Welcome Michele to your lesson. Do not comment on her lack of homework. Provide any equipment needed. Do not ask Michele to read aloud.” Why? Because Michele is in school by the skin of her teeth, is beating the odds just by sitting at a desk. “Michele struggles with literacy but has started to make progress and is keen to catch up.” Michele is a Traveller, one of a dozen at Chalvedon school in Essex. Her disrupted primary experience is just one of her difficulties in staying in Year 7, as further reading of her individual education plan makes clear.

Barbara Blaney was a reluctant winner at this year’s National Teaching Awards (she got her Plato for excellence in special needs teaching). “The only thing that persuaded me was the profile of the Travellers,” she says, as she moves around her room, watering plants and readying the register before pupils arrive. Now head of learning support, she has been at Chalvedon - a 1,740-pupil, 11-18 foundation school - for 17 years. In that time, Chalvedon has built a reputation nationally and locally around Basildon for having cracked the difficult nut of how to include Traveller children in mainstream secondary education. Actually, says Ms Blaney, it has not been so difficult. “What Traveller pupils need is to have their culture valued and to be accepted for who they are. We don’t hide it away that we have Traveller children - we put it on display boards.”

Three boards in the corridor outside show poems by Traveller children, photographs of trailers inside and out, skilled drawings of horses, and pieces of writing about Appleby Fair, an annual event that looms large in the Gypsy calendar. They celebrate Traveller culture at Chalvedon, but modify their own practice as necessary. “We’ll make any adaptation we need to make,” says Ms Blaney. “You’ve got to believe that you can break the rules.”

The rules tend to work against the inclusion of this most marginalised group. Franiellen Read, aged 15, is in Year 11. Apart from her big gold hoop earrings - last year’s Christmas present and an important token of cultural identity - she looks like other girls in her year. But the life she comes from is very different. “We live in a house but we still travel around,” she says. “It’s just a place to come back to.” She has recently been on a short trip with her family to Ireland; before that, she spent four months on the road, “seeing new places and new things, with about 20 families. All your cousins are there and it’s a laugh.”

She came back to find she had fallen behind with coursework, and with no particular encouragement either way from the family. Persuaded by Ms Blaney to come into school for a meeting, Franiellen has decided to return on a reduced timetable. “My cousins say, ‘oh, you’re quite old to be going to school’, but I’m only staying at home cleaning, so I might as well go to school and learn.”

Franiellen’s mother has suggested that when the family goes travelling next spring, she can stay with her grandmother to enable her to take the exams. “She says they’ll come back for me afterwards,” says Franiellen. “I never thought she’d be like that.”

School, meanwhile, has high hopes that she will be present in the sixth form. The first challenge is to recruit children to secondary school. “Parents think the children will learn too much in school,” says Ann Lee, manager of 10 Essex Traveller sites, including the 25-pitch Hovefields, where several Chalvedon pupils live. “Drink, drugs, sex - all the things Traveller girls are not supposed to do. They go past schools and see the big boys and girls smoking and cuddling each other and they don’t like it.”

Other families slip out of the system at the end of primary school, fearing that having a child’s name on the roll of a secondary school may bring unwelcome attention from education welfare officers. Up to 10,000 Traveller children of secondary age are not registered with any school, HMI estimated in 1996; the inspectorate commented that access to the curriculum for secondary aged children was “a matter of grave concern”, with boys in particular likely to drop out or be excluded. Regarded by the community as all but adult from puberty, boys are expected to earn money. “They tend to go with their dads from 12 or 13,” says Ms Lee, “to learn the trades. They’re not used to being confined.”

“In primary school it was really hard,” says Franiellen. “They outcasted me, calling me a dirty gyppo. It’s like you’re a different status from them. Whereas here, they really know what you’re about and that you’re not dirty.”

Chalvedon takes referrals from the county’s Traveller education service, with whom the school works closely. But it goes further, actively welcoming Traveller children. Last year, Ms Blaney hosted a buffet lunch in school for prospective Traveller parents. Three came, another sent apologies. One of the mothers had never before set foot in a school. Three children were subsequently enrolled and the 21-year-old aunt who came for one child is enrolling herself, too - in the sixth form.

Chalvedon’s claimed flexibility is real. Two of the new children are sisters, one a potential Year 7, the other Year 9, chronologically at least. But Charlene and Sherrie Price wanted to be together - and they are, in Year 7. “I came two years ago and left a week later,” says Sherrie. “It was a shock to my system - too big, but it’s different now I’ve got her with me.” She says that children in the school are friendly. “They’re all very interested. They’re not funny about it. The boys ask loads of questions about the trailer.” Sherrie and Charlene are increasingly casting off from the safety of the learning base into full school life, although they don’t do PE - Traveller culture forbids undressing in public - and initially only observed in drama lessons. “I think they thought you went on a stage and acted a play,” says Ms Blaney. “It’s a lack of understanding of what it could possibly mean.”

Behind every inclusive school is a supportive headteacher. Alan Roach has been head at Chalvedon for 14 years; an early emigre from London’s East End, he describes the rootless, undereducated young people he serves as a “lost tribe”. He says:“We’re not educating children, we’re giving them a life. They are masters of antagonism; they can beat us at that game. What we’ve got to do is love them to death.”

Within this very modern, very British context, Traveller pupils, he says, have something others lack. “They are the only community that has a culture you can testify to. There is a morality, there are standards. Fathers take their children out of school at any whiff of exposure to drugs or trouble from boys.”

Non-Traveller children learn that Traveller girls are not allowed to go out clubbing, that there are strict rules of hygiene regarding trailer life, and that families are close and protective. One former Chalvedon pupil liked it all so much she has been absorbed into the Traveller family of a friend she made at school. “I have never met nicer people; they would do anything to help a person in need or in trouble,” she wrote in a testimony for one of Chalvedon’s profile-raising exercises (which have extended to hosting an evening of Gypsy culture, in which pupils and seasoned artistes performed together, and employing Traveller pupils as ambassadors for the school).

Traveller children offer something vital to an otherwise monocultural community, says the head. “They’re the ones who give us the cultural mix.” Alan Roach is willing to do what it takes to get and keep the children, if not always in school then “kind of permanently with us”, offering flexible timetabling, introductory periods off roll, free school uniforms - “blazers are pound;12.99. What’s the big deal in the great scheme of things?” - and flexible interpretation of school rules on, for instance, the wearing of gold hoop earrings.

“I’ll say to them, ‘I won’t put you on roll. Just come in. You need a uniform? I’ll give you one’. Once they’re in and they’re enjoying it, I’ll say, ‘what about formalising it, part-time?’ Later, I’ll say to parents, ‘how about going on roll?’” He is willing to take the risks to attendance and achievement figures that may accompany Traveller children. “If our attendance suffers because we have Traveller children here, so what?” he says. “But in reality, it does not depress the figures. You end up with a richer community, and that’s what brings results.”

Alan Roach’s rhetorical “so whats?” don’t indicate a lack of concern, except about the rules that can turn education on its head. He clearly cares about Travellers. “You can vilify Travellers in a way you can vilify nobody else, and ignore them in a way you can ignore nobody else. Who’s fighting to make sure they get a good education? Nobody.”

He suggests that until there is a code of practice relating to the education of Travellers, their experience will remain chancey. Teachers - there are 100 of them at Chalvedon, many recently arrived in the school - all get a booklet produced by Barbara Blaney called My Mother Said. It provides a crash course in Traveller culture and mores, with children’s thoughts about school - “They thought we were dirty and dangerous but now they know we are clean and kind”; “It’s important to learn to read because if you want to move about you have to read the signs” - and points to help staff in the classroom (see box). They report back to Ms Blaney that the booklet is among the more interesting pieces of literature to appear in their pigeonholes, and tend to read it whether or not they are in direct contact with Traveller pupils.

Russell Hartley, a Year 11 form tutor, has had four (now down to three) Traveller girls in his class over the past five years. “When I started it was quite difficult. I wasn’t trained in that field and no one comes into college to talk to you about Travellers,” he says. “The rest of the class didn’t understand why they couldn’t do detentions after school and why they went early.” An assembly given by the girls, input from Ms Blaney, and frank class discussions soon cleared the atmosphere, he says. “Since then, it’s been great. The other kids are fascinated and I’ve never seen any prejudice. It’s not ‘them and us’.” Form 11Q put up the postcards from Appleby and Ireland on their board.

Ms Blaney has long-standing links with the community, and is in demand for signing official forms for passports and birth certificates. Trust has been built slowly over the years, and she is thoughtful about the deeper issues surrounding bringing Traveller children into school.

She recounts recently taking a child home after a school outing. The van progressed further and further along the unmade road leading up to the site. There, the family was congregated, waiting for the return of the child. “It was like a little homestead,” she says. “It reminded me what hoops we put these children through. The lifestyle is all outside - with the dogs, the chickens, the horses - and we’re saying, ‘get in this uniform, in this mould, do this, do that’. Inclusion is not the same as integration. It means including people, as they are. It’s a helpful term. It reminds you to consider in whose interests are you working? And what are their interests?” Wendy Wallace is education feature writer of the Year. For more on the Teaching Awards see You and Your Job, page 26