Is this a dagger which I see before me? It is, and I’m scared. Around me, a dozen teenage boys, too violent for ordinary schooling, are running riot. They brandish weapons; some fight. Granted, these swords and daggers are theatrical props. But props, misused, can do plenty of damage. So can the chair that was just hurled against the wall.
What does our society do with the tens of thousands of children unable to function in ordinary education? In the dilapidated gym of a run-down school in the middle of nowhere, I discover a frightening answer.
This should be just another day in a job known as TIE: theatre in education. We are a small performance troupe organised by the Orange Tree Theatre, touring Greater London schools, helping students to tackle Macbeth for the national curriculum exam. But Wandle Valley School — in Sutton, Surrey — is what’s called a special school. It takes on children with EBD — emotional or behavioural difficulties. And left-leaning, socially conscientious arts bods we might be, but we haven’t a clue what we’re walking into.
We find Douglas Bone, the head teacher, who takes us through a maze of cheerless corridors to the gym. There is little evidence of the school’s population beyond the odd child skulking in a corner. Bone describes our visit as “an experiment”.
A succession of teenage boys — the school is officially mixed but almost entirely male — wander in. Bone, along with three female teachers, spends several minutes getting them to sit. It is difficult: many stand up as soon a teacher’s back is turned, or move their chairs around the gym. Finally, Bone exhorts the audience to treat us with respect.
We begin with a ten-minute “sketch” of Macbeth, a light recap of the plot pitched somewhere between Hammer Horror and Little Britain. It is well received. But from our first effort to work interactively, the session spirals out of control. The few boys who engage with our questions ask only to see the actors torture each other.
Some fight. One boy throws coins around the room. Another paws the teacher next to him. She occasionally moves his hands away but otherwise does nothing. A boy who has maintained a stream of foul language is sent out. He picks up his chair and hurls it across the gym, into a football goalmouth. The others cheer. Minutes later they are all on their feet, making a bee-line for our props. Some dangerously attempt sword fights. Two boys begin an argument that descends into punches. Others rifle through the costumes or try to steal the fake daggers.
It is several minutes before the teachers regain control. We decide to perform some short, lively scenes from the final Act. One boy asks to see Macbeth’s death by decapitation. Tricky, we reply — it happens offstage. The group becomes insistent; the teachers look at us pleadingly. Shaking off thoughts of Middle Eastern hostage-taking, we concoct Macbeth’s end, with a shower of fake blood.
They are enthralled, but disorder quickly returns. The entire group is sent away. Astonishingly, the teachers are euphoric, promising it will help with the national tests.
Outside, our audience loiters, unsupervised, in the desolate grounds. My final image of Wandle Valley School is looking back to see a boy chasing us through the gates. A cigarette hangs from his lips. In his hands are balloons filled with water, which he hurls after us.
EBD is an officially recognised learning difficulty. But unlike autism or dyslexia it is not a diagnosable condition — it’s ascribed to persistently difficult children, usually by their school. Studies suggest that its incidence is highest in inner cities and among socially deprived families. It is by a long way most common in adolescent boys. Educationalists describe the condition thus: if you offer a normal child £10 to behave all day, they will probably do it. An EBD child cannot.
Last year 128,130 children in state-funded education in England were classified as having “emotional, social or behavioural difficulties”. Of these, 12,470 had been moved from ordinary schooling to one of 419 EBD schools such as Wandle Valley. There are no official figures for the private sector but experts say only “a few thousand” EBD children attend independent schools.
So the future of children with the behavioural problems we witnessed lies largely in the hands of the state. I am drawn back to Wandle Valley. Does this institution, run-down and chaotic as it seemed, represent the best our society can do? Douglas Bone, who has been at the helm of Wandle Valley School since its foundation in 1986, says: “The general public don’t realise what we’re doing. EBD schools have tended to close their doors and get on with the job.”
If I expect the man charged with running this place to be despondent, I am mistaken. Upbeat and confident, at 52 Bone has a rugby player’s build and a blokeish patter. His career has been mostly spent in special-needs education and he is passionate about his school, determined to dwell on its achievements. But throughout my second visit a picture emerges of a valiant struggle against chronic underinvestment. “It’s difficult for visitors to gauge an EBD school,” he says. “If you come from the inner London schools where I come from then you know this is a good EBD school.”
The school has 80 children. All but three are boys. Most come from deprived families and cannot afford computers, bicycles or even £50 for an annual school trip. Most come to Wandle because their previous school could not shake them out of a persistently disruptive, and often aggressive, pattern of behaviour. In most cases academic achievement has been poor.
So what’s gone wrong? “It could be that school wasn’t right for them,” says Bone. “Or that they didn’t get on with a particular teacher. It could be the family situation. It could be anything. I’d be a millionaire if I knew.”
EBD demands a high teacher-to-pupil ratio. Bone has “twelve and a half” teachers but the school is critically understaffed. Two teachers recently moved on and the school cannot fill their places. The school has tried countless approaches to recruitment, even taking out a Personals advertisement in the The Big Issue.
Often there are no replies. After seven adverts for a music teacher at a cost of £3,500 (“a lot of money to us,” says Bone) Wandle gave up trying to recruit one.
Clearly, too little is done to encourage the right sort of teachers into EBD schools. Bone refers scathingly to a recent government document giving directives on recruiting teachers: it did not even mention special schools. But cold, hard cash comes into it, too. So perilous did the school’s staffing become at one point that sympathetic head teachers from nearby secondary schools took matters into their own hands, diverting a total of £10,000 from their own funding so that Wandle Valley could take out job adverts.
Attendance at Wandle Valley is more than 90 per cent. A few boys are persistent truants. Some are sent taxis to ensure that they attend. Others are loaned one of 12 bicycles owned by the school. Despite the school’s special status, Wandle’s pupils are taught the national curriculum. Why teach a difficult text like Macbeth to children whose exam answers are too poor to be sent off? “Some papers aren’t sent in,” Bone admits. “But if you get the kids to believe they are achieving, then they do.”
All departing pupils gained GCSE qualifications last year. What happens next? “I see some of them in the pub,” says Bone, who lives locally. “Some of them are rascals and get themselves in trouble, but loads get employed.” Another Wandle Valley teacher adopts a different tone when I ask her about the pupils’ futures. “You mean the ones that don’t end up in prison?” she replies.
I mention the boy we saw pawing a female teacher. Bone says the behaviour was addressed later. The teacher did not want to confront the boy in front of visitors.
It was, says Bone, “the wrong judgment”. “The kids are absolutely not allowed to touch us,” he says. The boy in question is an “unusual” case but Bone admits that “maybe we need to reassess our policy on this”.
Then there’s the building itself. It is an old secondary school, shut down in the 1980s, designed to hold a population ten times the size of its current occupants. This somewhat accounts for the ghost town feel. Experts agree that environment plays a crucial role in rehabilitating troubled children. One specialist I speak to, who knows Wandle Valley, says it is a good EBD school but the environment is “not ideal”. “It’s a very big building for a small number of kids,” he says. “Create a pleasant environment and you’ll see improvements.”
Bone has sought, unsuccessfully, to replace the building. He has planning permission for a specialist teaching block but his funding applications have been rejected. He is adamant, however, that the school is neither bleak nor cheerless. The school tries to decorate, mounting displays on corridor walls. Sometimes the children pull them down.
I am given a tour of the school. There is a Breakfast Club, a pleasant room where pupils gather in the morning for a free meal. Another room houses an adolescent’s fantasy of sofas, turntables, rap posters, computer and electric piano.
The classrooms I see have fewer than ten pupils and more than one teacher. The lessons seem calm. We encounter a few boys loitering in the corridors and stairwells, and one smoking in a toilet. Bone sends them back to their classrooms.
He insists that the building is in good condition. But as he shuts the door on one classroom, the handle comes off in his hand.
Wandle’s most tangible achievement is the bistro. Pupils run a lunchtime restaurant out of a food technology unit, supervised by a professional chef. It is popular with the locals. But staff had to raise the funds for it themselves. Several ran marathons. Some spent their holidays kitting out the room.
Other operations have been curtailed. The school scrapped a course on the electrician’s trade, well liked by pupils, because European regulations mean “you’re hardly allowed to wire a plug in school any more”. It abandoned swimming classes and camping holidays, both praised by Ofsted when it visited two years ago, because it could not afford the instructors.
The Department for Education and Skills says that funding for children with special educational needs rose from £2.8 billion in 2001 to £4.1 billion in 2005. There is a system called BSF — Building Schools for the Future — under which some local authorities can lobby for buildings to be replaced. But Sutton, Wandle Valley’s local authority, is not a BSF priority. It will not be eligible for major project funding before 2011. And since government policy lumps all special needs funding together, grants for EBD schools are being weighed up against applications to bring disabled access to normal schools up to national standards.
A postcode lottery emerges. Dr Ted Cole, executive director of SEBDA, the Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties Association, which campaigns on behalf of children and teachers, cites major building projects at EBD schools in Kent, Co Durham and Lincolnshire. “Some local authorities are doing better than others,” he says. “Some seem not to be putting sufficient resources into this sector. Overall, we are not doing enough for EBD as a society.”
Wandle Valley School is far from the lost madhouse I imagined. It is in the hands of a committed head teacher, respected in his field. But these are troubled children, at the most crucial stage of their development.
“I need a multimillionaire benefactor,” says Bone. “I could do so much more. There is great reason to support these kids and get them moving on.”
Donations to Wandle Valley School, Welbeck Road, Carshalton, Surrey SM5 1LW
Schools for scandal: how children have suffered because of changing government policies
Once, a child who would not conform at school was labelled “educationally subnormal” and taught separately. Then, in 1978, a report by the educationalist Mary Warnock, now Baroness Warnock, suggested that children with special educational needs were better off in mainstream education.
“Inclusiveness” remained the buzzword when Tony Blair came to power. Since 1997, 117 special schools have been closed under Labour and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act of 2001 gave parents the right to insist that their children were educated in mainstream schools.
At the same time, schools were given increased powers to exclude difficult children. The number of boys expelled from secondary education each year has increased by more than 1,000 since 1999. Last year 8,070 children were permanently excluded from secondary schools. Of these, around 6,500, or 80 per cent, were boys.
It boils down to a paradox: as more difficult children are integrated into mainstream schools, schools exclude more children because they are too difficult to integrate.
Baroness Warnock now rejects the policy of inclusiveness at all costs, admitting that the ideas in her 1978 report proved unworkable. Last year she called for a “radical review” of special schools.
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, insists that the proportion of children educated in special schools is increasing. Instead of mainstream inclusion, the policy is now that “special educational needs should be met in whatever school is best suited to the individual child”.
The casualty of the shifting policies is the boys themselves. EBD specialists are talking of an emerging “lost population” of delinquent boys who are receiving no education at all. They are persistently excluded from comprehensive schools but there are are either no places at the nearby EBD schools, or no local special schools at all.
