[Socialism Today, No 15, February 1997, p. 10-11]
School exclusions are rocketing Lewisham NUT secretary Martin Powell-Davies asks whether there’s an alternative.
The action by teachers at The Ridings and Manton schools last year to demand the exclusion of ‚unteachable‘ students has pushed the issue of school discipline into the spotlight.
Some teachers were angered by the way the leadership of the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NAS/UWT) sought publicity for these disputes, allowing individual pupils and schools to be demonised in the tabloid press. However, their demands struck a chord with many others frustrated by the growing stress of trying to teach in under-funded schools.
Most teachers would agree they have to cope with more disruptive behaviour than ever before. Small wonder, when you consider the pressures of poverty, stress and insecurity weighing down on millions of families today. Young people, especially black youth, alienated from a society that offers them nothing, resent and challenge authority. The Tories‘ testing regime, reinforced by selection and streaming by ability, has shattered the self-esteem of many pupils labelled failures at an early age. Why fear disciplinary sanctions when you have nothing to lose by ignoring the rules?
For schools faced with dwindling budgets and oversized classes, the time and effort needed to support these children can easily be seen as too great. Many prefer to cut their losses and concentrate resources on pupils who have a better chance of securing the school a higher place in the exam league tables. Exclusion is then seen as a good way of warning other pupils of the dangers of stepping too far out of line. It can also help boost the school’s reputation for Strict discipline with parents, so attracting extra pupils and, under Local Management of Schools (LMS), extra money.
While overall the number of excluded pupils still forms a small proportion of the school population, permanent exclusions have rocketed to 13,400 a year. The majority are secondary school boys, particularly African-Caribbean students, but even growing numbers in primary reception classes are being excluded.
A University of Portsmouth study showed excluded pupils were more likely to be male, underachieving, large for their age, with low self-esteem, or black; but the study confirms that the real issue is resources. ‚If a school was suffering financial cuts, staffing problems or was overcrowded, the problem child was likelier to be excluded‘.
While Nigel de Gruchy, the NAS/UWT General Secretary, claims to be fighting for more special units to support excluded children, his approach boils down to ’not in my backyard‘. He, along with Labour and Tory politicians, tries to pin the blame on working-class parents, saying: ‚Why should people bend over backwards to accommodate bad behaviour? The focus should be on the family, which is where all these problems start‘.
Given the budget crisis facing education, some children may best find the individual support they need in specialist schools. However, most excluded pupils are likely to be given the relatively cheaper option of home tuition, or attending a ‚pupil referral unit‘ – perhaps only a few hours education a week. As even the Audit Commission pointed out, ‚many spend most of their waking hours with nothing in particular to do and have few positive goals to work for‘. Their immediate worry was the estimated £1 billion a year spent tackling youth crime that up to three quarters of excluded pupils are involved in. The cost of teaching pupils in referral units is also twice as much as teaching in mainstream schools. In other words, these more far-sighted representatives of business recognise that these resources would be better spent in trying to tackle the root causes of these problems. Of course, they will never be able to solve inequality and alienation on the basis of capitalism.
Even where separate schooling does offer pupils proper support, it sets these youth apart and can reinforce feelings of rejection. Half the pupils permanently excluded never return to mainstream schooling. Socialists must argue for mainstream schools to have the necessary resources to meet the needs of all pupils.
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First of all, schools need an immediate injection of funds to recruit more teachers – to reduce class sizes and alleviate teachers‘ workloads. Totally inadequate budgets for special needs support, school counsellors, educational psychologists and welfare officers must be massively increased. Support for youth services and nursery provision is also vital.
Some local authorities are also developing teams of experts in emotional and behavioural difficulties who can help support teachers and pupils. Such an approach in Kent has begun to see permanent exclusions fall, but only because schools agreed to give back some of their budget to the local authority to pay for it! LMS, which requires most of a council’s budget to be delegated to schools, leaves precious little at the centre to provide such specialist support. By basing budgets on student numbers, LMS also means that schools facing difficulties and falling rolls, also end up with falling budgets. Targeting resources where they are needed can only be done if the market competition of LMS is abolished.
Rather than returning to council bureaucracy, however, budgets and school admissions should be planned and agreed by genuinely democratic local education councils made up from staff, unions, parents, students and local authority representatives. Such a body would also have the experience and authority to arbitrate in disputes about individual pupils. Many recent disputes, like that at Manton, centred on conflicting views about whether a child should be excluded.
Of course not all schools suffer from the same problems. Good management and clear policies can help. Binning the Tories‘ national curriculum could help make many lessons more interesting for young people immediately! But even developing new policies and training staff demands time and resources that schools don’t have. As even the Times Educational Supplement wrote after the dispute at The Ridings, ‚The colossal effort required from heads and teachers in such circumstances is almost beyond the call of duty and ministers have no right to expect it‘.
With Gordon Brown promising to stick to the Tories‘ spending targets, it’s clear that the necessary resources are not going to be made available. Many teachers, and resentful pupils, will feel that they have no alternative but to demand the exclusion of disruptive students. Cuts will lead to bitterness at additional resources being directed towards pupils with special needs. It is understandable that some parents at Manton school felt angry about extra funding being found to provide individual tuition for the boy at the heart of the dispute, when Nottinghamshire schools have been hit by savage cuts.
Teachers cannot be simply expected to bear the brunt of the problems caused by government failure. Socialists have to defend the right of teachers‘ unions to defend their members, particularly when threatened with assault. Temporary or even permanent exclusions have to be available as a sanction in limited situations. Teachers may sometimes be justified in refusing to teach a violent pupil, particularly where schools and local authorities ignore staff concerns. But the aim of any action must be to both protect staff and win the resources needed to best meet the child’s needs. Unions need to try to negotiate with parents. Publicity should be kept to a minimum; it only damages the pupils concerned and it can also lead to staff being scapegoated, as happened at The Ridings.
Any action over individual pupils should be taken only as a last resort. Teachers‘ anger should be directed into a battle for more resources for all pupils, not into the disastrous policy of demanding mass expulsions. NUS/UWT members at The Ridings talked of up to 60 pupils, 10% of the school’s population, being unteachable. Nigel de Gruchy talks of up to 150,000 pupils his members ought not to be forced to teach. Such a policy means accepting that many young people should merely be written off. It puts the blame on the pupils and their families, instead of the real culprits. It divides parents from teachers – when their united action, demanding that governors across the country refuse to carry out cuts, can help win the resources our schools need.
* Martin Powell-Davies writes here in a personal capacity.
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