I work in a school for children with social and emotional difficulties. Many have been excluded from or struggled to cope in mainstream education. Much of the work we do makes a real difference: home visits, running parental workshops, holding multi-agency meetings and attending court are all a vital part of the holistic package of care we give these vulnerable young people.
To me, though, it feels like a piece of the jigsaw is missing. On the surface, the message is “high expectations for all”, but the reality seems to be quite the opposite. Rather than pushing our students to achieve, my school finds excuses to avoid focusing on outcomes.
It employs devious tricks to inflate success – using baseline tests pitched at a low level so we can show better progress later – and plays on the fact that we’re a special educational needs school to justify narrowing the curriculum. This means featuring only core and vocational subjects, despite these pupils being more than capable of studying languages, humanities and creative arts.
This has nothing to do with the increasing focus in mainstream education on English and maths and everything to do with the assumption that our “type” of pupils wouldn’t see the point in or enjoy these subjects.
For some of our students, this lack of breadth is just what they need. We offer a vocational route for those suited to it, and they get a chance to make something of themselves. The young people I worry about are those who have enormous academic potential, and would like to pursue other routes. We are letting these students down.
Soon after I joined the school I voiced my concerns. I knew that the pupils were capable of reading a whole book and enjoying it, for instance, but was told by the leadership team that “these kids don’t like reading”. I was advised to give them extracts and “mix it up a bit”.
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This assumption about students’ preferences doesn’t tally with my observations. There’s the pupil with severe dyslexia who comes to my classroom most lunchtimes to read an 800-page novel. Or the one who took home the book I gave them and read it cover to cover. When students have been encouraged in this way, I’ve seen their belief in their potential grow.
The school’s approach to behaviour compounds the problem. It’s commonplace for students to walk out of lessons because they don’t like a topic or “need” a smoke. There’s always a reason for why they haven’t finished their essay. We accept the excuse that students have only written a paragraph because that’s all they felt able to manage, and end up being almost grateful that they have produced anything. Dramatic incidents are kept to a minimum, and nobody wants to rock the boat.
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.Dumbing down the curriculum and lowering our expectations in this way perpetuates the self-fulfilling prophecy that these pupils can’t achieve academically. If they say “I can’t do it” and we say “You don’t have to”, surely something is very wrong?
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.We allow ourselves to think we’ve empowered these pupils by focusing on soft outcomes. But we’re holding them back from being the best they can be.