When children with SEND, who have violent outbursts, become adults

[wobblychristmastree]

Saw an article online about teachers being injured by children/young people with SEND in schools. My own child is in a (mainstream) class with a pupil who has violent outbursts, is supported by a 1:1 but my child has been injured, as have others. Clearly it’s a failure of the school, although I understand it is difficult to keep 1:1s for them due to have difficult the work is. But it got me thinking, this can’t go on indefinitely. Is the hope that they develop the skills to cope as adults? What becomes of the these when they become adults?

It's untrue that exclusions are no longer a thing. PRUs up and down the country take excluded kids who have no EHCPs, and SEMH settings take those who do. The problem isn't that kids aren't excluded, the problem is that LAs use Fair Access Protocols or Managed Moves to force an excluded child, without any proper support, back into a different mainstream, where the whole cycle starts again. It is common for placement in SEMH specialist or a PRU to be agreed only after 3 schools have excluded.

The problem is also that exclusion should not be needed, where there are SEND needs, because if they are behaving in a way that reaches the exclusion threshold then their needs are grossly unmet and they should have been moved to a more suitable school a long time before that.

Children have brain plasticity. A few will be damaged cognitively, and always violent, but in most cases it's completely down to unmet need. Leaving them in mainstream is devastating to them, and those around them. Proper support at an early enough stage can be life-altering. If you leave them in an environment that triggers anxiety-fuelled aggression and anger and violence, then eventually yes, that becomes who they are. But in a lot of cases it doesn't need to.

That isn't to deny that there are children who simply don't understand the impact of their anger, or (as a poster below commented) that injuries are real. They just act on emotion, like a tiny child, and can't comprehend it's real that they harm people. In other cases, the child comes out of meltdown and feels extraordinary guilt. It's complicated. But I do think in most cases, kids are acting from being pushed beyond endurance and met by challenges that are literally impossible for them. They simply need a better environment for their needs.

I’m in Scotland. The opposition to exclusion in our area is so entrenched that if a child has a meltdown at school, teachers are not allowed to phone home and say ‘your poor kid needs a break, can you come fetch him’ without a tonne of paperwork. That’s exclusion. The words ‘time out’ are frowned on; that’s exclusion.

It’s a thought process in keeping with the one that determined that a rapist should be allowed in a female prisons, so … 🤷‍♀️

We are governed by imbeciles and numpties.

Ah, apologies - different legal and SEND system to ours.

That's correct re. informal exclusions here. Permanent exclusions are very much a thing, though, and actually a record of multiple fixed term ones are often created to justify the permanent. Time out in a sensory room or similar is internal exclusion I think, too. It isn't that you aren't allowed to do them, it's that you have to record them.

I think records should be kept, as here it helps parents force specialist placement. CPOMS that doesn't record what actions the school have had to take in turn means they can't prove they took them.

DS was very violent as a child. Mainstream school almost tipped him into being an irretrievably violent young man. Luckily he was excluded (though it didn't feel lucky at the time) and just as he was starting to be allowed back, Covid started which was terrible or his education but fantastic for allowing DS to destress at home instead of having to go daily to an environment that was incredicly toxic for him

DS stopped being violent at home around age 5 (apart from slamming doors and occasionally breaking something in his teenage years when very unhappy). He has never harmed a person in our home or even any wide family member since then. Most of my family are happy to see him and have him around. He does not scare them at all. Even aged 21 and still at home now, when he gets upset and starts to be frustrated, he will calm down if either I or DH are there and can talk to him, even if it is one of us that has upset him. I find him frustrating often but have never ever been scared he will hurt me

However, he only stopped being violent in social settings and at primary school at around 10 years old. He started being violent again at secondary school in year 9 and he stopped being violent only after he stopped going and went to a local college instead. His behaviour can still be difficult to manage sometimes and he gets incredibly anxious but he hasn't hurt anyone in 5 years, since he started college at 16 years old. I doubt he will be able to work though as I think a normal job with average stess levels will be very bad for him and if he were not allowed to be left to calm down when upset, I suppose he might possibly lash out. If he gets very upset but is left alone however, he regulates quickly nowadays.

So it is not inevitable that an excessively violent child (and DS really was excessively violent when he was younger) will turn into a violent adult but it is reasonably likely I'd say and depends on so many factors it is hard to know who will stop doing this as an adult and who won't

As someone earlier said however, it defintely requires consistent and skilled teaching and emotion coaching. DS was lucky in that 1) He had no siblings to take away from mine and DH's commitment to this which was frankly incredibly time consuming and exhausting work and would have been impossible with other children in the home 2) He was intellectually able which helped to mitigate some of the frustration and helped him understand when we were teaching him problem solving skills, 3) He grew up in a reasonably calm environment with 'goo d enough' parents. Put a child like this in a chaotic home and they have no chance at all. 4) His father is autistic but incredibly calm, non emotional, very supportive on a practical level and very successful professionally, so a good role model for DS

DS was unlucky in that 1) He has a volatile mother prone to depression, so he might have had an even better outcome if I had been able to stay calmer through out all his challenges. I did my best, read up on how best to deal with him, did training and got therapy etc but it was always a work in progress, in a way that it never was for DH. 2) He attend mainstream school. To this day I think he would have done better in a specialist placement but we just could not get him into one, we really tried.

The correlation between exclusion and prison has been turned into a causal link and education adjusted accordingly (no more exclusion). The correct cause would be unmet SEN needs. So if mainstream schools can’t cope with SEN demands then it’s not going to stop kids with SEN becoming adults in prison.

THIS. Also the obsession with attendance. Lack of attendance leads to lack of qualifications (quite obviously) and lower life outcomes, so it seems to be assumed that getting bums on seats or bodies physically in the school building will lead those pupils to gain qualifications and therefore not end up with the lower life chances. Completely missing the point that simply being physically at school does not magically imbue anybody with knowledge, and often the reasons kids bunk off or end up with EBSA are because they can't engage with the learning content in the first place largely due to unmet SEN or SEMH needs.

Ross Greene has a good analogy for this kind of thing, he calls it being "late". By the time you're looking at excluding a kid and decide not to, it's already late. The actual problem was occurring earlier and leading to the behaviour causing school management to consider exclusion. By the time you're looking at a kid who is physically not even turning up to school it's already late. The actual problem was occurring earlier and leading to them not engaging which over time leads them to feel what is the point of even being here.

He has just written a new book about this called "The Kids Who Aren't OK" which I haven't read yet but I think I will.