You contemplate the stocks or defenestration, but there’s not much you can really do, except pray for their absence. We’re not talking lovable rogues here, rather deeply damaged children who need serious attention.
Being on a GCSE grade less than C. Buggering up league tables. Being a bit disenfranchised – challenging, difficult, and “troubled children” seem to have become an alibi for some worrying stuff.
They’ve prompted two worrying recent developments.
First, the disappearing of many pupils – 10,000 last year. That’s the number of pupils who “left” England’s mainstream state secondary schools in the run-up to their GCSE courses in 2015, according to an analysis of official data by The Guardian and the Education Datalab think-tank.
Their absence improves league table positions. You finesse the figures. It reflects our wider society. Cleansing of the eccentric. The more unsightly and less scrubbed pupils were put on gardening leave.
Where do they really they go? Who knows? Not Michael “Macho” Wilshaw. The chief inspector of schools says that it is not clear where these vulnerable pupils are being educated after they are taken out of school.
Second is Mrs May’s latest macho lark. It is darker still.
Criminalise them. Put “them” in jail. Do Not Pass Go. Well, GCSEs. Free Schools run by the police and crime commissioners. Free and Jail make for much cognitive dissonance. Doesn’t jail famously brutalise crime?
It’s for “young people on the cusp of crime or interested in joining the police”. It will prevent troubled children falling into a life of crime. Ponder the conflation. A disturbing mind-set. It makes disturbing assumptions about a career in the police.
And cusp? This might turn Dave Mania or Sidney Lunk. Their interest in the Old Bill has mostly been trying to flee their interest in them.
The initiative is pioneered by Northamptonshire’s police and crime commissioner, who is to open a 1,200 strong Free School with a “crime-specific curriculum” this September. How to commit it? Stop it?
Sara Ogilvie, policy officer for Liberty, says it could fast-track the ordinary rogues into a life of crime.
It is certainly grotesquely insensitive or cynical. I don’t want them to be incarcerated. I don’t want them to be wandering the streets. I just want their “troubled souls” to be welcome and secure in my classroom.
- Ian Whitwham is a former inner city London teacher.