By a Tower Hamlets teaching assistant
Ruth Kelly’s government has been instrumental in closing down, wholesale, special schools in line with a policy called “inclusion”. The idea was that students with special needs would do better if included in mainstream schools.
Many people agreed with this and it had its good points. Students with disabilities or learning difficulties would get to mix with and learn alongside their peers rather than being sidelined in a separate institution. More able students would learn to be tolerant and accepting of people different from themselves. However, many parents wanted the choice.
Apasenth (Asian Parents Association for Special Educational Needs in Tower Hamlets) say that 50% of their members prefer mainstream schooling for their children and 50% prefer to remain with a special school. One policy does not fit all kids.
The problem was that the government that champions “parental choice in education” closed off any choice in the matter by shutting down special schools. Parents were forced to place their children into mainstream schools which, at the same time, were being clobbered with such competitive strategies as league tables, SATs, test results, etc.
A school which puts its priority on staying at the top of the league tables is not going to plough resources or teaching time into extra support for those children who, for what ever reason, find it difficult to keep up.
Also, inclusion into mainstream schools could only work if resources were ploughed into them to provide for the extra training, more staff, smaller class sizes. The Workforce Remodelling Agreement which was supposed to place a greater emphasis on the role played by classroom assistants, recognising their skills, improving their training and pay has never been properly implemented.
In Tower Hamlets, there are still schools which have teaching assistants on the lowest scale of pay despite working for the borough for ten years and more. Many have to take a second job to make ends meet, working in supermarkets in the evenings and weekends.
There are teaching assistants who are told that they cannot be released from work for training because the resources are not there to cover for them in their absence. Although the borough provides training courses for them, the schools do not always release them to take the opportunity up. This is not in the spirit of the agreement, and it makes a mockery of the idea of inclusion.
The teaching assistant in the classroom is the person who ensures that the child with special needs is included in what the teacher is teaching and what the rest of the students are doing. Without the teaching assistant it cannot happen. Most teachers say that their jobs would be impossible without the assistant’s presence in the room.
One of the ministers of the very government responsible for stranding many children in a limbo-land of feeling rejected, lost, confused and stupid has decided that this is not what she wants for her own child.
Apparently, she cannot be condemned because she “only wants what is best for her child”. What on earth does she think all the other parents in the borough of Tower Hamlets want? Second best?
She brings to mind the government official of post-1979 China who was responsible for ensuring that no woman in her province had more that one child, forcing women to have abortions and driving them to despair, until, one day, she developed a burning desire to have a second child herself. Using her position of privilege and power she emigrated so she could get what she wanted, leaving all those women in all that misery behind her. What stinking hypocrisy!
If the schools in the borough do not provide adequate support for her child, then they are failing others too; others who do not have £15,000 to spend on private education.
