Social Inclusion in Schools

Improving Outcomes, Raising Standards

Ben Whitney

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781843124740
• eBook ISBN: 9781135394325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides the busy teacher with all the information they need to make social inclusion a reality within schools.

By demonstrating how teachers and schools must work together to promote the wider welfare of all children, the book focuses particularly on the welfare of children on the margins of society who need the most protection.

It shows how teachers can aim to reduce inequalities and maximise the learning opportunities available for these vulnerable children, whatever their background or social class. The author addresses key issues such as:

• attendance and achievement
• exclusion and behaviour
• safeguarding and child protection
• children at risk of missing education.

By emphasizing the Every Child Matters agenda and the importance of joined-up partnership approaches with other professionals and agencies, this book is essential reading for all practitioners working to support pupils at risk of exclusion.

CHAPTER 1
Joined-up services for children

It was like Piccadilly Circus in my house most of the time. There always seemed to be someone there trying to sort out the latest crisis. We had all kinds of people coming round; most of them were OK: social workers, the wag man from school, police, the housing, everyone. Mum dealt with them mostly; she was always up the Social for something, or down the doctor’s. I left her to it, or looked after the little ones. It was embarrassing – having to admit that my family wasn’t like all the other kids at school. And they never seemed to talk to each other. You’d have to tell them the same stuff over and over again before anything happened. Everyone has problems I suppose, but I always felt different; out of it.

Promoting inclusion

This book is about how teachers and schools can best work together with others to promote the wider welfare of children. More than that, it’s about how we must work together in particular for those children on the margins who need us most. Schools are part of a multi-agency network of professionals and services that are intended to bring about an improvement in every child and young person’s quality of life and prepare them all for adulthood.

This opening chapter offers an unashamed perspective in support of social inclusion for children within the education system; a ‘mission statement’ on which all the subsequent chapters will expand. It is based on two simple principles.

• Firstly, that when we say every child (and young person) matters we really mean it, without exceptions.
• Secondly, good or improving outcomes for the majority or even for most children are not a sufficient measure of our effectiveness.We have to be measured against them all.There is a universal entitlement to be delivered and nothing less will do.

We have clearly become more compassionate and inclusive as a society than used to be the case – perhaps we sometimes forget how much things have already changed. My own experience since the 1960s makes the point.When I was at grammar school, I never came across any children with learning problems.They would have all failed the 11 plus and gone somewhere else. If you couldn’t cope with the work or, perish the thought, if you misbehaved and the cane or the slipper wasn’t enough to make the point, you had to leave and that was that. Most pupils were from middle-class homes like me with supportive parents. Other children from other kinds of backgrounds must have existed, but I never met them, or not at school anyway.

Many previous ways of treating children that used to be seen as perfectly routine have now become unacceptable, such as the right of teachers to hit those in their care. My own children found the very idea incredible. Child abuse was known about for years before it was actively addressed. Similarly, the standards of inclusion that we aspire to now are also higher than before.A greater participation by children with special educational needs is a particular example. Only a generation or so ago they were classed as ‘subnormal’or ‘retarded’,terms now rightly seen as offensive and degrading.That change of attitude has benefited the lives of countless children and their parents.

I began my professional career in the early 1970s. I happened to be one of the first social workers in the new social services departments to concentrate specifically on supporting families with disabled children who had just started attending a school near to where they lived. I was also involved in setting up regular respite care in the community where they,and their parents,could have a break at weekends and in the holidays. This approach, keeping families together wherever possible, was previously almost unheard of but now seems obvious.

I was motivated no doubt in part by the fact that my own, highly intelligent, older brother had muscular dystrophy but unusually, had remained with his family and in mainstream education. If it worked for him, why not for others? Most of his contemporaries were educated quite differently.They didn’t live with their families and I saw them only on flag days and at garden parties when they were allowed out from their ‘home’ somewhere out in the countryside. No doubt they were well cared for and it was, in one sense, a safe and stimulating life for them, but somehow it never felt right.

I have since spent over thirty years in family social work,education and the voluntary sector. I have worked with children in care, churches, parents and community groups and, for the last sixteen years with schools again, this time helping them to engage with another kind of child at risk of being left out: those who may rarely thank us for our efforts and whose lives are in constant chaos.They may seem to delight in breaking all the rules, but their needs and potential as individuals are just as great as those who were overlooked before.

WHO ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

The original DfES Guidance (Circular 10/99 – Social Inclusion: Pupil Support) identified a list of children and young people at particular risk:

• some of those with special educational needs (but not all)
• children in the care of local authorities/looked-after
• some minority ethnic children (but not all)
• travellers
• young carers
• those from families under stress or experiencing abuse
• pregnant schoolgirls and teenage mothers
• poor attenders

To these groups might be added:

• children who are ‘missing education’ either through formal or informal exclusion or other factors
• those whose behaviour makes them difficult to engage, including those who are dependent on illegal drugs and/or alcohol, young sex offenders and others in the criminal justice system
• other transient groups such as asylum-seekers and refugees
• children with mental health problems
• children and young people living in poverty, who are homeless or whose families are generally marginalised from the wider community

Future generations may yet judge us harshly for our continuing social inequalities,even if they are now rather more subtle.They can still have a significant impact on many children’s learning and their subsequent performance and achievement.The assumption that there is now a level playing field available and that all parents and children have a free choice among all schools is clearly a very simplistic analysis.We are not supposed to call them ‘league tables’ but everyone knows that’s what they are. Schools compete, and in any competition there are always losers. Some children are still last to be picked for the team, if indeed, they are allowed to play at all.

For those children who are not easily going to score well in such a competition, achievement and pastoral care are inextricably linked together.Their needs should be at the heart of plans for school improvement. Indeed, at a recent headteachers’ conference in my local authority, Steve Munby, Chief Executive of the National College for School Leadership (NSCL), identified how well schools engage with marginalised children and their parents as the first priority for effective leadership in the future and the key to raising overall attainment. These issues must be key priorities for both managers and practitioners in any school, including those that do not necessarily see them as a current priority.They may be missing something crucial.

But schools cannot operate in a vacuum. Children’s lives outside school have to be understood and a holistic approach adopted that seeks to meet the multiplicity of their needs,informed not least,of course,by the child or young person themselves.Their own perspective has often been overlooked up to now.It may be helpful to begin by becoming more familiar with the wider ‘social care’context within which schools now operate and getting to grips with the language used by others who will be working much more closely with us in future.

KEY DATES IN CHILD WELFARE PROVISION

1872	Infant Life Protection Act
1889	Protection of Children Act
1890	NSPCC formed
1933	Children and Young Persons Act
1945	Death of Dennis O'Neill
1946	First recognition of deliberate fractures (USA)
1948	Children Act
1962	First use of term 'battered baby/child' (USA)
1969	Children and Young Persons Act
1974	Death of Maria Colwell
1978	Warnock Report
1981	Education Act (SEN)
1988	Cleveland Inquiry
1989	Children Act
2000	Death of Lauren Wright
2001	Death of Victoria Climbié
2002	Education Act (safeguarding duty ss. 157 and 175)
2002	Death of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman (Soham)
2003	Laming Report and 'Every Child Matters'
2004	Children Act
2006	Local Safeguarding Children Boards

The growth of ‘welfare’

Arrangements for promoting the welfare of children in Britain, especially those judged to be most vulnerable,undergo significant change about every twenty years.For the first generation after the war there was a particular need to rebuild family life,literally through improved housing but also through universal health care and expanding employment. But as most of the nation came to accept that we had ‘never had it so good’, we also had to come to terms with the difficult recognition that some children were not reaping the benefits of the improvements seen by many.This was either through continuing poverty or because of significant shortcomings in the quality of their parental care.

Things were not all as rosy as memories may sometimes suggest.The death of Dennis O’Neill from deliberate abuse and the gradual emergence of ‘battered baby syndrome’, first in the USA and then in the UK, demonstrated that such issues had not gone away as most must have hoped. Some parents at least could not be trusted with the care of their own children.The privacy and parental authority that was traditionally inherent in British family life now came under much greater scrutiny as the role of the state expanded.

The Children Act 1948 was generally non-interventionist and supportive towards families. In contrast, the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 increased the emphasis on taking children into alternative care. Following the killing of Maria Colwell, both the profession of social work and the need for inter-agency arrangements began to take hold as a largely new element in welfare provision.There was a growing recognition of physical neglect, if often still as a result of poverty as well as intentional cruelty.Then sexual abuse was acknowledged (not in fact new but hardly mentioned, for example, in my own initial social work training).The emphasis was moved away from the previous medical-based therapeutic approaches and on to more practical interventions designed to help families with the problems of everyday living. Social workers in the USA never delivered fridges or gave out grants to pay the rent as I used to do.

Significant numbers of children were now being removed from their parents to live in ‘approved schools’,‘community homes’and other specialist provision when they were judged to be ‘beyond control’. Many children and young people went to Borstals and other punitive establishments when they broke the law. Experts and specialists knew what was best for troubled children, it was thought. Ideally they should be looked after where we didn’t see much of them,but where we could also have every confidence that they were in the best place,wherever that was.(It was only in the 1960s that we stopped sending disadvantaged children to Australia.)

Many of those who would now be recognised as having SEN were the most ready victims of such arm’s-length compassion.They were deemed ‘ineducable’ and provided with only the most basic of care in ‘mental’hospitals,often in remote,if idyllic,locations. There was little opportunity even for what was usually described as ‘training’, where it existed at all. We have only had special schools (as opposed to Junior Training Centres) for less than thirty years and in my early working life I would regularly visit children with severe learning difficulties who had spent their whole lives hidden away, often staying there right through their adulthood as well. Such an approach was taken for granted as best for everyone.

Children Act 1989 and beyond

However, crises such as the events in Cleveland, Orkney and other examples where children appeared to have been removed from their families unnecessarily,undermined public confidence in both residential provision and the judgement of professionals. There was also a growing awareness of physical, emotional and sexual abuse by a small number of staff in children’s homes and other institutional care settings. Out of sight could no longer mean out of mind as well.There was an emerging consensus around the need to put more emphasis on the rights of the individual again, of both children and their parents this time, rather than just parents as before.

This thinking, along with other questions about how we should handle the implications for children of parental separation and divorce,led to the Children Act 1989 (implemented in 1991).This is still a key milestone with continuing significance.This Act greatly enhanced the need to work in partnership with parents and to avoid, wherever possible, heavy-handed action which may actually make things worse for children. It is, after all, their welfare that is supposed to be ‘paramount’.The pendulum now swung back towards the family, admittedly a more varied and less robust arrangement of relationships than used to be the case.In all but a very few cases,staying at home is likely to be better for the child (and less expensive for the taxpayer), than any alternative. It also means that more children with additional needs are likely to remain in their community, and therefore in local schools, as a result.This was the beginning of the social inclusion approach; it is not a recent invention.

Almost twenty years on again and the neglect and murder of another child,Victoria Climbié, has changed things again for the twenty-first century.This was a shocking, if far from unique, case of child cruelty. It gripped the attention of politicians and raised major questions about professional competence and management accountability,rather than only pointing the finger of blame at the people who actually killed her. Unusually, the criticisms of the subsequent Laming Report went right to the top.The focus in child welfare for the coming years will not be so much on the debate about whether the state or parents should decide what is best for children.Either may be appropriate depending on the child’s needs and the parents’ circumstances. In itself that is as sterile a dispute as whether mainstream schools or special schools are always better than the other.It clearly depends on a number of factors in each case.

What matters now is that the people to wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Joined-Up Services for Children
• Chapter 2: Attending and Achieving
• Chapter 3: Behaviour and Exclusions
• Chapter 4: Safeguarding and Protecting Children
• Chapter 5: Children At Risk of Missing Education
• Chapter 6: Making a Positive Contribution
• References and Resources