“The same old faces. Ten years this school’s been opened, and for 10 years after every assembly we see a line of boys here, and the same old faces.” Mr Gryce, Kes
Each July the Department for Education (DfE) publishes its annual statistics on fixed-term and permanent exclusion of children from English schools from the year before.
And each year, as predictable as a downpour on a bank holiday Monday, the report notes that children with SEND are far more likely than children without SEND to be excluded from a school, either for a fixed-term period or permanently.
For example, the DfE statistics for the 2014/15 academic year note that:
- Pupils with identified SEN accounted for half of all permanent and fixed period exclusions.
- Pupils with SEN support had the highest permanent exclusion rate and were more than seven times more likely to receive a permanent exclusion than pupils with no SEN.
- Pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) or with a statement of SEN had the highest fixed period exclusion rate and were almost seven times more likely to receive a fixed period exclusion than pupils with no SEN.
All else being equal these trends could suggest that children with SEND are simply predisposed to far worse behaviour than their peers without SEND and perhaps the staff in special schools, and pupil referral units for that matter, are just prepared to put up with a lot more in terms of disruptive behaviour.
I do not believe that to be the case. I have worked in a comprehensive, an independent selective school and three different types of special school and my experiences, coupled with the many schools I visit, do not support that.
Another interesting statistic from the same period of time, this time from Ofsted, shows that:
- Fifty-four per cent of all special schools had an outstanding judgement for behaviour and safety (now known as “personal development, behaviour and welfare”).
- Thirty-three per cent of all other schools had an outstanding judgement for behaviour and safety.
By definition special schools are entirely populated by children with SEND so this information, from thousands of schools all inspected under the same Ofsted framework, should lead us to look to specialist settings to see what can be learned to improve behaviour and therefore reduce the numbers and rates of children with SEND being excluded (although it must be noted from the DfE statistics that special schools do not get off scot free as some still use exclusion at a high rate).
So what does your own in-school analysis show? Are children with SEND over-represented in the exclusion statistics in your own school? Do you break down exclusions to show how SEND (or other categories for that matter) is represented?
If you are not looking at this information in any detail, you will not spot trends that may hint at an issue that needs further attention.
If you do look at the finer detail, is this level of information reported to governors? This will enable them to be far more effective and to challenge well. This is their job remember, so anything you can do to help them be more effective is of immediate benefit to the school as a whole.
Does your analysis show that you are using fixed-term exclusion repeatedly for the same students with no discernible improvement in their behaviour? If so, have you considered the effectiveness of fixed-term exclusion as a behaviour improvement strategy?
Exclusion without subsequent improvement is just respite, despite the fact that it may make you feel like you have dealt with a situation by doing something that sounds tough.
We change tack as teachers if teaching strategies do not lead to learning, yet we do not always take this approach to examining the effectiveness of behaviour management strategies.
Zero-tolerance and no excuses
The psychologist Richard Nisbett has written in his excellent book Mindware on the common errors that we make with assessing our behaviour and that of others.
He recommends that we “should pay more attention to context”. He continues: “This will improve the odds that we’ll correctly identify situational factors that are influencing our behaviour and that of others ... we should realise that situational factors usually influence our behaviour and that of others more than they seem to, whereas dispositional factors are usually less influential than they seem.”
Zero-tolerance or no excuses policies are inflexible by definition and, as such, cannot allow for context, such as when a child with sensory integration difficulties cannot bear to have their top button done up or a child with autism who may struggle to maintain the eye contact that you may insist upon.
Negative behaviour because of unmet needs
This is one of the cornerstones of my beliefs about understanding and improving the behaviour of children in schools.
It has enabled me to progress from the NQT who grappled with behaviour to someone who has now developed a depth of confidence that this approach works.
If you do not think about the causes of behaviour and the situational factors noted by Nisbett you may render yourself powerless to do anything about it.
Consider the research by Geoff Lindsay and Julie Dockrell, for example, on the relationship between speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) and behavioural, emotional and social difficulties (BESD). They found that children with SLCN needs are 35 to 50 per cent more likely to have behavioural, emotional and social difficulties.
This may well shock you, but it will be blindingly obvious to anyone who has worked in special schools with children who have social, emotional and mental health difficulties (SEMH).
Often this is to do with the large amounts of verbal information they are having to process and/or frustrations they may have with communicating, such as the technical vocabulary they may need to be successful in your subject.
Unless we take concerted action within schools, such as the steps I have outlined above, to reduce the gross over-representation of children with SEND in the statistics for fixed-term and permanent exclusion, we will continue to mistakenly associate SEND with behavioural difficulties.
It does not need to be this way, I assure you.
- Jarlath O’Brien is headteacher of Carwarden House Community School in Surrey. His book Don’t Send Him in Tomorrow is published by Independent Thinking Press.