Kids hurled abuse at me – I still didn’t want them sent home

Like most teachers who have worked in large, inner-city state schools, I can reel off tales that would make the rest of the population shudder.

I’ve seen children throwing chairs at staff, arriving for GCSEs very clearly under the influence of something illegal, and getting into fights worse than any drunken brawl you’d witness on a Friday night.

I’ve had teenage boys twice my height square up to me in the classroom, swear at me, and hurl both racist and misogynistic abuse my way. 

There have been kids who film teachers covertly to spread it on social media, shout back if you challenge their disruption in class, and refuse to lift their head off the desk for the whole lesson.

I could tell you of police visits, bag searches and innocent-looking 12-year-olds absconding over school gates. 

With all that in mind, some might assume that I’d disagree with government ministers who have said that pupils who are suspended from school in England for non-violent misbehavior should remain on site, rather than being sent home to rot on their phones.

They might think that I’d fully support the prospect of banishing ‘problem’ students, making them their parents’ – or anyone else’s, really – responsibility.

I don’t, and in theory this is a good idea – but that’s only half the story. 

Because the truth is that whether the kids stay or go, it’s unlikely to have an impact until we completely reevaluate in-school isolation (and that’s just for starters). 

As always when it comes to the government and schools policy, this feels like a headline-grabbing initiative with a hollow core. 

If I’ve learned anything from spending my entire working life with the teenagers of the nation, it’s that there’s no such thing as a bad child. All kids, even the ones hurling chairs and smoking in the toilets, are a product of problems far bigger than themselves. And they all deserve support.

But keeping misbehaving kids at their desks does not automatically equal success. It doesn’t solve the root cause of the behavior.

Just because suspended students are not at home doomscrolling into oblivion or causing havoc on street corners doesn’t mean they aren’t being failed. 

It’s just happening in a less visible, more convenient way. 

Keeping those suspended kids in school might allow the government, and society at large, to convince themselves these children are being supported, but the reality is very different.

Schools in their current state, buckling under the weight of chronic underfunding, cannot do much more for suspended students other than keep them in a room with an adult (usually not even a teacher) babysitting them. 

Sure, they might not be mindlessly whiling away the hours on their phone, but they might as well be, for all the intellectual stimulation they’d be getting. 

In most of the schools I have worked in, ‘internal inclusion’ (a particularly popular pseudonym for in-school isolation or suspension) consists of a room with makeshift cubicles around individual desks. 

Children spend the whole day, often including break and lunch, staring at the grey, peeling walls of their ad hoc cell in enforced silence. 

During lesson time, they will be sent work from their subject teachers – but this is usually an afterthought, with already overburdened teachers scrambling to find a worksheet halfway through a lesson for a pupil who they’ve just found out won’t be in class.

There is simply no budget or manpower for providing those students with the kind of targeted, specific intervention that they need to overcome the myriad behavioral, psychological and social barriers that are preventing them from thriving like their peers.

When you consider that this behavior is a symptom of societal and systemic problems like poverty and poor mental health, the assumption that teachers can somehow plug the gaping chasms caused by persistent underfunding of public services is frankly preposterous. 

If the government really cared about those suspended from school, then it would go further.

It would fund specialist intervention like providing every school with fully-trained psychological support staff who can coach young people on the mental and emotional causes of their behavior. 

It would prioritise securing more teaching staff by making the profession more appealing, so that there are enough trained professionals in every school to not only cover curriculum content, but also work with pupils on issues like behavior.

And for those students who really cannot stay in their own schools, it would ensure that there are enough high-quality alternative provision spaces for young people to access education and training in an environment that is catered to their social and emotional needs.

Without those support mechanisms in place, we end up with a failure of a different sort. We force so-called ‘problem students’ to languish in educational purgatory.

All this kind of treatment ensures is that any hope or faith they did have in the education system is slowly sapped from them.

This ‘solution’ does not benefit students. It does not benefit teachers. It doesn’t address the issue of how we can effectively educate a generation that appears to be grappling with more problems than ever before.

The simple fact is that when ministers tell teachers like me that suspended students should be kept in school, it’s because it’s convenient for them. 

Because unless new measures like this are backed with funding and targeted support, what this is really about is keeping the problem away from them, and away from the public. 

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@usnewsrank.com. 

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