I don’t think there has ever been a period of greater uncertainty in Scottish education than right now.
We have had what seems like endless reviews, unfulfilled commitments, conversations and discussions. We have lacked decisions and action, and now we have a massive potential list of priorities and no budget to address it.
Little wonder that colleagues are wondering what is coming next - and I am not sure that the Education (Scotland) Bill offers the sort of clarity they are looking for.
We do know, however, that a government statement on behaviour is planned. In advance of that it has been interesting to see the increasing number of occasions when leading politicians, including education secretary Jenny Gilruth, have seemed more relaxed about exclusions of pupils.
What these politicians say matters. They are linking into a completely understandable concern about disruptive behaviour in schools. Survey after survey shows that teachers feel increasingly under threat from aggressive behaviour.
School behaviour: a change in approach to exclusions?
There is growing evidence that young people have been profoundly affected by the experience of the Covid pandemic, with more instances of disturbing behaviour. Attendance has become a huge issue, not simply because of absence, worrying as that is, but also because of partial attendance (young people coming into school for parts of the day or being in but not attending classes).
Staff working in schools are struggling, so excluding pupils who are disrupting education for themselves and others - and adding to staff stress and workload - may seems like an obvious solution. Certainly a number of voices are increasingly challenging what they see as Scotland’s wrongheaded policy on exclusions, so why am I not following suit?
Exclusion may get rid of problems - but it clearly does not solve them. It will also create problems.
Scotland has endorsed The Promise, a commitment to better support looked-after young people. One wonders how that commitment squares with more exclusions.
Looked-after children are more likely to be excluded, so any increase will affect them disproportionately. In my experience, few things cause a foster placement to break down faster than the young person being out of school.
I have vivid and disturbing memories of a fascinating experience that I had as head of education in East Lothian. We had a unit for young people excluded from mainstream provision, which had failed recurrent inspections. So we closed it. The inspectors insisted on coming back to complete the process and that meant inspecting the experience of young people who would have been in the unit had it remained open.
What they reported was alarming. Work experiences, which had been agreed, were not happening. Arrangements made with families were not being implemented. Nothing was being done that would help these young people to be successfully readmitted to mainstream education.
If that unit was part of a central plank of exclusion, it was not working.
Arguably schools were less disrupted, other young people were safer, school staff were under less pressure - so their interests were served. But they were being served at the expense of some of the most vulnerable young people in the county.
That takes us to the real debate, which is whether this is the best that we can do. I think the answer is “no”.
We must serve both staff and students
We cannot set the interests of staff against those of students. We must try to serve both. To do that we need to recognise that where we have a wide spectrum of need, we need a continuum of provision.
We talk about inclusion and integration and often enforce that by keeping children in mainstream provision even when it is evidently not working for them. We then finish up with a situation where students are most likely to be excluded or to be in hugely expensive alternative provision when they are aged between 14 and 16. Their chances of reintegration would be generously described as remote.
When I was director of children’s services in Stirling and reviewed case histories of young people, looking for an intervention that would have led to a better outcome for them, the crucial point was always early in their school experience. What we often felt would have made a difference was an intensive therapeutic intervention, yet there were few such interventions available. I think there is even less such provision now.
We are often, rightly, told that teachers’ working conditions are pupils’ learning conditions. That means that we need to address teachers’ working conditions as a matter of urgency - but not at the expense of some pupils’ conditions. We need to enhance both.
We must start having conversations that go beyond soundbites and look at practical steps that we might take to improve both. I believe in inclusion, but it must not become a shibboleth. It requires scaffolding, and alternative provision can be part of that scaffolding.
We need to be talking about all of these issues rather than going back to an approach that seeks only quick fixes and obsesses with punishment. As an earlier report on looked-after children asserted: “We can, and must, do better.”
David Cameron is an education consultant based in Scotland who has previously worked as both a local authority director of children’s services and as a head of education. He tweets @realdcameron
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