who could disagree?  And yet, and yet, and yet… 

First Axel: repeatedly excluded for violence to staff.  I have no tolerance for any sort of violence, and I was wary when Axel came to us aged six.  He had not completed a full day in almost two years of compulsory education.  He kept hitting and kicking staff.

With us he enjoyed the novelty of being in class, was co-operative and worked hard.  The honeymoon lasted about two weeks, until one morning my door opened on a very cross teaching assistant holding a grinning Axel by the hand.  “Axel,” the TA announced, “has just punched me.”

“Really?  Axel, why did you punch Miss Peters?”

Axel threw back his head, opened his mouth and repeatedly shrieked: “I want to go home!”

I waited until he fell silent: “If you ever hit anyone else at this school, I will ring up your mother and tell her that you have to stay here all night.” He hit no-one for a full two years (nothing is for ever).

Second, Becky: permanently excluded on her first day of Reception.  Yes, honestly.  Her mother was told Becky would never be able to attend a mainstream school.  She spent much of her first six weeks with us face down on the floor screaming: in classroom, playground, and street outside.  Gently, firmly, kindly, our staff worked with her and around her.  Within months she became the most polite, sensible, kind, hard-working young lady you could hope to meet. 

Some will object that four and six year olds do not pose the same challenges as teenagers.  This is precisely why I chose Axel and Becky as my first examples: they are incontrovertible evidence that some schools are far too quick to exclude, and I could cite many other examples of children who were much older when I first met them.

For instance Con who came to us in year six after violence towards other pupils at his previous school.  He is autistic.  When he “wobbled” we gave him space.  He learnt to take himself out of the difficult situations, spend a few minutes calming himself, and then return.  He never hurt anyone while with us, but was a huge asset and by far the highest achiever in his year academically.

Then there was Daniel.  He was rarely in trouble at primary school, having been with us from Reception to year six.  A super footballer, a kind friend to others, an above average performer academically, whose home circumstances would be enough to make the most hardened cynic weep, he was keen to do well and would not willingly have harmed anyone.  But his self-image was rock bottom.  In his first days at secondary he hid from the world behind a hoody, which led to a series of confrontations with staff and a permanent exclusion in very short order: he was, apparently, abusive and defiant.

Axel, Becky, Con and Daniel are real children.  The first three had been genuinely violent and disruptive, but for all four, and literally dozens of others I have known, exclusion was possibly the worst response to their behaviours.  It encouraged Axel to hit people; for Becky it was no help at all, she needed to learn routines and good habits; it might have deprived Con of a bright, successful future; and all Daniel needed was to know that he was valued.  None of them posed any risk at all to other children’s education.

I am not a zealot.  There are children who are a risk to others, who cannot thrive in mainstream and for whom a specialist setting is needed.  But there are very few of these. My experience tells me that exclusion is sometimes not the “last resort” it should be; far too often it seems an easy option for the school. 

Note: I have updated this blog post by removing two sentences about Axel. For some readers these proved a distraction from the main point. If you want to know more about this see the next post in this blog: How to Manufacture a Twitter Storm.

HIV and schools

“I need to remind you that we have a child in school who is HIV positive,” used to be part of my introduction for the staff to every term.  “I’m not going to tell you who it is, because there could be more than one, and there could be members of staff in the same situation, so you must scrupulously follow our policy for dealing with blood and wear gloves every time, and you must make sure that the children also know this is important.”

Welsh rugby hero Gareth Thomas took a brave decision this week to openly admit his HIV status.  Brave because there is still a lot of ignorance and fear around HIV which leads to discrimination against those who have the virus.

Our pupil with HIV, for example, the one we knew about (let’s call her Kylie), was turned away by two schools before her mother applied to us.  And yes, I know there is no legal basis for refusing admission to a child with HIV, but they did it.  There is also no law that says Kylie’s mum had to tell her school, but despite the rejections, she felt it was right that we knew, and when it came to secondary transfer she asked me to tell the secondary school.

Many current school leaders grew up with the terrifying tombstone government advertising campaign of the 80s, and very few will have personal experience of a pupil with HIV: only 356 children under the age of 15 were known to have the virus in the UK in 2017.  So it’s not surprising some school leaders are scared of it: not surprising, but inexcusable, because the facts are easy to discover and managing HIV in school is not difficult. 

The virus is not necessarily fatal, there are effective treatments which stop it developing into AIDs, and there are very few, and very specific, circumstances in which it can be passed on.  It is only transmitted through infected blood, semen, vaginal fluid and breast milk.

This means that in a primary school the only risk is from blood, and even then the blood has to mix, so while using gloves is safe practice, it is vanishingly unlikely that wiping a cut knee will lead to any issues.

Secondary schools have the added complication that as the children grow older they may become sexually active and even experiment with drugs.  This makes effective and comprehensive PSHE vital.  But it is anyway, whether or not you have a Kylie in your school.  There is nothing to say that young people will have sex or take drugs only with other pupils from the same school.

There is no need to restrict in any way the curriculum or the activities of children infected with HIV.  They are victims already, and often vulnerable in other ways without being discriminated against further through ignorance.

One summer, Kylie’s family was made homeless.  It was months before she came back to us and while they were away it was impossible for mum to get Kylie to school, so with mum’s permission I consulted Google and rang the nearest school to their temporary home.  I explained the situation to the head.  “I’m not asking for a permanent place,” I said, “but is there any way you could take this lovely girl in, just for however long she’s in your area?”

To her credit she agreed immediately.  “Of course,” she said.  “We would be happy to.” It would almost have been better if she had not been so accommodating, because Kylie never spent even a minute in her school, and the reason made me sadder and more angry I think than anything else during my time as a headteacher.  I seethed about it for weeks.

“In fairness,” I said, “I should tell you that she’s HIV positive.”

“Oh,” said the head.  “Then no.  Sorry.  No.  We can’t have that.  No.”  The shutters were down.  She was not to be persuaded.

I will note in passing, without making too much of it, that this head is an Ofsted inspector and the school is graded “outstanding”.  Discrimination and prejudice are alive and well amongst those who should know much better.

So respect to Gareth Thomas.  I hope his courage will help to make lives easier for some of our most vulnerable children. 

Inclusion Benefits Everyone

Twenty years ago I was privileged to teach Holly (not her real name) a wonderful girl who had cerebral palsy and very little control of her limbs.  Not only was Holly unable to walk, she could not even grip a pen or pencil.  The result was that when her sister went out to play in the evening, Holly would stay at home and read, and read, and read. 

She was provided with a word processor to get over the physical barrier of writing, and with this she produced work of the very highest quality.  Those were the days when the Literacy Strategy was mandatory.  Primary school teachers were required to teach an hour of English every day, and to divide our lessons into rigid, timed, sections.  When it came to the twenty minutes of independent work, Holly would switch on her keyboard and rattle out the equivalent of two or three pages of typescript.  While other children were still sharpening their pencils, copying the date, or thinking of a title, Holly would have her first two hundred words written, edited and polished.

Every teacher enjoys working with the pupil who drinks everything in, produces exceptional results, listens to feedback and is constantly keen to improve, and I loved teaching Holly.  I thought – and still think – that she would have a very bright future.  If she wished, she could certainly become a professional writer, but in fact she could go on to do, or be, almost anything she set her mind to.  But two things in particular have always struck me when I reflect on the experience of teaching Holly.

The first is that, without the developments in inclusive education during the eighties, she would almost certainly have been in a special school where she would have had neither the stimulation nor competition from her peers in the same way.  Secondly, having seen how well Holly worked with her word processor, I persuaded the school to invest in a class set.  I arranged typing lessons for all my class and, following Holly’s example, some other children were enabled to produce work of a quality they had not previously dreamed was possible. 

Having Holly in our class was good for us all. It made me a better teacher, and helped the others in my class to achieve more highly.