Let’s talk about how we can make changes in schools to improve them for everyone involved.

[SchoolsMustChange]

Having binge-read the WFH/attendance thread, I feel it important to have a positive discussion about changes schools can make that will improve things for everyone.

As a mother of autistic children, a couple of whom have school refused to the point of us being threatened with court and fines, and feeling totally unsupported by school, and ending up home educating because there felt like no other options, which also meant claiming more benefits to be able to do that.

I feel there are alternative options that would help schools become less chaotic, ease the stress on SN families (much of which comes from gaslighting and lack of support from within school) and improve outcomes for most children involved.

Lack of special school spaces is obviously an issue that must be addressed at some point, but for this thread let’s focus on mainstream schools, which seem to be really struggling right now.

At my youngest child’s school there was a high % of ND children, mainly because the local choice of schools is a draconian academy which manages out children with support needs, and this school, which is now riddled with attendance and behavioural issues. When I deregistered my son he was the 11th child in his year group to be removed, in a small school with under 60 per year group. My son’s attendance was nearing 50%.

What would have worked for him? Streaming lessons. Using technology already set up in the school during Covid lockdown. Allowing my son and others like him to login and register his attendance, and attend school and in a way that he could cope with. If he felt he genuinely had a choice to access education in this way he would have thrived. In days where stress levels were lower he could attend school and register as normal. If the day got too much he could come home and log in for afternoon lessons without it affecting his attendance and worrying schools, OFSTED and government. With this arrangement I know that his attendance, and that of loads like him, would be 100%. He wants to learn, but he can’t always do it in school.
Edited to add: this would also work for children who are ill who should be at home instead of spreading their germs to everyone!

I also think this plan could go further in dealing with increasing behavioural issues in the classroom, by being clear to parents that any issues (a lot which will be caused by unsupported SN) and their child will do lessons in a quiet room, streamed to a device with headphones (isolation room was often full of children who couldn’t cope in a loud classroom and who calmed down once there), and if the behaviour persists they can go home to learn there - if school is then not accessed they can be chased for their attendance, because a workable option is available.

Schools can then have a clearer line of acceptable behaviour with a real solution that’s not up for debate. At the moment lines are blurred and behaviour remains a big problem.

So rather than talking about the problem, can we have a discussion about potential solutions?

It’s depressing reading the frequent threads fighting teachers and/or children and/or parents.
Teachers are understandably not coping and are often blaming pupils and parents, children are not coping - as seen with rising rates of mental illness and poor attendance, parents are not coping because, especially those of us with SN children, we can see that they are not supported and we take the brunt of that once home. The system isn’t working for anyone.

So what can be done, because unless someone addresses the issues, instead of constantly pointing fingers at any other problem, this is only going to get worse for teachers, parents and pupils alike.

Any thoughts?

Schools work on economies of scale. We can’t really afford a highly tailored individualised approach.

*Fund them appropriately - and that means both physical buildings and staffing wise.
*Fund CAMHS and social services properly so teachers aren't wearing that hat too.
*move away from the fact that 10 GCSE's is right for everyone. Let functional slikks maths and English be taken at 16 if appropriate. Move back to vocational routes for those children where they are more suitable.

No one can afford to continue with the current system either, @Wildflowers99. My parents are both retired secondary heads and were very much of your opinion until they saw schools from the perspective of my autistic 10yo, who's bright, polite and works extraordinarily hard but who's found it impossible to thrive in his very inclusive mainstream because the setting is just too overwhelming for him. They have some serious regrets about decisions they took before they had that additional, hands-on SEN experience.

OP, I like this thread. I have no issue with the concept of uniform but dressing every child like an Edwardian stockbroker is insane, particularly as so few adults wear ties to work these days. I'd swap a shirt and skirt/trousers for a polo shirt, sweatshirt and joggers, at both primary and secondary levels - far fewer children would be fighting with their own sensory aversions that way.

What would have worked for him? Streaming lessons. Using technology already set up in the school during Covid lockdown. Allowing my son and others like him to login and register his attendance, and attend school and in a way that he could cope with.

I also think this plan could go further in dealing with increasing behavioural issues in the classroom, by being clear to parents that any issues (a lot which will be caused by unsupported SN) and their child will do lessons in a quiet room, streamed to a device with headphones

This kind of sounds as thought it's assumed that school lessons are like lectures, where a teacher just stands at the front and talks. Lessons are interactive and involve group work, pair work, plus the teacher going round and giving students feedback on what they are doing / writing. This would not really be achievable in a streamed lesson.

Also, given the number of students this might apply to, how would schools find the space amd staff for these (presumably supervised) rooms? Schools mostly already have an 'inclusion' room for students who have been removed from class for behaviour issues, but if there are more than a couple of difficult students in there, it's often not a nice calm space for anyone to work in.

What you suggest sounds like a utopia of the perfect education system. It would cost billions to implement. The root cause of why so many children cannot now go to school and meet attendance and behavioural expectations needs to be much better understood. There should be more support for children and families that struggle but inclusion has been pushed for the last couple of decades with no funding to go with it. Schools cannot meet all the individual needs that pupils have and it isn’t fair to expect them to without the funding or staffing. Successive governments are to blame for how little money schools have to deal with additional needs. There are also many parents who claim their child has additional needs but actually they have poor language and communication due to poor parenting in the early years (I am not suggesting this is you OP).

The SEN bill is at £10 billion, a record level. I wouldn’t say it’s underfunded. I’m not being contrary but the ‘lack of funds’ argument is a bit of an urban myth.

• make families less scared of social care and early help, when they and their child need help

• make parents realise, as Covid lockdowns taught us, that the social aspect of being in school is just as important as grades. Children working from home and in isolation is not the answer and should be actively avoided.

• fund more children's mental health education. Not necessarily support. I feel the current generation of children need teaching the resilience needed to cope with periods of mental ill-health.

• parents need to have more respect for the knowledge and skills of teachers and headteachers. Even when it's not what they want to hear.

Some kindness and flexibility on the part of the school.
Overhaul of curriculum and learning environment so less academic or ND children are not forced to learn material they can't access or do well at, but instead can do vocational and practical options leading to employment.
The root of a lot of issues are poverty/deprivation/ housing problems which need a wider solution.

I don't understand why some schools can be so good/equipped at SEN support and others can do nothing but punishment.

I have been both a teacher and parent of a child with SEN. If you are teaching a lesson in a classroom, you cannot do an online streaming lesson at the same time, so you would need either another teacher/staff member to implement this or access to an online platform. This might not be tailored so well to the child, if it's a generic lesson.

I agree with most of what @LittleHangleton says, except our experience of Social Services has been very poor. A complete lack of support and wishful thinking that the issues which have been identified as needing support would just disappear. I think that this links with the comment about the SEN Bill, which is a lot of the services work on a point of crisis rather than early intervention and prevention, which of course will cost more.

So much but let's start with the basics.

• Smaller secondary schools.

Most of them are overwhelming jungles for most SEN children.

• More dedicated SEN staff.

One SENCo and one Assistant SENCo for 1500+ children is utterly insufficient. Just reading emails from parents and various reports is a full time job.

- Proper training for all teachers to be able to actually* understand what their students face every day.

This can be done cheaply and quickly (i e. not burdening teaches unnecessarily) by asking parents to give a talk or two from their vast experience, rather than treating them as the enemy.

• SLT actually listening to teachers and parents who are at the coalface, instead of enforcing pointless rules and worrying about league tables/Ofsted

- Ofsted actually helping* schools.

So, to come back to what schools could do better, definitely more flexibility. Also, better education/training for schools and if necessary, accountability for schools to be follwing EHCPs. The EHCPs need overhauling too, as they are unwieldy, take tooblong, expensive and need to be much more effective.

I’m talking about the thousands of children/families who cannot consistently access education because of school based trauma.
Most of these are autistic or ND, and the need for support ramps up dramatically as they progress through school.

Your points sound a little patronising, as if parents of such children don’t understand such things, which we do, and that we’re unwilling to engage with services, which we generally are until those services turn out to be quite ignorant of our children’s needs and in turn become damaging to our families.

At this point, when more and more children are effectively out of education, and every thread by a teacher or parent shows how shocking schools have become, surely we’re at a point where we should collectively be working out what to do rather than simply saying “no that won’t work” which won’t get us anywhere.

Overhaul of curriculum and learning environment so less academic or ND children are not forced to learn material they can't access or do well at, but instead can do vocational and practical options leading to employment.

Narrowing of the curriculum.

Ofsted and .gov.uk will tell you research shows that children have better outcomes if they are given opportunity to learn a wider range of subjects. This is especially the case for disadvantaged children, inc those with SEND and FSM, who are more disadvantaged by narrowing of the curriculum than non-SEND and Non-FSM.

I don't agree with this, I'm just saying. I had a long argument with ofsted over the narrowing of the curriculum by having a 3 year GCSE and fewer GCSEs for some SEND students in order to focus on functional skills and core subjects. But this is a battle any school will lose because research shows otherwise.

stop making children do a full timetable of GCSEs when it’s not suitable / a major issue in art/music lessons full of disengaged students messing about.

more staff, not teachers. DD goes to a supported classroom and it’s used as a dumping ground for naughty/wandering kids. Genuine quiet classrooms for students not coping. Classrooms for disengaged students doing something else.

I understand that streaming a lesson, on zoom or other, isn’t necessarily the simple solution, but surely streaming a lesson as it is would allow an anxious child to access more education than they are right now, and allowing these children more flexibility could solve the attendance issues very quickly.

Short of completely overhauling schools it would be good to find some temporary fixes that would help these children and take the increasing pressure of them and their families.

At this point, when more and more children are effectively out of education, and every thread by a teacher or parent shows how shocking schools have become, surely we’re at a point where we should collectively be working out what to do rather than simply saying “no that won’t work” which won’t get us anywhere.

But we can't force the government to fund these things!

This can be done cheaply and quickly (i e. not burdening teaches unnecessarily) by asking parents to give a talk or two from their vast experience, rather than treating them as the enemy.

Get unqualified parents in to give talks to teachers? But surely they really only have vast experience of their own child's needs? Schools have very limited training time available, so they need the training to be widely applicable and useful to all teaching staff.

I think the answer is to work out why so many children have anxiety now rather than further embedding it by making it so they never have to leave their front door

Ban skirts and leggings, every child wears trousers in classrooms and tracksuits for PE. Everyone wears a name badge/lanyard all the time so everyone is known and accountable. Somewhere warm to sit in the winter (at my school we used to be made to stand outside in the rain during lunch and break without our coats).

Yes, in an ideal world, but as we’ve seen at least over the last 10 years (when I first deregistered a child) there is a huge reluctance within individual schools to recognise what’s happening when many of us as parents could tell them exactly why our child is school refusing, but they’re simply not interested, and nor are MPs or other services who should be working towards meeting our children’s needs.

Whilst it looks like it’s further pushing our children to never leave the house, in reality the pressure to attend school which is usually the root of the trauma is doing just that. The ensuing mental health crisis means many children leave school and are unable to work as they are too ill.

Having the option to access education from home would take the pressure off completely, and in my child’s individual case would mean he’d probably be able to go to school more, knowing that he was making that choice and that no one would be in trouble if on certain days he was unable to.

That blows my mind 😳. Where is all the extra money people want supposed to come from.

How would banning skirts and leggings help education?

I’m sorry to be negative, I really am.
My experience (having recently returned to teaching in a state primary after a decade away) is that the SEN provision is breaking schools - and teachers. Certainly the one I work in.
An unsustainable number of children need such specialist attention and this is making it impossible to teach the curriculum in too many classes.
You can have as many ELSA’s, TA’s or EHCP’s as you like, but, in many schools, a tipping point in the number of individual children needing just behavioural support has been reached and it’s like watching a slow motion car crash. A very dramatic analogy, I know, but one I feel appropriate.
I also know this doesn’t answer your question, and again, I’m sorry.

It would make girls less targeted imo.

I disagree. Dd would be really upset, she hates the fit of trousers. I think more options rather than less is a better way to find something that suits everyone.

"I think the answer is to work out why so many children have anxiety now rather than further embedding it by making it so they never have to leave their front door"

This.

Many people think too much screen time is a primary cause. Making kids access lessons from home would be adding even more.

I supervised key worker kids working online using school computers during lockdown. Monitoring software showing their screens and playing their audio showed many were more off task than they would be an actual lesson...