"Disruptive, Difficult and Damaged"

[StandUpForSEN]

Had to name change for this one!

According to Michael Gove the majority of children who are suspended or excluded from school are "disruptive, difficult and damaged children" who need "special help" in boarding academies and Pupil Referral Units. The Head & Governors will have the last say on excluding them from school with no right of appeal. Even if those Governors and Headteachers were the ones who ignored their SEN and caused their disruptive behaviour.

Whereas Brian Lamb said:
Pupils with SEN (both with and without statements) are over 8 times more likely to be permanently excluded than those pupils with no SEN. In 2007/08, 33 in every 10,000 pupils with statements of SEN and 38 in every 10,000 pupils with
SEN without statements were permanently excluded from school. This compares with 4 in every 10,000 pupils with no SEN.

here is Mr Gove's view.

Is it just me or do you find calling children - the majority of whom have SEN - "damaged" massively offensive

why name change this is the sn borad

But it's alright Starlight, because they'll set up wonderful new Pupil Referral Units and special boarding academies where our disruptive, difficult kids can be taken away from our damaging parenting.

This paragraph, while not SEN related, sums up how far from reality a lot of that "document" is:

"less than 4% of children eligible for free school meals take GCSE biology and less than 3% even try GCSE Physics or Chemistry. More take media studies at GCSE than all three sciences put together."

he guy's a berk - most kids take double science at GCSE.

Oh, and Calculus was already off the O-level syllabus for 1986, when I took it. I do believe the Tories were in charge, back then.

The wibble about league tables They were a Tory thing. Same with the National curriculum - which was being revised when I did my teacher training in 1995.

Those wonderful schools like Gateshead college? As good as selective, since most parents in a family wihtout a learning ethos will send their kids to the school around the corner with all their mates. They also do a lot of heavy teaching to the test and some severe handholding through coursework - those GCSEs are just so easy, you see . It's certainly not excellent teaching that's responsible for the results, since there's a very high staff turnover. There's also that thing where they don't really take a lot of kids with SEN and don't really have to. Makes for excellent schools

Other than the bit about disruptive, damaged pupils (3/5 of the way down) there's alarmingly little about SEN. I guess these kids don't matter in the scheme of all these reforms.

Yeah but the real thing about these free schools is that the maintained schools budget will be topsliced to (preferentially) fund them, and guess which group of children will suffer the most? (Yep, it's the children who grow up in deprived homes, who funnily enough also have most of the places on the SEN register.)

The only thing the Tories said about SEN in their manifesto was opposing closing more special schools. While not terrible in itself, it certainly plays to prejudice of the 'get those SN kids away from my precious darlings' sort.

Its interesting how you can set out a whole approach to education and not mention SEN although that accounts for 20% of the children - and presumably a high % of poor performance.

Actually my DS is disruptive,difficult and damaged- and a lot of the damage was caused by his previous school.

Hmm ds2 has free school meals and has double whammy of single parent on benefit has took maths gcse already and got A* and is not doing double science is doing triple science so that's 2 fingers to his theory

Sorry, can't get past the photograph on the site banner. Did he brief the designer:

"I should be looking down to make the reader fell as if they are a small child and I am this odd man asking "So laddy, what is your favourite subject at school?", only they can't concentrate because they are having to squint because the sun is in their eyes and it is really hot and somebody told them not to take off their blazer".

OK read the article. If he doesn't want children with SEN in schools, I wish he would just come out and say it.

Special boarding academies? They sound like pre-prison.