How disruptive does a child have to be to be removed from Primary School?!

[Juggletits]

Ongoing saga at our primary school. One child has been hugely disruptive since day one - attacking other children (stabbing with pencils, stamping on chests, stomach punches, facial damage with nails or sports equipment amongst many others), attacking teachers, throwing chairs, upending tables and regularly trying to escape.

Last term they brought a pocket knife in to school and showed it to other children, cut his own trousers and threatened other children that he "could stab them"

There is an ever growing list of assaults and incidents against many children and the parent community is absolutely baffled as to why the child has not been removed. They clearly need serious and ongoing support and our school is not set up for a child with such a level of additional needs.

The reason from the HT is that "certain thresholds haven't been met"

Does anyone know what these thresholds are from a legal/professional point of view?

It has reached the point that parents are keeping their children out of school because they are not safe in the classroom.

Multiple emails have been sent to the school, Academy Trust, Ofsted and MARU

What more can be done? An entire school is being disrupted by one child - this cannot be right?!

Things do change, but it's about going about things in a certain way. I think that that is the problem it's knowing how to approach the issue. Lawyers are good at that sort of thing, which is why parents, who go to SEN tribunals, not infrequently get their wishes met.

In this instance, the school response sounds not at all good.

You can Google challenging behaviour and find manuals and videos in ABC charts and ways of identifying a child's triggers. There are management techniques which work. Many children improve in their behaviour, with the correct interventions, if started at that relatively young age

The school should give the child an individual behaviour plan. I don't know the rules, but I would have thought another parent had the right to ask what the school is doing to keep their own child safe, and to ask questions about what has been put in place, including in the behaviour plan.

I never agree that size and strength and fitness don't matter in a member of staff tasked with managing the immediate presentations of challenging behaviour. I think if a child were to be attacking another peer, and angry, or even fighting with another angry child, then some physical strength would be needed to break it up. But it shouldn't get to the level at which an argument has become a fight. The volatile child ought to be helped to engage at play time in structured activity. All the obvious and usual strategies, which used to be used in schools.

Staff need to be active and able to move swiftly, with the child. Supporting challenging behaviour is a specialised area of work. You need the right people to do the job and then the management of the behaviour works well.

At what point as a parent of a SEN child you know attacks others do you take some responsibility and pull them out yourself? I would be mortified if my child was injuring others, even if I knew they could not help their reactions. There is no way would I allow my child in an environment that would allow them to get like that and do that to other children. I'm sorry, but I just wouldn't.

SEN support is shocking in schools and I really feel for parents and children dealing with all of this. Something needs to change and fast. But other children should not be being hurt in the process of this.

Lots of parents do pull their children out if they are distressed to the point of injuring other. There are thousands and thousands of children with no school place for years on end.

Deregistering and EHE often results in less and slower support. By EHE it is easier for professionals to sweep DC’s needs under the carpet and LAs say parents are making suitable alternative arrangements thereby relieving them of their duty. You wouldn’t deregister if that meant your child was less likely to receive the support they need, and the support they did get took longer and a bigger fight to get. Far better to push for more support, and an alternative placement if necessary, while remaining on the school’s roll.

I think, in terms of close supervision, you also have to bear in mind the constraints of space in many classrooms. Typically, any child in my old classroom was necessarily no more than a few cm from their direct neighbour, and 6 other children would be within the teach if an outstretched arm or leg.

For one thing, an attentive adult (or two, allowing for breaks) would always have to be seated or standing within an arm’s length of the child because otherwise they would be unable to get to them quickly (almost no circulation space) and for another, for the child not to be able to reach anything that could be used to hold or throw as a weapon (other than a table or chair) would deprive several other children of necessary equipment as it could otherwise not be far enough away.

There would be no space to seat a child with an adult with a large enough ‘exclusion zone’ except outside the classroom.

The school are being neglectful. There should be a policy for when that child is violent and he should be removed straight away. Even if he does have special needs there should be plans put in place to prevent that sort of behaviour. That seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

Ds had challenging behaviour besides the autism. I had managde to ensure he had a statement giving 1 to 1 support before he started nursery. He did manage to hurt other children in nursery and reception. I felt terrible but I wasn't there and I had done everything in my power to keep everyone else safe.
It changed when ds had an incredible TA who wasn't afraid to refuse the teacher's requests to support others, do photocopying, displays etc as each time ds had hurt previously was because the TA who was assigned to him was elsewhere "running errands"
Long story short but because of the incredible support he received by her and subsequent TAs when he moved to an outstanding secondary, in year ten he got the HT award at prizegiving for having "behaviour and attitude to learning second to none."

My DCs school, many years ago, did very little in similar circumstances until eight children left the school en masse. Each parent wrote to the Head explaining why, copied to HoG and the LEA. Once that happened they sort of said "Oh, right, it's a problem, we need to do something."

The offending child is now in prison.

Many parents of disruptive children - and I'm thinking about a special school context, and my (now) adult son who has asd - will keep them off school, if they have had a meltdown or seem more unsettled and challenging than usual, they will keep them off, until they seem more settled. It is often the case that physical illness precedes very challenging behaviour. You can't work out what has caused agitation, and then they fall asleep at 5pm on the sofa and start to get a temperature. However, most parents I know would keep children with ASD off school, if they were going through a challenging bout of behaviour.

What sounds unusual about the child about whom OP is speaking, is that there is very little analysis which has been done, or so it appears, into the antecedents for the behaviours. It is unbelievable that he is being left unsupervised to go through the school day with a knife and attacking children in the stomach and risking serious injury. It's unbelievable to think about being the headteacher and not being worried about a serious incident occurring. How could you get up in the morning and go to work, knowing that your laissez-faire attitude to health and safety might put you in court, cause you life-long regret and guilt, and damage children? Most people would want to remove the risk of serious injury as immediately as possible. Senior managers in school would be expected to have an enhanced appreciation of risk assessment, not one which is wholly unrealistic.

My son left school a few years ago, so what I observed was different, and I'm now continually reading that funding for schools is so inadequate that the children are not learning and they are dangerous places to be. Maybe all the tried and tested recourses no longer exist. Maybe there are no experts to come in and design strategies. But as a school leader, you'd think the senior managers would want to exclude and keep the environment safe, and answer questions about their action later. Better to be critisized for excluding, than to do very little and risk a serious incident.

It just sounds nasty to speculate on the child's family and their sense of responsibility. For whatever reason, the parents can't manage or improve the boy's behaviour. Schools are expected to be places where teams work collectively and enhanced knowledge and training can be bought in. By contrast, two adults on their own don't have the same back up. It must be hard for them to keep their other children safe. Unless you are parenting a child who shows very aggressive tendencies as described by OP, you don't know how easy or hard is their workload, in managing him.

Child-rearing is logical and instinctive for the majority of normal presentations of typical children. It is impossible for us to say on Mumsnet what is the range of this child's behaviour, whether effective parenting is possible, and his is a young age for any professional to be making clear diagnosis. It may or may not be achievable for the parents to help this child reduce his aggressive behaviour on their own.

If provision is so woeful that school's no longer see the point in making referrals to other agencies, because these no longer exist or function, then this is another thread for extrapolating that readers should vote Labour at the next election.

Yes they may get slower support, but its your duty as a parent to ensure your child doesn't hurt others. Plenty of threads on here accusing parents of being neglectful for sending their children into school with a cold, but send your child in who struggles to the point of regularly attacking others and its suddenly ok?

And it’s the LA’s duty to provide education and SEN support, not the parents. If DC are unable to attend due to illness, SEN, exclusion or otherwise parents still shouldn’t deregister and EHE, the LA must provide alternative provision to ensure DC receive a full time education.

You don’t see parents on here deregistering their DC because of colds.m or anyone advocating it.

Whilst often it because of additional need or home situation most schools would have an automatic exclusion for a child bringing in a knife though my experience is secondary so maybe primary operate differently. I wouldn't be happy with my child being stuck in that position and it's clear the child bears more support than they are getting.

People should not deregister. If they do that the LA will do nothing to support the child and that is likely to last for years especially given the current wait time for Tribunals.
The parent needs to be constantly on the school and LA's case because the bigger 'nuisance' ( time wise) you are, the more likely the child will get the support they need.
Be the difficult parent. Put everything in writing, record all meetings, everything that is said to you verbally should be sent to them in an email as a record of what has been said. Know the law. Find and talk to like-minded parents. Never completely trust professionals. Ignore emotional blackmail.

If your child is getting very distressed then keep them off if you want to but keep them on roll and make complaints about the lack of suitable education being provided.

That aggression is not well managed is very revealing, and quite shameful I think of our education system. There are probably lots of reasons for it, but I know retired teachers who say it has got worse over the years.

There are good examples of where aggression is low to non existent in both mainstream and SEN schools, because they have quality leadership, good practices, clear guidelines.

No child should have to go to school, a place where they have no choice to go, no agency, where they are exposed to harm. Incidents are rarely a surprise ‘one off’ like the OP describes, there is a known child who is a regular risk.

No child with aggression should be so unsupported that their aggression/outbursts continue, whether SEN or not. Again I do think there are very low expectations, children with SEN on the whole, with really good support are able to cope, manage emotions without harm to themselves or others.

By the time a child is in year 5 or 6 they’re a danger to adults. The vast majority of TAs are females on minimum wage. Why should they be stabbed and physically assaulted. The child needs to be removed from the school and placed in a specialist provision

They shouldn't be female on minimum wage. It would be negligent of a senior management team to give the job of supporting an aggressive pupil to that profile of worker. They need to hire properly trained behaviour mentors who are very physically active and motivational to troubled youngsters. You recruit the staff to match the job, not match the pupils to the profile of those who currently want to work for 38 weeks in a school.

Those saying "the LA must do something" - they do not!! It is impossible to get anyone from the local authority in. It takes months if not years. I haven't seen an Educational Psychologist in my school since before Covid. LAs used to have behaviour support specialists who would come in -these no longer exist due to funding cuts.

I have been teaching for 20 years and can say that IME children almost never get removed from primary school these days,
and those that do it will rarely be before years 5 or 6 when they are bigger and stronger and only if space can be found at specialist provision and parents are supportive.

We have many, many children with additional needs, far more than in previous years. Lots of children are coming into Reception with undiagnosed needs. It then takes months or years to get an EHCP and that will only be for the most severe needs. In that time the school has to fund 1:1 support for which there is no money and it is difficult to fund people willing to do the job. There is a crisis in TA recruitment. In my one form entry school we have four non-verbal ASD students in KS1. Two are no trouble and have 1:1 TAs but how much they learn is questionable as there is no training and virtually no access to specialist support from the LA, a real contrast to when I first started teaching.

The third child is mostly non-verbal, a lovely boy but extremely big and strong - too big to be safely physically restrained by an adult if needed (some have tried and been injured). He pushes past other children, jumps fences onto where younger children are playing, climbs furniture and jumps off it. It is very dangerous for the other children but we have no support from the LA for dealing with the risks- all rights are for the inclusion of the child with additional needs. Parents do not want him to attend specialist provision. We are just told to get the other children to move out of the way.

We have another non-verbal child who does nothing but scream and run around the school. He will kick and hit adults and other children, lie down in corridors etc screaming. Parents have no interest in the EHCP process and certainly no interest in specialist provision. They likely have additional needs themselves.

In addition to that we have several other pupils with severe SEMH or behavioural needs. They wil shout, swear, throw things, refuse to folow instructions, regularly leave the classroom. There is no funding for additional support. It is all left for teachers to deal with. It's completely draining and extremely disruptive to the rest of the class. I just wish the minister for Education would spend some time in schools and see what the reality of their funding cuts has been but fat chance.

I teach in a deprived area and I think we see more issues than in "leafy" areas, for a myriad of reasons. We certainly don't have parents that want to take their children out to home educate.

I realise my LEA,is luckier then most as we have two special needs primary schools and Two ASD,hubs,and same for secondary school,I simply can't imagine my own non verbal severely autistic child in a mainstream school,he's been in a special school since reception and he's in year 8 now

Having a bit of personal experience of a very similar situation, I do ask,as the disruptive dc in question has 2 older siblings, did they display similar behaviours in primary school too?

Then what you've been told about what the neighbours said about the parent's 'parenting skills' would have some merit.

Parents can force LAs to “do something”. Yes it takes time, but it is possible, and this situation has clearly been going on some time. Schools who need more funding to provide support can apply for high needs top up funding.

As part of the EHCNA process advice from an EP must be sought - if the LA can’t do that in house within the statutory timescale they must commission an independent assessment.

Training, qualifications and experience can be specified in EHCPs.

Schools could follow due process and formally exclude.

Where’s the money coming from?
No EHCP, no funding and even then schools must provide the first £10,000 of funding. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would be willing to do this job. People can argue about the adult watching the child at all times but that’s physically impossible, not to mention staff need breaks. Burnout amongst 1:1s is ridiculously high because having to be hyper vigilant for hours a day is exhausting

No EHCP, no funding and even then schools must provide the first £10,000 of funding.

High needs top up funding doesn’t require an EHCP. An EHCP can be fully funded and legally the school do not have to fund the first £6k or £10k or whatever.


not to mention staff need breaks.

A well written EHCP will account for lunch and breaks.

You’re saying all this with no clue how many many schools run at this current moment. You’re not going to find a member of staff willing to be physically assaulted. We’re heading towards the situation in the US where a teacher was shot with the lack of regards for staff safety

There has already been a TA in the UK who had to get compensation for injuries that meant she can't work again due to an attack by a child.

Yes I do. My post you quoted is fact, 2 of the 3 sentences based on the law. The LA can be forced to fund the provision at whatever level it takes to provide it. The pupil’s needs aren’t being met if it reaches the level of physical assault, if those needs are better met those times will reduce.