Email from my child’s infant school uk? I’m sorry but this all seems wrong?

[Frazzledmomma123]

Dear Families,

I wanted to address a concern that has understandably been raised regarding the use of a ‘safe word’ to move children out of the classroom. On reflection, we recognise that terms such as safe word and evacuation can raise anxiety and concern.

We agree that children should not have to leave their own classroom in order to feel safe. However, there are times, though not daily, when moving the class is the safest option for all children. This has happened a few times, and only when absolutely necessary. We fully accept having to go to such measures is a worry, but it is a system that schools are having to turn to more and more. I appreciate this provides little comfort, but hopefully helps you hear that supporting emotional regulation has become a real focus and factor for schools nationally.

The children themselves were involved in choosing the word, and the purpose was to minimise panic and keep the situation calm if it needed to be used. Our aim is always for every child to feel safe, happy, and able to learn in their classroom, as is their right. We are putting a range of steps and strategies in place to work towards this, and we do not intend this approach to become the “go‑to.”

We also want to reassure you that we are supporting children to understand that behaviour is a communication of feelings, but the way those feelings are shown must still be safe and appropriate. We do not condone unsafe behaviour, and we share parents’ concerns about children seeing this as “normal.” I have spoken with the class to reiterate that message and reminded them that they should always talk to a trusted adult if they feel unsure or worried. In school, children choose five trusted adults; it may be helpful to have a similar conversation at home about who your child feels they can talk to at school.

We are very aware that things are challenging at the moment. We do not want this to continue, and we are actively putting support in place to help all children feel safe and settled in their learning environment.

Thank you for reading, please keep speaking to us about your concerns.

There are several volatile children in my son’s schoo/class. Some that are ND, some are behavioural & some alarmingly casual aggressive language & physical behaviour they really could only have learnt from ‘home’. Not kids tv. This is a village Primary school.
one child turns volatile/aggressive when anybody says’thank you’ so holding the door/lunch duty etc every single other primary aged child has now been told under no circumstances to say ‘thank you’ the very manners at such an impressionable age we’re teaching them , they’re now unteaching them to accommodate 1 child.
my child has bn punched in the stomach, had his fingers stamped on, pulled over by the same child. Broken his arm when being pulled over Had a 7 y.olds nose to his face & told him to shut the f up’ all because he’d bn goading my son who eventually & calmly told him to go away. (I saw with my own eyes) the child ran off when I approached, so absolutely knew it was wrong
why can’t the school move/manage 1 child ? Its preventing the other 99 plus adults learning & feeling/being safe ?
my once happy ,school loving child now dreads it.
school should be safe for all pupils regardless of nt or nd.
no idea what the answer is, but as a parent I’m tired of it & baffled by the schools current approach. I’m an older mum as well so I also recall getting a good bollocking & detention.
im dreading my 4 year old starting school in September…its so sad

This is all true, but expulsion is not for the child in question, it’s for the rest of the school population. There is this idea that the most difficult/challenging behaviour should be that around which the school’s provision is focussed and it is simply not workable.

I’m a TA in a mainstream primary school, and have been verbally and physically assaulted during my time at work, aswell as sexually assaulted. I’ve been punched, kicked, spat on, had my hair pulled, had various parts of my body touched and pinched including intimate body areas, I’ve got scars all over my hands from being pinched daily by a significantly complex needs child. Every single time something happens to me it’s reported following the right safeguarding process and policy for my school, and everyone who is informed agrees that the situation is awful and shouldn’t be happening. Many of the very physically aggressive children aren’t in main classroom settings, and everyone including external bodies agree they shouldn’t be in mainstream schools at all. It’s not easy to just offload a child into a specialist school place otherwise it would always happen. I do toilet care daily with children aged between 5 and 9, sometimes this is where the physical aggression is the worst and we have to be extra careful due to the nature of the situation. I am paid below minimum wage when it’s worked out. I would get more if I took up a job in Tesco, but I love my job, and show up daily for all children. So many are being let down by our government, schools and teachers/support staff are doing and giving their absolute all to provide a safe, caring environment for all children, but if I think it’s more dangerous to remove an aggressive child during dysregulated moments than it is to remove the whole class I will do that. I am not paid enough to be beaten black and blue as it is, I won’t traumatise other children and put myself at even more risk if I don’t have to. Write to your mp and complain, that’s the only way this will change. And, if the white paper is accepted, then this is what the future of education will be. Less and less specialist provision and more children with complex needs put into mainstream and broken staff expected to play all sorts of defensive roles just to keep the child calm and in the classroom not attacking anyone. Our education system needs a massive overhaul asap it’s completely broken and not meeting needs.

This is so true, it's awful what we're all used to now.

The thing that gets me every time is children dealing with mental illness - parents just know there's no support.

As a parent to a child who had unsafe behaviour - I would have LOVED a safe, separate setting for him. Do you know how hard it is to get an EHCP these days? Do you know there are a real lack of appropriate schools for our sen kids. Parents of SEN children are out fighting everyday to get the correct support for their children, but parent of non-sen kids just don’t get it. They, like, YOU would see a child who is “naughty” not following the rules and making like for your child uncomfortable. Instead of saying, we don’t want them in our schools. What not say “how can we support sen families to make sure that the schools are there to support them!?” Join the SEND reform groups. Lobby your Mp for more SEN spaces. Advocate for more support in the classroom for these children, so children like yours can learn, uninterrupted in a safe environment, and children like mine can learn in an environment where there are less kids around to overload him with sensory input, where his meltdowns can be managed by a person or two who know him better and who aren’t trying to shield him from 30’other children in a busy overcrowded classroom.

Does this child have a 1:1? It's terrible that he managed to break your son's arm.

The 'thank you' thing - I'm really curious now, do you happen to know anything more about this? I know of another child with similar but it's for a really niche reason, so just wondering.

There are always going to be some children with horrible home lives. A small proportion of those children will behave in really traumatised and challenging ways. From my personal and professional experience though, there isn't all that much correlation between what would be considered crap parenting and violence. Some of the most gentle kids come out of homes with questionable parenting and loads of the 'violent' children come out of very loving, very normal homes. In fact, it's really common to see households with one really aggressive child and several other children who are nothing like that at all.

My child often has violent meltdowns & we speak to the school daily, we attend all meetings, we have engaged with part time schooling at the schools request, risk assessments, exclusions, talking therapy, CBT, external community support. What you don’t see is the children who say “let’s wind sen kid up so we get evacuated”, Sen kid calling the police on himself because he believes he deserves prison because he misunderstood something and got upset, wanting to kill himself because he threw a chair and he can’t process the guilt, is having to physically remove him from school during a meltdown, losing friends, losing education, losing self worth because he’s in an unsuitable environment. The never ending waiting list for a formal diagnosis. That a diagnosis may mean medication and additional support or alternative schooling provisions. We shouldn’t get to the point that primary schoolers or any children are suicidal because they are victims of the governments cost cutting measures.

and if the child responds with similar violence? Equal natural consequences?

But that’s what is happening?
what would be the issue with pupils with a high level of need being educated together? Is that not a significant concern here? That they are being kept in mainstream when they shouldn’t?

Yes, this is kind of ancillary to the discussion at hand but it's important to mention that SEN is not synonymous with challenging behaviour. Lots of challenging kids don't have SEN and lots of SEN kids are extremely well-behaved. Personally I think NT kids, ND kids who can manage behaviour and learning (but tend to be the targets of bullying by NT kids), and ND kids with challenging behaviour are three very different groups who, in an ideal world, wouldn't all be thrown together in one classroom.

Well they won’t all have the same needs for a start.
That’s half the problem in my class at the moment. For example on child needs strict routine to feel safe and regulated- a personal time table, first and then board lots of reminders we are coming up to a time of transition, but another child in my class hates some lessons so if he sees them on the visual timetable he becomes dysregulated, hates countdowns as he feels pressured etc
This is just one example of many.
Some children have cognitive difficulties, some have speech and language difficulties.
Some would need to move around lots, some need a quiet and calm space.
8 different kids, with varying needs in one room would be chaos!
We also do not currently have a spare room or any spare staff and the proposed extra money is peanuts!

Can someone explain to me how this ‘safe word’ works? Surely if the teacher has decided it with her whole class of 30 and later on shouts ‘unicorn’ then the violent child might also go to the safe place and follow the safe word and instructions? Are they assuming this child won’t listen? Or is it whispered to all but this child? If it’s shouted then why not just shout ‘everyone out except child X who is behaving unsafely’?

It’s not necessarily a new situation. When I was in primary school in the 1970s, there was a boy in our class that used to get angry and violent regularly. On several occasions he beat up the female teacher. He was very big for his age. Everyone just accepted it a part of life - but the teacher ended up leaving the school, don’t blame her. Kids like that should be given alternative accommodations so the rest of the children can learn.

You might of just got lucky as it certainly happened when I was at school 20- 30 years ago and multiple friends talk of similar experiences at there primary school.

The reason the other children are removed is because this is the safest method/ way so that no one gets hurt. You try to remove a deregulated child will just escalate the behaviour and risk them and the person removing them getting hurt. Often this behaviour is due to an unmet need. The best way to deal with it is to provide the child with the resources to cope and meet the need. Be thankful your child is able to manage there emotions and maybe they will grow up to be more understanding then you.

Also a child with no sen/ send doesn’t need to be shown the behaviour is unacceptable as they already know how to behave in the way you want.in the case they copy the behaviour is naughty and should be punished. A child with significant sen that doesn't understand isn’t having a meltdown to be naughty but because they can’t control it. In this case the behaviour should be prevented by providing resources/ methods to prevent it from happening. Unfortunately the current situation with sen schools mean that more sen children are in mainstream with teachers that aren’t trained to deal with sen kids in unsuitable environments.

The only way to solve this problem is build more sen units/ schools and for sen training to be included in teacher training.

In this situation the non sen child has done it on purpose and knows they are going to get a reaction so I would have little sympathy for them. if you bring your child up to not be a bully/ having understanding of other people then they won’t be winding another child up in the first place. If the sen child has reacted unprovoked then that’s a different issue.

Very true that it doesn't always mean that they have challenging behaviour.

My son is disabled but doesn't have challenging behaviour. He does need support but with that support can manage well in mainstream.

I would object to him being segregated from his friends just because he's disabled.

If a child can cope in mainstream then I don't see the need for them to be removed or segregated. The issue is deciding that children who clearly can't cope and clearly need specialist provision belong in mainstream.

A few things happened.

SEN schools have largely closed down. That is not necessarily a bad thing, in the 1970s a child who was a wheelchair user would be sent to a SEN school where they might spend the day cutting out shapes in coloured paper.

Mainstream was intended to improve the education of such a child, but it also ignored the children who couldn't thrive in mainstream.

Schools changed. When I was at school most, if not all classrooms had desks and chairs facing the front where the teacher had a desk and a blackboard.

Now lots of schools have children sitting around desks / tables so you might have your back to a teacher, the child opposite might distract you in some way so you are not learning and the teacher can't always see if you are listening.

Schools got a lot brighter. Particularly primary schools, lots of pictures, bright decorations, displays, string crossing the room with things dangling from or pegged to it.

A couple of laws changed making disability discrimination illegal so schools couldn't just say, "No we can't cope with your child due to their SEN".

The government decided all children should sit GCSEs in set subjects. Children only get 1 or 2 choices of GCSEs. Not all children are academic and even if they are they may not be interested in the subjects they are forced to study.

Teachers could no longer be left to just teach.

Not all children can cope with the number of subjects and would benefit from doing 5-6 subjects rather than 10.

When I was in school (riding a dinosaur to school) only maths and English were compulsory.

If you could design a system to torture a child with autism you could not do much better. I'm not saying all the challenging behaviour is due to SEND, it isn't but it doesn't help.

DS1’s infant school placement was a complete disaster - and it was mainly the teachers’ treatment of him, not the other pupils’, that was the problem. Some of them treated him appallingly. It was an Ofsted Outstanding school.

Please, for those of you who don’t have children with SEN and object to SEN children sharing a classroom with your own children - please respond to the White Paper.

My son is now a young adult. I’ve had spiteful comments about his disabilities. Then spiteful comments about him attending a private school. Then spiteful comments about the cost to the LA of his special school. And now spiteful comments about his inability to work and being on Universal Credit. Some people are more fortunate than they realise.

I’ve filled in the white paper response thanks to this thread.

I am outraged that we are failing so many children with this approach.

DS has DCD and is at a private school where he gets 1:1 support as needed and it’s a supportive environment but it costs a fortune which is out of reach for most and I feel guilty for it because I think all children deserve a high quality education but I had to do what is right for DS.

Yep.

There really doesn't seem to be this much needed balance. It was an extreme of every child with a disability not attending mainstream and now it is an extreme of children attending mainstream who really can't cope.

Exactly. We wouldn't tolerate child A stealing child B's crutches or running off with child C's inhaler so that child C ends up having an asthma attack. We wouldn't even tolerate A making fun of a non-SEN child D suffering the bereavement of a parent (e.g. singing "you're gonna be sent to an orphanage"). Hence, we shouldn't tolerate child A deliberately targetting child E's psychological weak spots that come from E's neurodivergence.

Thank you.

I think it’s really good that parents without disabled children are becoming more aware of these issues. There will not be the strength of public opposition to what the Education Secretary is proposing to make her change course from her catastrophic proposals unless many of the parents who don’t have disabled children also object because obviously they are the majority.

I don’t think we can expect the parents of non-disabled children to really have this on their radar. Many won’t even have been aware of the proposed reforms of the open consultation. I understand the frustration of many of the parents of disabled children that has been expressed on the thread, especially with endless news articles trying to pretend that their children’s difficulties are made up or a result of “parenting issues” etc, when it is schools that are the problem, which obviously leads to a lot of defensiveness having been gaslit and blamed for years by schools, Local Authorities, newspapers, other parents etc.

But I also understand that from the point of view of a parent with a non-disabled child, often all that is seen is that disruption is being caused by disabled children, and reading reports of huge amounts of money spent on disabled children in schools yet seeing no benefit from this because it’s being spent on the wrong things. These parents won’t be aware, mostly, that much of that money is being wasted because it is spent on fighting unnecessary legal battles with parents, or on inappropriate “support” in mainstream schools when it would be cheaper to set up other schools where the child didn’t need so much “support”, or that if available places at appropriate schools were available without a years-long battle the child’s educational needs wouldn’t escalate to be so severe and expensive as a result of being in the wrong environment or years and years before anything is done about it, and there would therefore be far less disruption.

We need to explain these things calmly and clearly to the parents of children who aren’t disabled so that they can understand why things are such a mess and that the Education Secretary’s proposals are the very worst thing that could possibly be done, won’t save any money in the long run, and will actually make things far, far worse not just for disabled children but also for ALL children in state schools because the classroom disruption they are seeing now will be nothing compared to what will happen if these proposed reforms go through.

We need everyone to stand together and say this is completely unacceptable and the Government instead needs to spend the money required to set up sufficient different schools to meet the different needs of different children so that similar children can be taught together and it is actually possible for them all to learn and teachers to teach them. This is the only way things will improve and is the opposite of what the Government intends to do, even though it would pay for itself many times over in the long run. This is ALL about short-sighted short-term cost saving to the detriment of all children.

@Frazzledmomma123 I am glad you are engaging with this topic and I hope other parents without disabled children will do so as well and respond to the white paper consultation and object to what is being proposed, for the sake of children with disabilities but also for the sake of ALL children in state schools who deserve to have an education in a safe an functional school environment where they can actually learn.

These are good points but worth adding that not all violent or disruptive students are disabled and not all disabled children are violent or disruptive.

and not all disabled children can't cope in mainstream. Though I think it is largely clear that within the topic of the thread pp is discussing disabled children who are violent and/or disruptive because mainstream is clearly the wrong setting for them and they aren't getting the support they need.

But we also don't want to go back to the days where all disabled children were automatically segregated from mainstream education. As I said on my previous comment, it seems to be always extremes and we need a balance (and LA's to follow the law in the first place!).