Not fine at home, not fine in school
Last week there was a piece on the BBC News website by Terri White (a “journalist, author and broadcaster” though this was the first time I’d heard of her) on the importance of school to vulnerable children, such as those with abuse going on at home, and the issue of the “ghost children” who stopped attending school when the pandemic hit in 2020 and have never returned or have not started consistently attending again. White grew up in an abusive home, with her mother bringing a succession of men into the home, many of them violent and some sexually abusive to her, but school was a refuge, where she could forget about the troubles at home and be herself and be “fed, looked after and encouraged” for six hours a day. She has also presented a two-part BBC podcast series, Finding Britain’s Ghost Children, and wrote a piece (containing some of the same material as in the BBC news article) for the Guardian in which she meets her junior school teacher. Also this past week there has been another Dispatches programme on Channel 4, Locked Away: Our Autism Scandal, about the state of our mental health services, including a horrific story of abuse by a young woman, Danielle Attree, who was sexually assaulted in a unit in Kent.
White’s article seems to be to be a case of using an emotive account of personal experience to generalise about what school can and cannot do for a child to advocate for particular policies, in this case a database of children who are out of school and for what reason, proposed in a Schools Bill last year though the bill has been withdrawn, and for what might lead to more intrusive surveillance of parents who opt out of the school system, which parents have always been able to do in this country. I know parents who home educate for a variety of reasons; some because they disapprove of the “school model” and particularly the direction British education has taken in the past few years, with more politically-motivated interference in the curriculum, a greater emphasis on ‘standards’ and much less on enjoyment, and an increase in outright propaganda such as the insistence on teaching “British values”, not only in schools but also in other monitored forms of childcare such as childminding. In other cases, the children are autistic or have other disabilities and found school impossible to cope with; in others, the move to home education was in response to racist or Islamophobic bullying and discrimination.
The article, and much of the panic around this issue, fails to appreciate that school isn’t always a refuge, even for children who are being abused at home, and for some children school is where they are abused while home is peaceful. I recall that some of the worst bullying at my boarding school was targeted at a boy who was in foster care and, unlike me, did not have parents to complain to the school if he reported abuse. Some teachers are wonderful and nurturing like Terri White’s old teacher, Mrs Webley, but some are not, even at primary school, let alone secondary school. Some teachers are not wise to the signs of abuse in a child’s behaviour or demeanour; they would interpret it as mere awkwardness or defiance. I knew teachers at my Catholic junior school who were intolerant and unsympathetic, whom a lot of children were afraid of, and who I do not remember showing tenderness or kindness, ever. And that’s even before we get onto the state of some of our secondary schools and the problems that come out of those places. A lot of children who coped fairly well in primary school go to pieces at secondary (I know many parents of autistic children and young adults in particular for whom this was the case, including some who have been victims of abuse such as that covered in the Dispatches programme), in large part because it treats children as a crowd to be controlled rather than individual children to be nurtured, and lumps young people at very different stages of development together and treats them as if they were the same.
It’s true, the panic lockdown of 2020 led to schools and social services taking their eye off the ball and as a result, children suffered neglect or abuse and some died: Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Kaylea Titford among them. In both these cases, excuses were made for why they were not returning to school after the lockdown ended, but these were not investigated; I suspect that in Kaylea’s case in particular, there will be a serious case review into what exactly went wrong. Her parents are the ones directly at fault, but a lot of people could have done more for her and did not. But neither were being home educated; they attended school until the start of the lockdown, and did not return afterwards. It is important to distinguish between the two. These children’s deaths and the incompetence or heartlessness of some parents and step-parents that led to them should not result in legislation that restricts every child’s parents’ liberties. Quite often, parents do know better than policy-makers, lobbyists and bureaucrats what is best for their children and much as school is the salvation of some, it is an ordeal for others and for every Mrs Webley, there are teachers who really shouldn’t be near children, and these tragedies should not lead to us forgetting that.
Possibly Related Posts:
- The ‘special’ schools that aren’t schools
- Earl Spencer and early boarding
- The London school fighting its own pupils
- Zionist censors come for another student leader
- Uniforms and punishments for poverty
