School - BBC 2 - 9 pm

[HollowTalk]

Anyone watching?

Why, when we value our children so highly and want the best for them in their lives, do we accept such crap?

Goodness, tonight was the hardest to watch so far sad

recorded , watching now x

I've just started watching it too. I feel like this episode is going to be particularly difficult viewing.

half of those kids should ne in SEN schools, they closed so many inthe 90s and even more now, a complete disservice to those kids.

felt sorry for that mum, its shameful how they target single mums with ASD teenage sons school refusers, wtf is she supposed to do? put herself at risk fighting what is essentially a grown man?

There is nothing in it for individual schools - quite the opposite. They are whistle-blowing because no-one has been listening. The situation in education is dire. This is only the half of it. Tonight's was a terribly hard watch, those poor vulnerable kids being so failed, the teachers with impossible tasks - so many in tears. Wait until next week - a school without the historical goodwill/results/affluent-enough catchment of Castle...

Wake up Britain, please wake up.

whats next weeks school looks grim

Mangotsfield.

Tonight's episode has really annoyed me. Schools need to find a better way of supporting students like Jack with SEN. Prosecuting his Mum is completely unfair as she has genuinely tried to get him into school. Schools need to better sort their funding as they have directly added to Jack's attendance problem.

I agree that the school didn't handle Jack's situation at all well, it made me cringe as I work with teens with anxiety. However not sure how they should 'better sort their funding' - it's being cut left right and centre from central government as outlined in the series so far.

“Schools need to better sort their funding as they have directly added to Jack's attendance problem”

And just how, pray, should they “sort” their funding when they get less each year? I’m assuming you don’t work in a school. What you saw tonight with the desperate SENCO in tears is what the reality is for many hundreds of schools around the country.

It is not school staff you need to be lecturing to, it is the politicians involved in steering the education system of this country.

Re Jack’s situation , it sounded like the school had done what it could. The SENCO had been out to the car every day for weeks to try and encourage Jack onto the premises. Do you want her to drag him in if he outright refuses?

Schools have to work with educational welfare officers to provide attendance figures. They can’t lie about it. If the council doesn’t like what it sees then they follow it up. If a parent doesn’t provide any medical documentation of hospital apontments referrals etc until the day they are called to meet the council officials then what can schools do?

ofsted will look at attendance and will want to know if procedures were followed correctly. In this instance the mum was asked to go to the meeting to prove her son was ill. She did and the correct decision not to prosecute was reached.
Seeing the SENCO in tears should tell people all they need to know about the frustration felt by teachers. There is NO MONEY and the government don’t care.

What an awfully sad watch. I wouldn’t be a teacher now for all the money in the world

I felt it was very jobsworth to insist on a doctor's note when everybody could see first hand Jack's anxiety about school. Especially given all the doctor would base his diagnosis on was what Jack and his Mum and School told him. I think school missed that the additional pressure they were putting on Jack and his Mum about attendance would increase their stress and, therefore, compound the anxiety problems. So many children with an ASC are out of school completely because of anxiety (ds2 being one of them) so I think his Mum should be praised rather than prosecuted for the work she puts into getting him there at all.

I did not understand why there was no discussion of what might be triggering the anxiety at school and trying different strategies to see if this might help. As usual it was a case of tackling the result (poor attendance) rather than the cause (anxiety). Perhaps they had called in an education psychologist or an autism outreach worker but there was no mention at all of this in the programme. It did mention at the end they were applying for an EHCP for him but why only after three years of such low attendance.

Who pays for the ed psych? There is no money. They didn’t prosecute but they followed the procedures set in law. It’s not their fault.

But what they were doing though was not a no cost option. It was taking considerable amount of staff time and senior staff time at that. it would be interesting to see if they summed up the hours used to try and get Jack into school and compared that to the cost of the EP. Hidden costs yes but costs nonetheless.

OneInEight you seem to be under the impression that the school could give an EHCP if they wanted to. They can't.

Schools need to find a better way of supporting students like Jack with SEN. Prosecuting his Mum is completely unfair as she has genuinely tried to get him into school. Schools need to better sort their funding as they have directly added to Jack's attendance problem.

This post entirely misses the point. Please watch again and educate yourself. How you can possibly still be ignorant of the fact that schools don't have any money to cover any more than the bare mainstream minimum after watching this series is quite beyond me.

Nope I am not under any illusions. My comment was that it should not take three years of documented difficulties before one is APPLIED for. I know full well it is the local authorities who grant EHCP's and not schools.

Schools are coming out and speaking out about how utterly unsustainable the funding situation is on programmes like this out of sheer and total desperation. For headteachers to agree to show this side of their schools, and face the media backlash and judgement over it all - it's them screaming and jumping up and down about how bad the situation is and needing society to sit up and listen before this generation's futures are flushed completely down the shitter and we lose them basically.

The headteacher march didn't get people to sit up and listen, teacher strikes only provoke endless "hilarious" comments about holidays and animosity... what else is there to do before people realise and start putting pressure on the politicians to sort it out?!

I'm dreading watching this week's one as the parent of a child with SEN, who would have done pretty well with just a little bit of TA support to help her focus and record her work - but because of funding being what it is is just being left to struggle and fail as her behaviour's OK so she doesn't cause anyone any problems. Didn't see it at the time it aired last night... ironically because I was at a school governors' meeting.

Schools cannot just "sort their funding" - it comes from Government, via a specific funding formula which isn't deviated from (and the revised one fucking well hammered us badly). For a good few years now every single school's been economising and cutting where they can while trying to keep things as business as usual for the kids - but now we're at crisis point, where we can't save money on things like bloody glue sticks and shopping around for the cheapest photocopier contract anymore... and staff are having to be cut all over the place - and unfortunately the first ones to go are the TAs who would be supporting children with SEN and delivering intervention work, the pastoral staff and the like. Who suffers the most from that? The most vulnerable children - the ones who need that support to stay in education but ones, like my own child, who actually could achieve very very well given just that bit of support to do so.

I'm now going in voluntarily to help deliver the SEN interventions in my kids' school to try to keep things going for these kids (I have QTS so it's not that horrific a proposal - but that is how bad things have got)!

It's so frustrating that some people acrally watching the programme still don't get it: there's no money. The government is withholding the money needed. There's no money for ed psychs, no money for speech therapists, no money for hospitals to reply quickly enough to give medical evidence to avoid pointless hearings, no money for school nurses, no money for mental health provision, no money in CAMHs. No money no money no money. Is it sinking in yet?

Not juat one generation but many generations are being starved of education, of a future, of potential. So many of my peers (who went to Castle school) ARE your teachers, your doctors, your nurses, your therapists... Fail this generation and all of us will pay.

HexagonalBattenburg agree with your whole post.

Great idea to go in and help with SEN 🧡 Once my youngest is in preschool and I'm not juggling my own work to the extent I currently am I will do the same as I'm trained as a speech therapist (though not currently working as one).

Also, on the point of EHCPs - even when they are in place, guess what, there's no money for them anymore. At the end of the programme the lovely girl with the glasses secured one but the amount wasn't known. My husband (SENCO, puts in for EHCPs himself) said she probably won't get any more money....

If you're a SALT they'll bite your hand off and hold you hostage in our school - seriously do not get me started on ranting about the state of that provision in our area (can you tell I've got a child with verbal dyspraxia)! We pay for a private therapist to go in and work with our child and feed a programme of work back for her to do in school and at home because it's such a bloody mess.

Our SENCO is absolutely bloody lovely - you couldn't find a sweeter, more informed and more desperate to help person... but hands are tied and there's nothing left in the system as leeway.

Inclusion is brilliant as an idea, and it can achieve some absolutely phenomenal things - but it needs resourcing to do that and it isn't. It's now just become a case of chuck a child in the class and pray they cope.