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A school that teaches 'unteachable' students
A school for 'unteachable' inner-city boys has been breaking all the rules itself - but it's working wonders with them
Bradley throws himself backwards into the corner of the sofa in the head teacher's room, landing on his bottom, his legs briefly in the air. It's an unconventional way to sit down, a move worthy of Bart Simpson, but Bradley looks comfortable. He's 12, this is his fourth school and he likes it, he says.
?The learning's good. Activities are good. I get to go on a cop course maybe this year. Fire course next year. And tomorrow, oh my, tomorrow morning, I'm doing my lesson, then we're going to test this gym place, then we're going to see my mate graduate from the cop course. Then we're going to see my mate - cause there's only three of us in the class - graduate from the fire class. That is fun.?
This is said with awe. The head could not have written a better script or asked for more committed delivery. A child of 12 whose past behaviour has been so challenging (spot the tactful word) that he has been permanently excluded from four other schools is sitting down and talking about learning, with enthusiasm and without expletives, to a visitor. Oh my, that's good. Only the plastic cup being crunched between his fingers gives away any nervous lack of control. But that's OK. The school can live with that.
Ian Mikardo High School is a special school with 35 pupils, all boys, who have social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. All have been permanently excluded from other schools; they are the boys no other school will take. Many are known to the police, many have a reputation for being aggressive, if not violent. What will happen to them? The conventional view is that as adults they will live on benefits and probably end up in prison. The chances of them leading happy or fulfilled lives are regarded as slim.
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When Claire Lillis arrived at Ian Mikardo in Tower Hamlets, East London, seven years ago she was the fourth head in nine months and the school was in special measures. Of the nine pupils who left in 2002, none went on to further education, training or work, and of the seven who became offenders, two have been in prison. During the past three years, only one of the 24 boys who left has offended. Eighteen are at college, training or working. In 2006 Ofsted assessed the school as outstanding and attendance rates have risen from 67 per cent in 2002 to an average of 90 per cent; last term the figure was 97 per cent.
Slowly, it seems, the Government is recognising that allowing children to fail persistently isn't good enough, not least because failing children are expensive. With the publication of the New Opportunities White Paper it has acknowledged the need for inspirational teachers in the worst-performing schools by offering £10,000 bonuses to those who stay for three years. And if pupils need specialist attention in schools where less than 30 per cent of pupils achieve five good GCSE grades, what of those at Ian Mikardo, where the levels of attainment barely register in the nether regions of league tables?
This is why it's instructive to look at how Lillis has turned her school around. She regards the teaching award for London heads that she won two years ago as validation of her tactics, and the school's motto underlines her approach: Come with a Past, Leave with a Future. Aged 42, she is a former history teacher who recognised that excluding children with behavioural difficulties often pushed them into the criminal justice system. Four years at Medway Secure Training Centre, which she left as deputy director, confirmed to her that locking up young people was often a prelude to a criminal career. ?My aim was to set up a school that reduced that likelihood,? she says. ?I want them to be able to have choices about their lives as adults, as opposed to replicating the cycles of dysfunction.? Only two of the boys are not from single-parent families, only one has a working family.
First Lillis painted the blue walls a mixture of vibrant and calm colours, and got the boys to decorate the loos so that they were a source of pride rather than spaces associated with bullying. She got a dog, Missi, a rescue border collie cross, that snores gently under her desk and is often the first point of contact for disturbed boys when they arrive in the school. These days the walls are full of celebration, feel-good boards of photographs of boys bonding, playing sport, on a trip to France; and the computers are no longer ancient and chained to the desks but Apple Macs regarded as so precious that no one even thinks of damaging them.
But her biggest ideas have involved tearing up the rulebook of school management and developing an ethos and a set of practices tailor-made to provide emotional support for the boys. If the school feels like an amiably unruly family in which decisions are made because they are right for now, rather than to meet an external target, Lillis - warm, full of laughter and capable of turning on impermeable authority in a second - is definitely the matriarch.
?What we're trying to do is build relationships with the children,? she says. ?Very often the dysfunction in their family lives has meant that they're insecure individuals with low self-esteem. They haven't necessarily had good role models, and in this type of school there's an opportunity for them to have a relationship in a professional setting and rebuild some of the trust that may have been lost.
?We're looking to provide a safe base for the children, and to remove the barriers between them and learning. So we don't have rewards and sanctions and punishment because we believe that life is about how you relate to other human beings and isn't as simple as ?do this and get four gold stars'. It's how you work through difficulties and conflict that shapes the quality of your life.?
That said, if a child commits criminal damage or assault the police are called and the child is supported through the court process. But there is no detention - Lillis reasons that it's much better to face the person you've upset and hear them say how disappointed they are. Exclusion is not used as a punishment, although boys do sometimes work off-site with supervision, and Lillis does not support physical restraint unless boys are fighting. ?They have often suffered emotional abuse and maybe physical or sexual abuse. To control them by physical holding compounds their problems.?
Does this mean that her regime is soft? ?It isn't about control,? she replies. ?It's about learning strategies to manage themselves - like we all do through the relationships we have with our parents; wanting to please them, wanting to be liked. The children here may not have that experience with their parents but if I ask them to do something, they do it because they want to please me.?
Long ago she replaced the curriculum with motivational study themes that are relevant to the boys and lead to GCSEs and vocational qualifications: my world, my body, my passport - which includes literacy and numeracy; my future, my self. There is a juice bar to encourage healthy eating, and a beauty and hairdressing salon to enable the boys to have healthy physical contact with others, and involve the community in the school. Next year a £4million refurbishment funded by the Government will consolidate her ideas and include a restaurant with a chef, a vocational idea that she has already pursued through liaison with Jamie Oliver's Fifteen restaurant.
Perhaps her most radical change has been to employ a part-time psychologist, who supervises the 26 staff. ?Disaffected children can be so incredibly abusive that they make you feel angry,? says Lillis. ?They try to make their workers feel like they feel - deskilled, insecure, under attack - and if that happens you end up with an institution as dysfunctional as its clients.?
Lillis's regime is also notable for the breadth of its staff. Her deputy head (inclusion) is a former social worker and only five of the staff are trained teachers; Lillis is inclined to spot people who will add an extra dimension and train them irrespective of their background. Some would call this maverick behaviour but Lillis just invites me to talk to her deputy, Julie Pierzchniak, who works with a family learning mentor, a child psychologist, external agencies and the boys' families, and you start to understand that there is a lot of joined-up thinking going on here.
?If there is going to be any sustainable change we need to shore up the families' abilities to parent these children,? says Pierzchniak. ?If the barrier to learning is that mum is forever leaving and the kids are not attending because they're frightened to leave mum, it may be a case of the child ringing mum to make sure she's OK every break and lunchtime from the school office. Or if dad's in prison and they're anxious to see him, we try to organise a visit, write a letter, open some lines of communication.?
Pierzchniak talks cheerfully about how she and her colleagues have cleared out houses where there has been faeces on the floor. She has unblocked a sink in a house where no washing-up had been done for three months. ?Let's get practical,? she says. ?I've sat in meetings but it's no good telling parents what they should do; they need to be shown. There are a lot of mental health issues among our parents - depression, drug dependency, or they've been through the prison system. They have had negative experiences of school themselves.
?We want the kids to leave school being able to make a positive contribution, be a good citizen; to be able to step outside Tower Hamlets and have the confidence to make their world bigger than their parents' world. They are incredibly streetwise in their little local area but take them the other side of the Blackwall Tunnel and they fall apart.?
This does not match the middle-class perception that damaged boys brought up in poverty become frightening thugs. The opposite is true, Lillis believes.
?They can act brave and be antisocial but a lot of it is based on fear of showing vulnerability. If you're a young male adolescent in an inner city, it's hard to say 'I don't feel good' because it doesn't go with the image you have to show. We show them how to communicate.?
I speak to a mother whose son has changed from a boy who couldn't sit down, who swore and threw chairs, to one who won't miss a day of school and is a talented artist. A lanky boy gives Lillis a thumbs-up through the window in her door; when she first met him his hood always covered his face. As I leave he teases a friend that he should give me a lift home. For a 16-year-old with a history of damage, that's pushing your horizons. That's confidence.