ORIGINAL ARTICLE

SUMMARY

Excluded by the system

Something is wrong with an education system that allows a 12-year-old boy to attend school for only three hours a day for art, PE, home economics and to play on computers. He is not taught English or maths because his school cannot provide him with a support teacher. Without one he would probably disrupt the other pupils in his class: they would learn nothing and he would learn nothing.

In the article, ‘Excluded by the system’, the writer starts off by telling us about a 12-year-old boy who attends school for only three hours a day, because the school can’t provide the support teacher he needs. He would disrupt classes without such support.

There are no easy solutions for teachers when they are confronted with troublesome children like this, but his part-time existence at school is no solution at all. An education system that fobs off troublemakers with a few hours of so-called schooling a day, rather than educate them, is failing itself, its misfit pupils and, in the end, society. Rightly, the boy’s mother complains: ‘It is supposed to be an education, but he learns nothing at all.’

The writer feels that for the teachers, there are no easy answers, but that it’s not fair on the boy. He feels that the current system is failing the school, the boy and society.

The writer quotes the boy’s mother who says that he is learning nothing.

If this boy’s predicament was unusual, it would be less worrying. But he is one of many such children. They are supposed to receive a mainstream education but, because they are so difficult to handle, schools cannot cope with them. So, instead of going against the grain of government policy to keep troublemakers in the mainstream, schools are discovering elaborate ways of minimising the disruption to themselves while at the same time keeping their exclusion figures low.

The writer goes on to claim that this boy is only one of many in the same situation – difficult to handle. He claims that schools use this system because it means they don’t have to exclude pupils.

Common sense dictates that there are two principal options for education policy-makers grappling with persistently disruptive pupils. Either they should be sent to special schools or they should be in ordinary schools reinforced with investment to create special units, special projects and to hire support teachers.

The writer feels that for pupils in this situation, there are two options – special schools or special units in existing schools.

The Scottish Executive has chosen the latter option, but does not seem to be funding it sufficiently for it to work, despite £23m in the excellence fund for schools to set up ‘alternatives to exclusion’. Money is not the only answer, but it helps. The lack of it, and the government’s target to cut exclusions by one third by 2002, is having the effect of increasing the number of halfway-house children who are being neither educated nor excluded.

The Scottish Executive favours the special unit model, but isn’t funding it properly.

The minister must look at the policy again. Unless, of course, Labour intends to modify its mantra ‘education, education, education’ by adding the words ‘except for children who cause trouble’.

Partly because of a lack of appropriate funding, and because schools are trying to cut exclusion figures, the number of what the author refers to as ‘halfway-house children’ who are neither excluded nor being educated will grow. The writer concludes by attacking government education policies, saying that they ignore troublesome children.