Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

by Kate Clanchy

  Fathers, though, do not do so well in this set-up. So what about Simon, who, judging by his agony, already sees, far more clearly than Kylie, a longer future, and the needs of the child as a person. Volatile, tender Simon, so prone to self-hatred and guilt, so desperately badly fathered himself. Simon needs all his energy to save himself.

  And, above all, what about the baby, Simon’s baby, smart, perhaps, as paint? Where do we place his rights next to the rights of his parents, also children? Because, as Kylie says, right now he is all perfect and nothing bad has happened to him. And that must have been true of the Black Country brothers, once.

  Royar’s Firecracker

  At the same time as I am working in the Inclusion Unit, I am also volunteering the odd morning at our local asylum centre, writing letters for Kurds, Albanians, Iraqis, or Tanzanians. I like to do this; it keeps me in touch with the world of refugees and migrants I came to know through my neighbour and nanny, Antigona, and offers me a world of stories.

  Sometimes, though, I worry that Antigona has broken me into a permanent soft target; certainly Nesrin, a vigorous Kurdish widow with a marvellous nose, latches on to me quickly. First, she gets me to write a council tax rebate letter for her, then to organize a long-distance funeral, then she spots me in Tesco, bursts into tears, and insists I read a letter from her son’s school, which is not, thankfully, my school, right there and then.

  Of course, I’m not supposed to do this; I’m out of hours. That is just the first of many difficulties. The second problem is that, after I do reply to Nesrin’s letter for her, in Starbucks on my laptop, she insists on leaving her email password on the computer so that I can write the ensuing correspondence for her and as her, phoning her as I go. This appeals in some ways to my theatrical nature, but is even more work out of hours, and also strange and embarrassing and makes me feel I will be found out if I use too many semi-colons.

  Much more difficult, though, is the fact that she is supporting her son in the dispute with his school with the irrational, exclaiming, melodramatic energy that perhaps only a Kurdish widow who grew up in a village with more scimitars than telephones could possibly muster, while I am, instinctively, on the teachers’ side. I’ve met Royar: he is large, handsome, macho, and impatient, and I can all too easily imagine him lounging on the back row in my classroom, chewing, nudging his friends, disrupting my lessons. In compensation, the crime I am initially required to write about is at least a dashing one. Get this: following some sort of dispute, Royar dashed away from the Assistant Head into the road outside the school and – there are various excited descriptions of this from different witnesses, including the driver – ran over the top of a 4×4 as it idled at the lights, and then all the way to the other side of the busy road, where he waved, merrily, to an audience of awed and emulous Year 7s. He has a five-day exclusion for this, but it seems longer because it runs into half term. Afterwards, he may be permanently excluded.

  Nesrin wants me to write and say that Royar walked away at the end of school because the bell had rung and he didn’t hear the Assistant Head at all, and the 4×4 was trying to run him over, that’s why he had to climb it, and he was waving to his friends just to say hello, but I really cannot see how any of this can work. Our Head would exclude permanently for this crime, no question. Damn it, I’d exclude him; I wouldn’t want him running over cars in front of my eleven-year-old. No, the only possibility, it seems to me, is to apologize wildly and beg for a ‘fresh start’ at a neighbouring school. (‘Fresh starts’ are a regular exchange between state schools, but given, usually, before major trouble like this. ‘Fresh starts’ come to our school especially regularly from the more middle-class establishments, because we always have places, though the traffic is supposed to go both ways. Emails are sent: ‘Tallulah has friendship group issues . . . Staff are asked to correct her quickly if she becomes obstructive in lessons.’ Sighs are uttered. Sometimes it works. More often, it helps for a bit.)

  But Nesrin, as a proud Kurd, refuses to beg, and so does Royar. We have a standoff in the asylum centre, which I lose. After they leave, taking advantage of the laptop arrangement and banking on Nesrin’s poor English, I write the apology/begging letter anyway, then tell Nesrin I’ve done so over the phone. I think I know best. Royar is in Year 11; if he gets PEXed for this he may well have to finish the year in the council-run Behavioural Unit, and then he won’t get any GCSEs.

  But my letter doesn’t work. Or does it? On the fifth day of the exclusion, Nesrin rings me in confusion. While she was out, Royar and his aunt were suddenly visited at home by a different assistant head. The aunt had let fly volumes of Kurdish abuse and ‘the Asshead’, as Miss T calls these unfortunate middle managers, had left abashedly, but not before she had given Royar the very strong impression that he was permanently excluded.

  But he can’t be, can he? You can’t do it like that. Not without letters. Not without some sort of process. There is nothing on email. There has been nothing by post. I am roused and riled. I fire off an email to the school asking for clarification, then go and ask Miss B about the law. No, she says, you can’t exclude like that, and she shows me the full exclusion process, laid out in a lever arch file. You need reports on the student, special needs assessment, care plans, parental meetings and agreements: a large number of chances, essentially, each one agreed by school, child, and carer. Only when they are all exhausted can a child be excluded. It is the work of years.

  Royar, says Miss B, should have his own school file, which he is legally entitled to view at any time. Nesrin should ask for it, because it would clarify things. A file contains – and she shows me Simon’s, open on her desk – reports and records of a student’s entire time in school, including all the behavioural interactions and agreements. Simon’s notes are extensive, to the point where they have colour-coded file dividers, but he has never been an easy boy. Miss B also recommends an educational charity, which I ring up. They tell me, yes, I should definitely ask for the file, and the formal notice of Royar’s exclusion, and for the school’s behaviour policy. Armed with these, we could ask the school governors for an appeal against the exclusion. All of this, though, must be done quickly if Royar wants an education, because, unless he is formally excluded, he can’t be funded to be educated anywhere else. He is a clever enough boy, though he has never applied himself. He wants to get enough GCSEs to join, God help us, the army.

  So I ask for the file, I request the appeal (it takes hours; you definitely need a degree), but before I can get a reply, Nesrin phones up full of cheer. A kind person from the school has come round, not a teacher exactly, but a mentor, that’s the word. A Christian one. My hackles go up; there are far too many people called ‘mentor’ in schools, and I am suspicious of Christian agendas. Royar is a Muslim, at least nominally. But Nesrin is pleased. The mentor is kind, she says. Yes, he is working with the school. Yes, Royar has met him before. And the mentor says that Royar can join a sport course with the city football club and qualify as a coach. He’ll love that. They’ve signed the papers already.

  I go back to Miss B, suspicious. So is she. Not all schools, she explains, keep files like hers. And then, when the school decides they can no longer contain a student like Royar, they hit difficulties; they haven’t gone through all the right steps, they haven’t exhausted all those care plans and parental agreements and fresh starts, so they can’t legally exclude. She thinks this might be the case here. Royar’s school is also under another sort of pressure: Ofsted are due to inspect soon, and they frown on exclusion because it’s too easy to push out difficult students and pass them down the prestige ladder to the school at the bottom. In their last inspection, in fact, Royar’s school was specifically told that they exclude too much. So, in order to avoid Ofsted scrutiny while also reaping the benefits of getting difficult students off your roll and out of your figures – and let’s say it one more time: these kids are poison for results – lots of schools do what Royar’s is doing: hide difficult pupils under the
carpet, or rather under the legal grey area of ‘alternative provision’. In this endeavour, informal volunteers such as the Christian ‘mentor’ can be very useful, and so can well-meant private schemes such as the sport one.

  So can profiteering private centres run by untrained and unqualified gap-year students, actually, as Sir Michael Wilshaw expostulated as he prepared to leave office in November 2016. The sport scheme isn’t like this; it is genuinely run not for profit, and by a church. It is still, however, not useful for Royar: a mobile classroom staffed by evangelical Christians and filled with, as Royar says, ‘not being nasty or anything, but like really thick kids. Some of them can’t write.’ The course is not run by the city football club at all but just uses some facilities sometimes, and it leads to Level 2 BTEC: a worthless qualification next to the five GCSEs Royar was expected to get, not good enough for the army. Even leaving aside the daily offence of a Muslim boy being subjected to relentless Christian evangelizing – which, to be fair, seems the least of Royar’s concerns – it won’t do.

  So I turn back to the school. Where is the notice of exclusion, please? Where is the behaviour policy and the file? It’s been weeks. After much nagging, they send a letter, but no notice of exclusion. Royar, we’re told, has agreed to ‘alternative provision’, and therefore there is no exclusion and no appeal to the governors. But what, I ask, about the visit from the Assistant Head, when Royar was told he was permanently excluded? The school has no record of this. I ring the educational charity, who tell me that if there are no documents this is informal exclusion and illegal, no matter what Royar has agreed to orally. Nesrin can ask simply for a hearing with the governors about this case – it doesn’t need to be an appeal against exclusion. She should get on with it.

  But Nesrin is completely lost, of course, in the confusion. Left to herself, she would never even have started this process; she would have let Royar drop out of the football course and out of view. Clearly, too, this is what the school and its social worker expected her to do; what the parents of illegally excluded children generally do, because they are no more up to the system than their children. Informal exclusion could, it occurs to me, be happening on a very wide scale in this school, and in other schools too. No one would know. No one would know about Royar if I hadn’t met Nesrin in Tesco.

  Finally, I receive Royar’s file. In contrast to Miss B’s neat, colour-coded sections, it is a mess: a hasty print-out of past offences, mostly recorded through staff emails to one another, mixed in with occasional social workers’ reports and notes from counsellors. So careless is it that the printed-out emails are freely attached to print-outs of other, personal emails, recording for example the ‘yummy cake’ Royar’s form teacher plans to share with Royar’s counsellor, and the Head’s secretary ‘nipping out into the corridor’ to settle his fate with the school social worker.

  The form teacher likes the counsellor, it emerges from the print-outs, but I don’t. I don’t like her judgemental comments on Royar’s sexist attitudes, his rudeness towards her. Why is there nothing of Royar’s background, of what it means to be the only son of a widow, with the honour of a family on his shoulders in a country which doesn’t know what honour means? One day, Royar compliments the counsellor on her blouse and she reports on him to his form teacher. She says it is sexual harassment.

  I don’t like the form teacher, either. He takes Royar to task over the blouse remark, and the boy responds with macho pride and a deep sense of betrayal that the counsellor would tell such tales. The form teacher encourages the counsellor to refuse to see Royar again. They agree together that they shouldn’t have to put up with this. Now I hate them, the form teacher and the counsellor, eating their yummy cake. I hate the social worker more, though, lounging in the corridor, signing documents off unread for the Head’s secretary. Why has she never told the counsellor where Royar comes from, that his family are refugees, victims of torture? Why has she never replied to any of Nesrin’s phone calls? No doubt the calls were inarticulate and desperate – but isn’t that, exactly, part of her job?

  It’s the firecrackers, though, that send me actually round the twist and into a state where I do very little except Royar’s case for a month. The firecrackers don’t even exist. In the last week of October, firework season, Royar was body-searched for firecrackers. The form teacher had a very strong notion that Royar might have some in his socks. Which maybe he could. Maybe if there were firecrackers in my school, setting off fire alarms, causing a nuisance, maybe if there were an overgrown Kurdish boy in my class whom the counsellor won’t see because she finds him too threatening, a boy who is bold and rude and always has other boys around him – maybe that’s where I’d look too. Royar’s socks. But the school had forgotten a simple thing about Royar, the thing that wasn’t in his file, the thing the social worker hadn’t said, the thing the counsellor hadn’t got to: Royar was from Kurdistan. In his childhood, he had been body-searched by soldiers who took his father away and later killed him. I don’t know if Royar knew that body searches ‘triggered’ him; maybe he just found out that day, the day he ran away from the Assistant Head, and climbed the 4×4, and ruined his life.

  I now understand why the helpful charity’s Informal Exclusion casebook is mostly made up of the middle-class parents of kids with special needs: you need to be articulate, connected, and empowered to push through this legal morass. Well, I decide, Nesrin, voiced by me, shall become the most articulate Kurdish widow ever to hit the UK education system. I lose all inhibition about my semi-colons. I complain, in fine and biting terms, to the social worker about the nipping-into-the-corridor decision and copy my complaint in to everyone I can find on the council website. I receive by return a letter from her boss, asking, in effect, for more complaints. The boss, clearly, has been concerned about this lazy and collusive person for some time, but has been handicapped by the same thing that prevents so much action against informal exclusion: a lack of good clear evidence from articulate people capable of writing down the date. The suddenly fluent Nesrin sends the boss a bunch more complaints and gets the social worker fired; it’s a pleasure and a gift.

  I scythe on with my appeal to the governors. It’s not about firecrackers, or yummy cake, or even evangelical Christianity, though I am sorely tempted on all counts. None of these things is needed; I simply have to point out to the governors that if you are going to exclude someone you have to do it by the book, and the school failed to do so. The only real difficulty is getting this statement through the many bureaucratic obstructions that the Head’s secretary, who is also the clerk to the governors, puts up. It takes weeks, deep into January, to get to the meeting, by which time Royar has not had any education for nearly a term of Year 11.

  Even when we win, as we do in less than half an hour, the school malingers. They refuse to make arrangements to readmit Royar, refuse to find him a form teacher, a reasonable timetable, until three weeks after February half term. This leaves him just a few weeks to catch up on his GCSEs, hard for the best student, which Royar is not. In fact, now I stop fighting, and turn to look at him, I see I may have done him no good at all. The lad who could never be kept at home, who played football and basketball at all hours, has morphed to a heap of depression who spends most of his time in bed. Exclusion has already had its chemical effect, even on a boy who hated school.

  Nesrin turfs him out. He goes back to school: back to the hated form teacher; to the counsellor who thinks he’s a pervert; the schoolfellows who used to have him as a hero, among whom he has now lost his place. He bows his shoulders for all of three days, then, in a return to Kurdish scimitar form, gets into a row over the late register and calls yet another assistant head, his third, a cow. Royar’s file, thanks to all my interference, is more organized now, and he can be, and is, moved swiftly to permanent exclusion, and then to the council Behavioural Unit. His school doesn’t have an Inclusion Unit, and from my seat in the asylum centre, gazing into Nesrin’s beaten, bewildered face, that looks like the
only possible place for Royar and his large and rag-tag ilk.

  Simon’s Child

  At Easter, things are looking good in the IU. Tom has secured an apprenticeship and is a different boy: pink, straight-backed, early in every morning to work on his spelling. Vikki has a college place too, to study hairdressing, and she has fallen in love with Dave. It’s taken years off both of them; Vikki has lost at least a stone and taken to bleaching and tonging her hair into dolly ringlets. Dave is flushed, tender, follows her around slack-jawed, stretching out a finger sometimes to touch her waist or a tinder-y curl. Kylie has grown a pregnancy bump the size of herself and slip-slops in, in her leopard-skin flats, more and more rarely, but Clarice, in compensation, has gained weight and is more or less back in mainstream class. And we have written a book, finest parts by Simon.

  I am just organizing a little reading with local dignitaries when I go into school to find Simon not there and the Excluded in muddled, mutinous form. Our rehearsal goes very badly, and afterwards, Miss B and Mrs N beckon me aside to tell me Simon may not be able to make it to the reading, either, because he has been excluded. A week ago, Kylie told Simon the baby wasn’t his after all, but another boyfriend’s, and Simon went into a complicated spin that resulted in his bringing his hunting knife to school. A teacher spotted it, he refused to hand it over, he ran away, and got up the tree. ‘Our tree?’ I ask. The IU tree. Where Vikki goes to smoke. A big, bushy beech. ‘He went up our tree with the knife?’

  ‘Yup.’ Miss B allows herself one snort. ‘Isn’t funny really,’ she says, ‘but there was such a fuss. We had to evacuate – they were going to evacuate the whole school. They’d called the police.’