We don’t need no education

Truancy and Social Inclusion

By Shamus

"One of the major aims of ‘Nerve’ is to tackle serious issues in an open way. We believe only by getting everything out in the open can we attempt to resolve it. This is difficult to do within a system where those dealing with the problems at the sharp end are unable to speak openly, due to the fact that they may lose their jobs. The following individual is one such person. He has called himself ‘Shamus’."

David is fourteen and spends his school days on a diet of boredom and petty crime but still claims that it is better than school. It is easy to imagine that David is only a small social problem, but truancy reveals a stark truth about state education: the growth of a bitter and cynical underclass, which sees no point in education.

The Audit Commission says that some 12,000 children a year are expelled from school and a further 15,000 are excluded temporarily. The commission also states that one in eight of school children will be absent without authorisation.

The Office for National Statistics reported that one in ten of Britain's children suffer from mental disorders such as anxiety or depression. They also found that children with mental distress were four times more likely to truant, to have special educational needs and ten times more likely to be in trouble with the police, all of which leads to behaviour that results in truancy. The agencies that work directly with young people are struggling to cope due to lack of resources or shortage of specialist professionals, such as child psychiatrists and educational psychologists.

New Labour’s policy of tackling truancy, social inclusion, has a damaging flaw. It has refused to change the free market ideology, which the Tory governments introduced into education in the 1980s. The Tories education reforms led to the introduction of the national curriculum, league tables, but more importantly making schools dependent on their funding based on their pupil numbers. This has led to a situation where if a school did poorly in the league tables, aspirational parents would withdraw their child from school, taking the funds with them, leaving the school with fewer children and less money to educate them The free market ethos in state education has meant that the intake of many schools consists mainly of disaffected pupils who create havoc and disruption in classes, leading to some schools having police officers patrol the corridors. In effect, children of the poor receive the worse education, and where do the politicians send their children to be educated?

New Labour’s biggest programme to tackle disaffection in schools is excellence in cities, specifically the learning mentors strand.
The ‘learning mentors’ scheme derives from the United States and is based on the ‘Big Brothers, Big Sisters’ movement. However unlike the USA model, the DFEE has failed to introduce a national qualification for mentors, guidelines for supervision, or a clear definition of what the role should be. This has led to variations in how schools employ learning mentors, some of them acting as classroom assistants, playground assistants, and attendance officers and as untrained and unqualified teachers. The Centre for Social Action, when it examined ‘Excellence in Cities’, found mentoring only had value to a young person as a way of missing classes and that learning mentors did not work in-depth with disaffected pupils over a long period.

When the DFEE reported on ‘Excellence in Cities’, it could only praise the gifted and talented strand in raising achievement in young people. This praise omitted the fact that this strand has been dominated by middle class pupils and abused by schools desperate to retain their brightest pupils from their competitors; other schools. The evidence of ‘Excellence in Cities’ working effectively with disaffected pupils is a poor one simply because Tory ideology has aggravated inequalities in education, and no amount of learning mentors can change that.

The Government has recognised that schools are having problems motivating disaffected pupils and have proposed a national 14 – 16 vocational training programme. This scheme will simply open up a two tier system. The mainstream pupils will be taught in school, whilst their disruptive peers will be placed on work based schemes. Evidence has already shown that schools take relief in ridding their worst pupils so they can get on with the task of teaching. This means that disaffected pupils are placed with schemes where the tutors are badly paid, have little motivation or incentive to work with such pupils and more importantly are not professionally trained. Also, placing disaffected youths on the same programme only fosters criminal associations, reinforces gender stereotypes and sets them up to fail because the majority of training schemes are badly managed and poorly equipped to deal with disaffection issues. But as long as the disruptive pupil is not in school, who cares?

While the free market model underpins education policy, no amount of social inclusion is going to erase the fact that schools in suburbia will continue to attract motivated pupils and more funds.