Effective Intervention in Primary Schools

Nurture Groups

Marion Bennathan, Majorie Boxall

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134123858
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

First Published in 2001. Nurture groups are spreading rapidly throughout the UK. This fully updated second edition is written in response to the support given by the DfEE to the Nurture Group project and the recognition by every major special needs policy document that they provide effective early intervention for children showing signs of emotional and behavioural difficulties.

Chapter 1

Children at Risk of Failure in Primary Schools

Marion Bennathan

Many young children in our schools cause great concern: they fail to make progress in their learning; they may behave badly so that they spoil their own educational chances and those of the rest of their class; they may be depressed, withdrawn, self-destructive. They evoke stress, uncertainty, even guilt in their teachers whose management skills they challenge beyond reasonable limits. Their failure to benefit from their time in school is likely to have serious consequences for their own life chances. It will also have consequences for the rest of society in their inability to make satisfactory adult relationships and provide adequate parenting, their need for welfare or mental health support, in rates of criminality.

It is difficult to know whether or not the number of children with emotional and behavioural difficulties in school is increasing. There are no agreed criteria for what constitutes a significant difficulty so that it is not possible to collect comprehensive data about incidence which would show changes over time. But the popular opinion, often reflected in the media, would certainly be that there is an increase of unacceptable behaviour as well as of distress in young people. This view is strongly supported by the authoritative work of Rutter and Smith (1995), Psychosocial Disorders in Young People, which records clear evidence from research over the last 50 years of massive increases in young people aged between 12 and 26 throughout Western Europe of reported criminality, substance abuse, depressive illnesses and suicides.

Exclusions

What has also increased sharply in the last few years is the number of children who have been excluded from mainstream school for unacceptable behaviour. There were already in 1991 widespread reports of rapid increases in the numbers of such children being excluded, of children as young as five being found too difficult for their teachers, of pressure on special resources (Bennathan, 1992). Parsons et al. (1994) in Excluding Primary School Children reported that the Department for Education estimated the number of permanent exclusions in 1993/94 at between 7,000 and 8,000 compared with about 3,000 three years earlier, when exclusions were already reportedly much higher than before.

It is impossible to say whether this increase really represents more serious emotional and behavioural difficulties in children or whether it is due to a changed response in schools which, it is often suggested, might be caused by increased teacher stress because of the many changes and extra work resulting from the 1988 Education Act. It may also be that there is less tolerance of disruptive behaviour because of ‘the impact of the National Curriculum on schools as heads and governors are forced to compete with each other and publish league tables of comparative performance’, as the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (1995) writes in its report on special educational needs.

Whatever the increased pressures, there is no reason to believe that schools are excluding children without good reason. Parsons et al. (1994, p. 17) write, ‘The evidence shows that the teachers involved with these pupils worked hard to contain them and to teach them, along with all the other children in the class, for a considerable length of time before the possibility of exclusion arose.’ Exclusion from school is clearly most undesirable; the failure to help such children adequately so that exclusion is avoided is serious in its consequences for them individually and it also has serious social implications. Those whose difficulties are emotional rather than behavioural are likely to be at greater risk of psychiatric illness in adult life as a result of rejection by their school. Those whose difficulties are behavioural pose a more obvious threat to society as well as to their own educational prospects, behaviour disorders in childhood having long been recognized as predictors of antisocial adult behaviour. (The evidence for this is comprehensively discussed in ‘Youth Crime and Conduct Disorders’, in Rutter and Smith, 1995.)

Parsons (Parsons et al. 1994, p. 7) points out that children expelled from school spend an average of nine months waiting for a new placement and may often wait a whole term before receiving any home tuition, which will then often be for only three hours a week. Excluded children are likely to come from homes that are already finding it difficult to provide adequate care and control for them even when they are attending school, so it is most unlikely that they will be able to provide a positive experience when they are at home all day long. Parsons’ conclusion from his research is that ‘the prospect of what these children might become, and what might happen to them, without appropriate provision, is frightening’. The AMA report likewise recognizes that ‘Exclusions can represent the last departure point, typically for boys, before they become entrenched in an alternative culture of crime’.

Increased exclusions are only one indicator of the increased number of children showing emotional and behavioural difficulties in our schools. It may be assumed that for every child with difficulties extreme enough to warrant exclusion there will be several not quite at that point but still drastically failing to achieve adequate standards of work and behaviour and often also seriously affecting the progress of their classmates. The aim of our education system is to offer all children the best possible preparation for adult life; it is, therefore, a matter of urgency that as much as possible is done to prevent emotional and behavioural difficulties affecting the quality of life for everybody in school.

Emotional and behavioural difficulties as a special educational need

One way to tackle the problem is to classify a child presenting serious emotional or behavioural difficulties as having a learning disability. This approach goes back to the 1944 Education Act where ‘maladjustment’ was for the first time accepted as a category of disability requiring special education in some form, along with such well-recognized conditions as mental handicap and sensory and physical disabilities. Since the 1981 Education Act emotional and behavioural difficulties, if they are thought serious enough to affect a child’s learning, constitute a ‘special educational need’ which may lead to a formal statement of entitlement to extra educational resources, a procedure which is no doubt essential for some children.

It would, however, be over simple to think that provision for children showing such difficulties is comparable with provision for other groups of children with special educational needs. There are considerable problems in comparing emotional and behavioural difficulties with such conditions as visual or hearing impairment, or other well-defined handicaps to good learning. A deaf child, for example, has a measurable hearing loss for which there is appropriate specialist teaching. Children either have impaired hearing or they do not; deafness is not dependent on emotional or social circumstances. It is a condition which is well understood, both medically and educationally.

Having ‘emotional and behavioural difficulties’ (EBD), by contrast, presents great problems of definition. All children are emotionally or behaviourally difficult sometimes; in a badly run class, many are so much of the time. The condition is not necessarily intrinsic to the child who, moved to a happier setting, might cease to have EBD. Also the causes of such difficulties are complex: some children live in difficult family circumstances, some are responding to distressing life events. In other words, having emotional and behavioural difficulties is not a clear-cut condition intrinsic to the child. The arguments in 1978 at the time of the influential Report, Special Educational Needs (DES, 1978; widely known as the Warnock Report, the precursor of the 1981 Education Act), against keeping the term ‘maladjusted’ were that it suggested a hard and fast condition. This thereby deflected attention from the circumstances that produced the undesirable behaviour, which might well include deficiencies in the management of such children in school.

Historically, individual differences in children had been seen as the main cause of differing educational progress, but the idea that individual differences in schools may be just as important is one that has been gaining ground over the last generation and is now centre stage. Rutter and colleagues (1979), in their landmark research, Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children, showed how schools with pupils from comparable backgrounds achieved widely varying educational outcomes. The Elton Report (DES, 1989), Discipline in Schools, also put the emphasis not on individual children and their circumstances but on the importance of creating a positive atmosphere in schools for all children and for their teachers.

This recognition makes it impossible to hold that all children who show EBD are a discrete group requiring special treatment. The situation is more complex than that, as is now officially recognized by central government, notably in the guidance which accompanied the 1993 Education Act. This Act and its Code of Practice (DfE, 1994c), which largely replaced the 1981 Education Act on children with special educational needs, was preceded by extensive consultation, detailed by Davie (1994), with all the agencies concerned with children in difficulties. The Department for Education circular, The Education of Children with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (DfE, 1994b), is an admirable survey of the present state of thinking about such children. Of EBD as a special educational need, it states, ‘There is no absolute definition … The difficulties are genuine. But EBD is often engendered or worsened by the environment, including schools’ or teachers’ responses’ (p. 4).

The clear implication of this is that if all schools were as good as they might be at managing children’s emotions and behaviour the incidence of EBD as a special educational need would decline. This is not to say there would no longer be any such thing as a child with serious emotional or behavioural difficulties. Some children have been so affected by extremely adverse experiences in their early years that they need more skilled help than can be offered by even the best mainstream schools. But the dangers in rushing to categorize children as EBD need to be underlined.

First, the demand for special placement would be high, which goes against the well-accepted policy first stated by the Warnock Report and reinforced by the 1993 Act that, with few exceptions, children should have the opportunity of mainstream education as the best preparation for adult life. Secondly, special placement is extremely expensive, using resources for a few that might enhance educational standards for the many. Thirdly, and this is perhaps in the long run the most important caveat, children with EBD should not be seen as a race apart. The processes they have gone through to make them severely EBD are only at the extreme end of the developmental processes gone through by all children. As someone memorably if inelegantly said, ‘Maladjusted children are just the same as other children, only more so’.

Understanding the processes that make a few children incontrovertibly ‘EBD’ helps to a greater awareness of the potential hazards for many more of the children in our schools. It can lead to an increased awareness of the emotional needs of all children, an understanding which ought to be part of the professional competence of all teachers.

Preventing educational failure by early identification

The Warnock Report brought about important changes in our thinking about children with handicaps to good learning. Underlying the insistence on looking at each child individually, rather than at the category of handicap, is the recognition of the many factors that influence the child as it develops. It is widely acknowledged that children may be born, for example, with a profound hearing loss but that in itself does not determine their educational future; with early identification and good intervention the educational effects of the deafness can be greatly reduced. It is less widely recognized that children may be born into circumstances which deny them the early experiences on which later educational progress depends. What needs to exist for such children is a system that acknowledges these complexities, that looks out for children with disabilities of whatever sort and then defines what they need educationally to progress. That schools can make a great difference to the life prospects of disadvantaged children should be seen as an extremely positive message for the education service.

The Warnock Report estimated that in addition to the 2 per cent of children with difficulties severe enough to warrant a ‘statement’ of special educational need, there were about 18 per cent of children in mainstream schools with special educational needs that should be identified and special help provided if educational failure was to be avoided. It enjoined school governors and teachers to set up stages of assessment for the identification, monitoring and adequate teaching of these children.

It would probably be agreed that the educational prospects of the 2 per cent were considerably improved by the 1981 Act, but there is no such confidence that this also happened for the 18 per cent. As Sir Malcolm Thornton (1994), Chairman of the House of Commons Education Committee, reviewing legislation in education, wrote:

The 1981 Act achieved significant change, particularly for the 2% of children needing special provision. It had, however, come at a time of pressure on LEA finances and had not had the impact hoped for on all schools. In particular it had not greatly improved the educational prospects of the 18% of children in mainstream schools estimated to have special educational needs at some point in their school lives. Visiting inner-city schools, it was clear that not all children were getting effective help.

The impact of the 1988 Education Act

Such help as these children were likely to get is generally acknowledged to have been threatened by the 1988 Education Reform Act. This, with its emphasis on raising academic standards and on making schools publicly accountable for their pupils’ progress, had, to quote Thornton again, ‘the unintended side effect of making schools less tolerant of children who needed more than their share of attention, particularly the group with emotional and behavioural difficulties’. Her Majesty’s Inspectors, in their report for 1991–2, likewise noted the ‘rising number of exclusions for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties in some Local Education Authorities’ and further that ‘few of those LEAs had evolved coherent strategies for managing the increase’.

Children at risk

Concern about what is seen as the increasing failure of the education system to help socially disadvantaged children is not only about their educational progress. There is growing disquiet, given frequent expression in the media, of a sizeable group of children and young people out of their parents’ control, growing up apparently without moral standards, beyond the law, a danger to themselves and to others and likely to be a burden to society throughout their lives. Calls for action came to a crescendo in 1993 during the trial of two boys, aged 10 and 11, for the appalling murder of two-year-old James Bulger whom they had first abducted and tortured. The fact that both boys were out of school at the time of the murder and in severe difficulties with their education was noted. It was not unreasonable to fear that, as the number of children out of school was growing, other such crimes might be in the making.

In summer 1995, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, launching a new campaign against street robbery, said: ‘It is a fact that very many of the perpetrators of mugging are very young black people, who have been excluded from school.’ In the heated public debate that followed, controversy centred on whether or not it was proper, fair or politic to single out one ethnic group. It would have been more constructive, the statement having been made, if those concerned for the welfare of our children had looked at the reality of life for young people who are rejected by their schools.

It has been known for some time that black adolescent boys are much more likely than white boys to be excluded by their schools. The Director of Education for the London Borough of Islington, for example, reported in 1992 (Evening Standard, 14 May, p. 14) an exclusion rate for black boys twice as high as for white boys and six times as high as for girls. Parsons et al. (1994, p. 7) writes that ‘a number of authors have signalled race as a factor in exclusions’. This aspect of the problem was almost totally ignored in the media debate, and serious public discussion of it is long overdue.

The 1993 Education Act

The 1933 Education Act may be seen as trying to soften the impact of the 1988 Education Act on a large group of vulnerable children. Its Code of Practice offers the structures that can help schools to do better for such children. The stages of assessment, the careful monitoring of progress, the involvement of parents could, if enthusiastically followed, make a great difference to the life chances of many of our children. But if schools are to implement the Code with the seriousness it deserves, to allocate resources to children identified at an early stage in t...