The Schools Blog

The Secretary of State for Education has accepted recommendations that all secondary schools should join behaviour partnerships.  He also announced new plans for a White Paper to change the alternative provision for pupils who have been excluded from school.  He also announced plans to tackle cyber bullying of teachers.

According to speakers at the NASUWT Union conference this Easter disruptive pupils are  ruining thousands of students’ life chances and are the biggest cause of stress among teachers.   One speaker said that diagnosing students as having ADHD was used as a reason not to exclude that student from school.  Others said that behaviour was becoming increasingly “audacious” including abuse on the street, harassment by email and pupils standing outside teachers’ homes shouting abuse.    As a result of legislation passed since the 2005 Report of the Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline, schools now have:

• statutory power to discipline children and impose sanctions for breaches of school rules;
• statutory power to confiscate;
• statutory power to impose discipline beyond the school site, for example for bad behaviour on the journey to and from school;
• a completely new power to search pupils for weapons including knives;
• statutory power to use physical force to restrain unruly pupils; and
• new rules on exclusion appeals panels.

the Secretary of State now intends to go further, in these areas… 

• accepting that all schools, including all new academies, should be required to be part of behaviour partnerships - all existing academies have also now agreed to be part of behaviour partnerships, and the overwhelming majority of LEA schools are in partnerships.
• plans to write to all Directors of Children’s Services to make sure that the additional £109.5 million for Parent Support Advisers is targeted at schools with the highest need; and
• plans for a White Paper to see a transformation in the quality of alternative provision, including plans for more voluntary and private sector provision such as high quality vocational training and studio schools.

Also a Task Force, which will be chaired by Kevin Brennan and will have representatives from social networking sites and teachers, will develop ideas for preventing and dealing with such abuse.  The Secretary of State is asking the Task Force to report its conclusions by July. In particular he has asked them to consider:

a - What more we can do to ensure all school staff and heads are aware of the powers available to them and use them effectively;
b - What more we can do to ensure that all schools have discipline policies that minimise abuse of teachers and anti-bullying policies that protect all their staff from cyberbullying;
c - Whether we should establish a national point of call where school staff can direct complaints about abusive material;
d - Whether we should have specific guidance for staff who have experienced internet abuse;
e - How we can best work with industry to address cyberbullying of teachers;
f - How best to explain the impact of cyberbullying to parents and their responsibilities to ensure that it is treated as seriously as other forms of bullying. Where cyberbullies are found guilty, their parents should be shown what the offence was.

Background notes

1. In the Children’s Plan there was a commitment to ask Sir Alan Steer to review progress since his 2005 report and to look at making behaviour partnerships compulsory.

2. Alan Steer’s initial response can be found at: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/behaviourandattendance

3. The 2005 Report of the Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline, chaired by Sir Alan Steer, can be found at: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/behaviourandattendance/about/learning_behaviour.cfm

4. The additional £109.5 million for Parent Support Advisers was announced in November.

5. Later this spring DCSF will be making a curriculum resource pack called Let’s Fight It Together available to schools. The pack is being produced by Childnet. Vodafone and O2 are helping to fund it, which is clear evidence of support from the industry. The pack, which include a short film, will help teachers work with pupils in lessons and assemblies to develop their understanding of the impact of cyberbullying and how to prevent it. Lets Fight It Together emphasises that pupils are not the only victims. The internet can also be used to harass, bully and abuse teachers and other school staff, and we are determined to take decisive action to stop this.

Tony Attwood

The vast majority of schools and colleges in England will offer Diplomas from September 2009.  Around three quarters of secondary schools and 88% of colleges will teach Diplomas with the support of local universities and employers.317 groups of schools, colleges and training providers will be run diplomas  from 2009 in subjects including Environmental and Land-based Studies, and Business, Administration and Finance. They will join the schools and colleges already preparing to teach the first five Diplomas from this September. Ministers have confirmed that by 2013 all young people will have the chance to study a wide range of Diplomas.

Parents who are members of a club, society or similar group are likely to have children who score higher in tests for reading, maths and covabulary.   This finding comes from a study of 2700 families by the University of Sheffield.

The explanation of the results is that if parents are involved in a club or society, they bring back to the house a variety of additional inputs.  Their minds are stimulated, they make new contacts, they experience variant points of view, and they socialise more.

All these factors are important when it comes to the way in which parents interact with their children.  Parents who are actively involved in genuine social activities are more likely to bring a variety of perspectives to the conversation with their children, rather than settle back into standard responses to questions, behaviour, discipline and so on.

The relationship between children and their parents is dynamic, and as such it demands a variety of responses from the parent – responses that need to change as the child grows.  If however the parent is only able to exchange ideas on the issues this brings with a limited number of people (for example the parents own parents) there is little chance for new ideas to develop and flourish.

Furthermore parents who participate in activities outside the home tend to return to the home with a willingness to take on the issues of home life, in a way that those whose life is focussed totally on the home or which alternates home and work are able to do.

It is certainly true that many parents will find the notion of looking after children, working AND joining a club or society to be one step too far, although many others do manage the one evening out a week that such membership or involvement brings.

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A study by The University of Hull of 1300 children has suggested that dyslexia affects a far larger number of children than was previously expected.  In fact over half those who did not achieve expected levels in SATS tests displayed signs of being dyslexic.

This raises an interesting question.  Supposing many more pupils and students than we previously imagined are dyslexic?    This would be in accordance with findings from Durham University which recently suggested that a significant number of young people suffer from short term memory problems - something regularly associated with dyslexia.

I’m interested because in the 1990s I spent several years working on a project to develop materials for dyslexic pupils and students - and what we found was something very simple.  The pupils who were thought to be dyslexic all had the same problem.  They could not (almost by definition) make much progress when taught with any of the conventional methods of literacy teaching.  However virtually every single pupil would respond if taught using two simple techniques.

The first was the making of the written language ordered and logical.   If the written language was broken down into individual rules, without any exceptions allowed, it then became possible to take these children through the processes.  The key was the order in which the rules were introduced - and indeed it was in the 1930s that the idea of starting with the letters I T P N and S arose - an idea that we followed.   Start with those letters and you get a lot of words with only a limited number of spelling rules.  In each lesson we introduced one or two new letters or new sounds - all in a very organised way.

The second was to use a multi-sensory approach introducing touching alongside saying writing and reading the words.  

Basically that was it.  An ordered sequence of learning, and a multi-sensory approach.   In the end we also concluded that testing the children wasn’t very beneficial in most cases - it was better just to get on and use this structured multi-sensory approach.   The approach helped everyone we saw, irrespective of whether the underlying condition was dyslexia or not.

Of course there will be children and students who don’t respond - there are of course other special needs.  But everyone we saw got significant benefit.   The downside was that we didn’t find a way of teaching these students and pupils in large groups - we always did it in groups of up to three.  But maybe that technique will, one day, be developed.

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