Samizdata

“‘He lashed out. He was scared’: the fight to save vulnerable UK children from being kicked out of school”– this Observer report by Anna Fazackerley on how two hundred lawyers “have come together to challenge a wave of discriminatory exclusions” focuses on the “unmet needs” of children who are excluded and the worry felt by their parents. Early on, we are told the story of an eleven year old boy called Sam:

His mother alerted the school that Sam would need support before going into class. But, two hours later, when she returned to check on him, she could hear a child screaming. It was Sam.

“As I went in, he was completely disregulated and surrounded by five adults and he collapsed on the floor. No one had called me,” she said.

The school suspended Sam for five days while they formulated a plan to manage his needs – something she was later told was unlawful. Having tried to push her to accept a move to a pupil referral unit, which caters for children who cannot attend mainstream school, she was then sent the notice of permanent exclusion.

After three months at home, Sam was enrolled at a new school, but it did not review whether he needed any additional support. His grades and class reports were good but, ­halfway through the year, a girl who had been bullying Sam pushed him and he shoved her back. The school permanently excluded him for assaulting a teacher who then physically restrained him.

“When I got there, he was in floods of tears,” his mother said. “He had lashed out but not in anger. He was scared.”

Maybe he wasn’t the only scared one.

These days one often sees signs displayed in hospitals, in government offices and on public transport that say something like “Assaults on our staff will not be tolerated”. I was tempted to ask rhetorically, “Should not the same apply to teachers?” and end the post there. But there is a complication that will be familiar to libertarians: even the gentlest, most loving childcare inevitably involves adults using force on children. Before Sam assaulted the teacher, the teacher physically restrained Sam. Am I OK with that?

Broadly, yes. I had hoped to quote one or two of Brian Micklethwait’s writings on this paradox but have not been able to find the pieces I was thinking of. Never mind. Brian was the last man to worry about someone else making his argument their own.

For babies and small children, it is inevitable that they spend almost their entire lives being physically moved around by adults. They are fed, dressed, cleaned and generally sustained by beings bigger and stronger than they are, without anyone so much as getting their signature on a consent form. Then, if all goes well, as they grow older children gain more and more independence until they reach adulthood. In a sane world, schools for children of about Sam’s age would be half-way houses to independence where the necessity of rules being enforced by, well, force, was acknowledged but not something one had to think about minute by minute. All but the very worst of workplaces and other places where adults spend their time are like this. A great deal of the unpleasantness of school life derives from the fact that, in contrast, they are places where force is omnipresent. The least bad part of this is that for 90% the time the children cannot choose what they do – after all, much of adult life also involves spending time on tasks one would not do for pleasure. The most bad part of it, the horrifying part of it, is that they cannot choose to leave. They cannot get away from bullies. Some of those bullies are fellow-pupils, some are teachers. Both categories of bullies are often bullied in their turn. They probably became bullies in the first place out of fear. Frightened people lash out, as Sam did. One ought to be able to spare some compassion for Sam and those like him; to acknowledge that in a better environment he might not have turned violent. It remains a hard fact that in this timeline the continued presence of violent pupils like Sam in a school makes life a misery for other pupils and teachers. It remains a fact that state schools are, on average, places of greater misery than private schools because when state schools try to protect their staff and students by expelling violent pupils they are hamstrung by the likes of the two hundred benevolent lawyers in the School Inclusion Project.