Good evening, everybody, and welcome to the Department of Education and to the second in series from the Excluded
Lives set seminar series Richard III tonight to welcome Professor Martin Mills.
Martin is the inaugural director of the Centre to Teach and Teach Research at the Institute of Education University College London,
and is researching an amendment, broadly speaking there of social justice and teacher education,
but also in alternative education,
including some some research they did for the deaf with with Professor Patricia Thomas from the University of Nottingham,
which is looking into alternative provision.
And Martin, as you'll hear from from his at its peak, spent a long time in an Australia, was formerly the head of School of Education,
University of Queensland in Australia and a fellow at the Academic Academy of Social Sciences of Australia.
So without further ado, marseglia talk for about 40 45 minutes and then there'll be plenty of time for questions.
And then we'll go to the common room for a drink afterwards.
Thank you, Michael. Thank you. Thanks for this invitation and and for coming out this this evening.
I have to say I kind of got into alternative provision by mistake really in the UK at the moment.
Like many of the young people in the UK. So what I'll do is give a bit of introduction, say something about the context and alternative provision.
I can't do a presentation without mentioning social justice somewhere along the way,
so I just want to take a little detour and say something about social justice and then give it a sort of
detailed case study of one alternative provision site that I went into and spent quite a bit of time with.
And then make a couple of concluding comments. I've always lived in terror of running out of things to say somewhere early in the lecture.
So I always prepared too much. And as I'm coming up on the train, I'm thinking this.
It'll be 8:00 9:00 o'clock. So at some stage you might suddenly I might suddenly start rushing through.
So let's get started. So I said by mistake, I was doing a special issue of the Journal of Educational Policy with Becky Francis,
and we were posing to lots of people the question What would a socially just school look like?
And people really struggled to answer that. Many people said, Look, we've so far gone.
It'll never happen. And some of the most kind of well known people writing in social justice and education struggled to do this.
And so that point, I thought, that's something I really want to explore going and looking at different schools to try
and get an understanding of what social justice a socially just school might look like.
Secondly, I've been involved in quite a big project in Australia with a colleague, Bob Lingard and other people.
And we'd produced a book and we had about classrooms and schools, and we argue for about three weeks over the words in the in the title.
Did we want schools making a difference or schools making the difference?
And we came down on a difference because take into account all the other external factors that impact upon young people in schools.
They young people, teachers and and the schools themselves couldn't make the difference.
But I started to think, Well, what would a school look like that did make the difference?
And could it be possible that schools could make the difference?
So I then was also inspired by Michael Fielding and Peter Moss's work, where they said,
We want this, you know, to challenge this dictatorship of no alternative.
To say that, you know, it is a play on Margaret Thatcher's comment in the in the 80s,
there is no alternative and trying to find different schools that were, I thought, in some ways, making a difference.
At the time I was in Australia and I'd come across schools that had been set up for young people who were homeless,
young women who were pregnant, indigenous students, a whole range of things,
some that began in parks, some that began in houses,
and many of those kids ended up young people ended up in those schools by virtue of them finding the school and choosing to go.
They're quite different from something like alternative provision,
but they were an alternative sector dealing with really highly marginalised young people.
So that that book that I did, but Glenda MacGregor, engaging young people in education went and looked all sorts of kind of alternative schools,
including some alternative provision in England trying to say, Well,
what can we learn from these schools for the mainstream if we're finding some of these alternative provision
type schools in in Australia and here where young people are actually engaged in school and schoolwork?
Young people who had hated the mainstream school and saying, Well, these schools are working with them, what are they doing?
That's different that we might be able to look at the in the transform mainstream education system.
So it was also getting into utopia politics at that time as well.
I then was involved in a in a book with Gillian McCluskey, who's part of the project located here from Edinburgh University.
And we'd been invited to to Korea to talk about.
So South Korea was getting into alternative education there for some of the same
reasons that we that I'd been seeing it both in Australia and in and in England.
And it was tied up a bit with kind of the current policy moment.
If you think about South Korea, they do really, really well on all those kind of Pisa tests and things.
But what you had is you had really unhappy kids and many parents were actually looking to create kind of alternative schools.
Right. But you also had a similar thing that was happening here is kids who were actually looking like damaging the reputation of the schools.
Maybe some a bit better for you. Maybe you might want the alternative school down the road.
So there were similar dynamics going on in in South Korea.
I love the work of the Zygmunt Bauman, and in his book Wasted Lives,
and I was thinking about this notion of a beautiful education system, and it's kind of the dream of many policy makers.
Let's create this system. That's wonderful. And the analogy seemed to me to be really fit with this.
This description from Michelangelo in Bauman's book. He was asked How you make this really beautiful sculptures so easy?
Just get a marble and cut all the superfluous bits, the unnecessary bits out.
And that's a bit like happened to the education system, I think.
You know, we get these schools, and if we want them to be really functioning fantastic place cut away the kind of the waste, the rubbish school.
And that's how many and many of the kids I've talked about that's talked to and teachers to some extent have said on the school,
just a dumping ground. It's a rubbish tip. You know, it's that sense of this is what they're for.
So the analogy seemed to me real to really fit. And, you know.
This kind of thing happens every time, you know, pays or whatever, you know,
like we actually do see kids being thrown out of school because of that trying to create a beautiful school.
This is in quite contrast to my notion of the the, um, socially just school.
I had been so, so so that's part of this.
I had a really nice fellowship from the Australian Research Council, which allowed me to come to England regularly from Australia.
And when I was asking about where might I see a really interesting kind of alternative school and I was sent to this one in West London,
which I'm going to do later as a case study. And I'd been there and we've been talking about knife crime.
We've been talking about so many of the issues that face these young people in their lives.
And I was walking away from this on one day and picked up, you know, those free newspapers,
you get to catch the tube and this double page spread wasted lives, you know, waste of young lives faces.
One hundred and twenty four teens in London killed since twenty seven.
This was a seven year period. And it's going to be a look at the faces and you think like these, you know,
these are very similar to the kids I've just been talking to and interviewing. And you can kind of see that this is more than just that.
The consequences of many of the issues around exclusion go beyond education.
And many of these young people who have got nowhere to go are on the streets and are getting into all sorts of trouble inside that.
The editorial in this paper, and you probably can't read it, but there was there was an editorial talking about this double page spread.
And they said the solution is quite simple to raise the academic standards of the schools that these young people attend.
So the idea was to get a really good, rigorous school, and these kids will then be simple so simple.
They somebody once said to every complex problem, there's a simple solution just that it's always wrong, you know?
And to some extent,
this is kind of this this argument here and against the good school that was kind of implicit in here is the kind of beautiful schools that you know.
So this kind of irony there in some ways, and it wouldn't have fitted the school that I was I was visiting.
So that's some of my context. Now I'm going to talk about the report in a moment.
I just pulled out a couple of quotes from headteachers that we interviewed for that report.
And the points, you know, it's exactly what we all think. Right?
And no, to some extent, you know, one headteacher says Ofsted judgements are influenced by the outcomes for pupils,
so getting academic results up adds a lot of pressure on us. Now, if I have a large number of pupils where the curriculum does not meet their needs,
that will affect my progress eight scores and the number of students who want to come.
This is a justification for sending kids to alternative provision.
We're all in the chase for best schools and this means we have to juggle the needs of students with the needs of the school.
I really think the needs of the students and the needs of the schools, they're a bit different.
It seems to me a very bizarre kind of comment anyway. So you get you get the picture.
This is kind of wasted lives. And so that's how I got into alternative provision.
Then I came to Australia and I've been working with Pat Thomson,
and then we did this report with a research company that contacted us and asked us to work with them.
But you can see the policy context is really into alternative provision at the moment.
So the Timson review talks about it. dFe has creating opportunity for all our vision for alternative provision.
When we did our report in conjunction with that, this ethos was doing a mark.
I don't know alternative provision, market analysis outcome. That's a bizarre on the concept to me.
But anyway, so they were doing their market analysis. House of Commons Education Committee's report Forgotten Children Alternative Provision So,
so alternative provision is on the agenda about three weeks ago.
Or maybe it's before Christmas. It seems like three weeks ago, but I was invited to a meeting at the DfT,
where we had a conversation with a whole range of different kind of people in the alternative provision
sector discussing what kind of qualities should we be looking for in an alternative provision teacher?
So clearly, there's a sense in which this is ongoing. There's not there's not.
This alternative provision is kind of what we're trying to phase it out or it's problematic.
It's something that's here to stay. So I'll give it.
What I thought I'd do is give you a quick overview of our report and then then get to what I think is the really nice parts,
which are the um, the case study, the case study, one of the things I always try to do.
And I never know whether it's good or not is to provide a lot of interview data because what I find with data,
as I'm learning to say now is is because I think the voices of young people in those schools
are often marginalised and we don't get to hear them often the teachers in those schools.
And I think we have to understand that. I think some of the teachers in those places are really trying to do the best they can and sometimes
really difficult environments and to try and give you an opportunity to hear some of their voices,
which I think are really important. So in terms of this study, it was a big study, quite bit like anything for the DFA really in a rush.
And can you do this, you know, like we wanted this, you will fund you now.
Can we get the report in a two weeks time and it takes forever to try and explain that
the detail that goes into doing case studies and telephone interviews and so on.
So a lot of people we spoke to and a great group of case studies.
It's like, I I think, look, you know, they said I was from England,
but I spent a long time in Australia and and I always used to think the Australian schooling system was a bit complex.
Oh God, here now, I can't, you know, like trying to understand that the schooling system is really fraught.
But then you try and understand the alternative provision sector. That's kind of a whole range of other complexities there.
Some are free school, some are academies, some are philanthropic and run by charities.
Some are run by the local education like it is quite complex.
And then it's, you know, if students go to them, sometimes full time, part time, some, you know, some are even on the site of the school.
Most, most of the offsite provision seems to be set up with the idea that they'll return to the mainstream.
The reality is that many of the teachers say to us, not likely, you know, some of our schools, some aren't schools.
One of the things that I found, and I was quite shocked by what I have to say when the first time I heard about it and this was that one of my
case studies schools when I was coming back was in full screen here and Australia is that I was told that.
And I said, How do you get your funding? And I said all schools in the local area by places at the beginning of the year.
So school by 10 places and other schools by 10.
What does that mean when you're about three, four or five months into the year and you've only used to think,
Oh, I've wasted my money, I better get some. But you know the economics of it, you know, you start to think that if you're a rational person thing,
I don't want to waste my money such and such as a bit of a pay, you know, such, you know, like maybe could.
It seems a bizarre situation. It's like insurance. You buy insurance.
But you know, I suppose you buy it, hoping you never have to use it. But but there's something very peculiar.
I think about buying places before you. You need them.
They're all non fee paying. Most of them seem to have to be referred.
Students have to be referred. But the students I've spoken to, some of them haven't been in school for several years.
Some of them have been to schools, all in the local area. And and and again, I can't.
I still can't understand how this can happen and students being told, No, there is no place for you here and they go.
It's like the go round trying to find a school that nobody wants them.
I just again, very, very difficult. Our findings were in that report when we asked schools why they used AP.
It was persistent. Disruptive behaviour is what they said all the time.
Interestingly, it wasn't the it was that seemed to be.
And I think people were genuine, and I think that was what the picture we were getting in schools.
It was in the in the alternative provision.
It wasn't some kind of major event where somebody one day threatened to beat somebody up or, you know, done something quite dramatic.
It is the kind of persistent disruption that you get in classrooms. And my.
My daughter's a teacher, and she hates it when I say I really thought about changing your pedagogy,
you know, like, you know, maybe it's too simplistic to say it's just pedagogy and curriculum.
That's the problem that there are issues that make you know.
And I was a high school teacher, and I know there's some days when kids weren't in school. You know, you think, Oh, goodness, not here today.
So I understand the difficulties that sometimes come with constant, consistent, disruptive behaviour.
But it seems to me an overreaction to cut people out of the education system.
The app's interestingly complained about that, like trying to have a conference once the once the young people were sent from the school,
from the from the school to the app, having a conversation with the school was really difficult.
It's like they no longer wanted to know about them. They'd gone. And now they're your problem.
Parents and pupils talked about how they were told, you know,
like some of the kids were terrified that you're going to the school that they thought was going to be, you know, going through metal.
They thought they'd be going through metal detectors if they thought they were going to kind of like a prison environment.
Parents were anxious, really scared for the kids and what the future might be.
Again, lack of communication about what this this might mean. And the other thing was attainment levels of the young people who arrive,
this alternate provision is so varied, like some of the kids who get there would be doing very, very well.
And, you know, if they were able to have did their work in a mainstream school would be doing quite well.
And some kids are really is reading ages were well below what they age, their age level.
So. So you also then had these, you know,
situations where the teachers in these schools were having to deal with a wide range of kind of hate the term that attainment levels ability level.
So levels of attainment. Also, many of the people in the in the alternative provision had said to me multiple times.
I can't believe such and such as here. Why are they here? Look, you know, that kind of actually amazingly engaged in doing their work?
Why are they here? And there were and again, issues around anxiety for some of these young people,
and autism came up over and over again as an issue as to why they were being sent there.
And it seemed to me again, an inappropriate response to issues that were kind of needed to be addressed in other ways rather than through.
And and you can say it's not punitive, but everybody in those schools feels it's punitive is the reason they're there.
Now, I don't know. I think some of the schools that we've been to try to create a government where it doesn't feel punitive,
but they in the back of their minds, that's why they've been sent there for punitive reasons.
Two issues I'll pick up here.
The small class, like I don't know, I hate the research that gets trundle out every so often that says class size doesn't matter, you know, to me,
like any, you know, anybody that's ever stood in a classroom and worked with young people knows that a smaller group is much easier to work with.
I don't care what the kind of, you know, class size affects or whatever, all those kinds of things.
It's if you know, you know, when you work with a small group of people, you can actually achieve much more.
And the students pupils talked about how much they liked the small classes.
The teachers talked about how much they liked the small classes.
There is an issue, and we're trying to explore this pattern, I've been talking about this for ages, really got around to doing it at any depth.
But teacher recruitment and retention issues in AP and that and.
What the teacher, what the head, teachers and equivalent in many, it says, look, we can find teachers,
but we actually trouble trouble enough to actually retain them and sometimes find suitable people, people who actually understand.
So you've got to you kind of need two things. One is you have to be a very good teacher, you know, to work with with young people like this.
You also so you need to be young, but you also need to have some kind of understanding of young people and understanding of young people's lives.
You can't go into a happy, loving, you know, ancient history or, you know, or mass.
But you can't. But equally, you can't go into AP just because you really like young people.
You need to have some pedagogical skills and understanding a curriculum.
So the real issues in terms of teacher recruitment and recruitment in this in this sector.
Interestingly. Whilst.
Whilst many of the parents or carers and many of the young people were actually bit negative sometimes about their into sometimes really,
really positive. Very few actually said I really want to go back to the mainstream if they'd been to a mainstream,
many of them were actually quite happy now, you know, working within the small groups and so on.
So. There's a range of kind of findings in that report, and I think it raises real issues about the nature of AP,
raises issues about the ways in which young people end up in AP, and I think those have to be interrogated.
Now, skip that. So I want to come on to a case study now.
But to frame it up, I want to just say something about social justice.
And for me, the whole. How kind of creation of a kind of alternative provision sector is a social justice issue for me.
And I think you think about who the students are. You think about their backgrounds.
You think about the consequences for their life chances. You think about how it's kind of creating a stratified system.
Really, really social justice issues. I am very fond of Nancy Fraser and whenever I can, I use her work.
And so for her, in terms of social justice, what it means.
She argues that social justice requires social arrangements that permit all to participate as peers in social life.
Overcoming injustice means dismantling institutional obstacles that prevent some people
from participating on a par with others as full partners in social interaction.
So what are the institutional obstacles? That alternative provision may be sets up for these young people, and to some extent,
it's kind of like for many of the young people, it's a pathway to nowhere. It's they get in here like doing kind of busy work, right?
And, you know, sometimes worksheets and things. And sometimes it's actually becoming a bigger obstacle for them getting on the net.
They tried to find some way of keeping them in the mainstream. But what we have found in both schools in Australia,
in this kind of selective and here that many of them actually try to address some of those institutional obstacles.
So Nancy Fraser talks about three kind of dimensions of social justice economic,
cultural, political, economic, financial, material, resources and so on.
Many of the young people that we've spoken to can't get to school or don't go to school for a whole range of financial reasons.
There's issues around food, transport, having the right clothes, all sorts of things that are economically make it different, difficult.
We many of the schools we've been to actually try to address that with transport cards, with food meals,
three three meals a day, you get there for breakfast, lunch, you have something to go into the day this Sunday.
If you're homeless, you know, go to school because if you go to school,
they will put you in touch with some kind of housing association or crisis housing.
Many of the young people that we've spoken to, I've spoken to in the case studies,
school and other schools, account surfing don't have anywhere to live.
The schools that I've come across with crises. Right.
So there's one fantastic school in that book that talked about the Glenda McGregor that we write about where and it's primarily indigenous girls,
but not just indigenous girls, but young women with babies. And they've kind of got this great crash at a fantastic price system so that,
you know, there's no reason why you can't go to school because of the baby.
And they've got fantastic kind of caring support. They've got nurses that come in and work with the the young women.
And so there's kind of an educated parental look at education as well as ensuring they get an education.
What is interesting here and this comes back to and I know it happens here and it happens in Australia, illegal exclusions.
You can, you know, you cannot tell a young woman she can't come to school because she's pregnant.
But how many women I've spoken to, young women I've spoken to have told me, Yeah, right?
You know, to pull the other one, you know, who felt that they've been excluded because of their being pregnant.
I won't be safe. You know what, if you get bumped, you know, like, you know, and again, a lot of it's around that the image of the school.
So that's economics, ensuring that people can come because of financial reasons.
Then this cultural kind of discrimination and many of you know and I've spoken to young people
who have have talked about how they felt discriminated because they they're a bit that,
in their words,
campy or a bit different or a bit alternative and of a sense of where they don't feel valued in the school and have been teased and bullied.
And so the other thing about alternative provision is you find lots of young people who have actually been victim, you know,
victims in a horrible term, but victims in a school environment, they're not the people who necessarily been really dangerous in a school.
They've actually received it. So again, creating an environment where people all feel welcomed, political representation,
political justice she talks about is a kind of having a voice and having a say in decisions that affect you.
One girl I spoke to in Australia in a in one of these schools,
she talked about how she'd been at her previous school, and she said that a teacher had called her a [INAUDIBLE].
She'd gone to the deputy to complain, and the deputy said, I don't believe you.
So she tried to burn his office down. So she set fire to his rubbish bin.
Well, and to some extent, another action. Maybe. But you can understand that sense of a lack of voice and a sense of frustration
that nobody's believing you or giving you an opportunity to be heard again.
The better kind of alternative schools. I went into alternative provision and.
And in Australia, we tended to call them flexi schools that they're very flexible in terms of the um, the regimes within them.
They provide opportunities for young people to have a say in it, to say what they want to study,
what they what they feel and are critical about in terms of the school.
I also think there's other issues around brand justice beyond Nancy Phrases.
Kathleen Lynch in Ireland talks about effective justice care relationships.
She talks about love, care and solidarity, that there all justice relationships, how we, you know, how we care for one another, who does the caring.
And I think that's part part of the the environment. We have to think about the others poor combat notion of contributing justice.
And so again, we've done the paper and critical studies of education on this, and it's about having meaningful work.
And I think why we wanted to really.
Emphasised this in the school context in alternative provision is you've got to give young people meaningful work, right?
Work that actually means something to them.
And what the definition, I guess that Paul Gomberg uses is the difference between conceiving of a project and actually executing it,
undertaking it and doing it. And in many times, what happens in schools.
And you can see why kids might actually not think this is worth doing because they have not been involved in the conceiving of the problem,
conceiving of the issue, conceiving of the topic. But they're expected to do it right.
And what we've seen in many of these sites where they do engage young people is involving them right from the beginning
in the curriculum and having a discussion with them about what matters to them and dealing with topics that matter.
And in many cases, I've seen. I've seen this done really well with something you think kids wouldn't get into World War One poetry,
right, where they actually link it to what's happening in the news. So people are soldiers are going off to Afghanistan or Iraq.
People know somebody that's doing that, you know, then they have a conversation about what's it like?
Well, you know, let's have a look at what some of the poetry that was written.
So actually,
this is why I think you need skilled pedagogue in these intone to probation people who can think and understand how to get young people engaged.
So that's my kind of social justice kind of rant, and I think those are things that we have to think about in relation to schooling.
We have kind of seen them in the alternative provision side by saying,
this is what we need in a mainstream school so we don't get to, you know, have to have alternative provision.
So this is the case study, not. Beazley Street in West London, but the three sites it was set up in response to a set of London riots and you can see,
you know how you might think, Oh, going, OK, let's just fix up those boys again, right?
But the person who was involved, it was somebody from the local community. He was.
He was. His background was from from North Africa. He could relate to many of the, he said many of the black boys in the school.
His life had been much the same. He'd come to England when he was 12. So we had a life story very similar to these kids.
They tried to do a whole range of things in relation to curriculum, but they really focussed on student focussed pedagogy.
A couple of things that were interesting, I think, would be to discuss it like they had this notion of crisis intervention and therapy.
So a bit of fixing up the kids, my my concern.
But these places, sometimes it's that fixing up the kids rather than fixing up the system because you try and do this fix up the kids,
then if they go back to the system they came from, the system is not necessarily fixed.
Before you know it, they're back again, and that seems to be a recurring cycle.
But they did this therapy work with them, and they built really strong connexions with with families.
Yeah. So the worker roles are interesting so that the regular ones, but the family workers are mentors.
This is the kind of the take into account more than education. We it it.
A recent, well, last year, I think the book we did. I did.
But again, Glenda MacGregor, Deb Hayes and Katie to Real and Asper brutes as we.
Drew, and one term that was used in one of these schools that was called clearing the path for learning.
What if you clear the path for learning they can learn? Many of the problems for these young people is the learning path is blocked.
So how can we clear that that path? And the had family work as a mentors in this school, right?
So the family workers would go to the to the homes of these young people.
They would talk about the young people,
but they would also help if people needed help with filling in forms or they needed help with anything to do with the housing.
There was a problem with the housing, but let's say well, so they actually weren't just about education.
They were supporting recognise that supporting the young person meant supporting that the broader family as well.
Mentors were kind of like youth workers. But the young people always had a mentor on speed dial.
And you know, and you could just if you got arrested one night or you were stuck somewhere, you could bring your mentor.
And so, um, so they had this other kind of support network in place.
But sometimes the family work as mentors didn't go to go to court with the young people.
So the young people, you know, had to go away from school for the day to go to court. They would go with them and support them.
So I sat in different meetings with about young people and you'd hear all the amazing stuff that these people were,
were doing with the young people and the tragic lives that many of them.
So here's some students in this school that Imran or pseudonyms, of course, was excluded because of fighting.
He was sent to. He was sent to a centre until the new school could be found.
He'd been there a long time. Well, they were really still struggling to find him a school, and he'd said he'd rather stay in the mainstream.
I want to be in. I was meant to go to mainstream, but I don't know. They didn't accept me in mainstream.
I was meant to go to another mainstream, but I had three interviews at three schools and they all said no.
You can imagine that kind of, you know, Well, should we go to a fourth or to the point where you actually do anything?
Oh, no, I'm just staying. And many of the teachers, they said, he's dying, you know, he really is unlikely to go somewhere else.
Siddiq, you're gone. This young boy's so he came to England after his father disappeared, and I think the Taliban had taken his father right.
He comes to England. He goes to this school and experienced all kinds of bullying, gets in conflict with a group of,
he says, black boys and is told to leave the school if they didn't feel safe.
They said, This fight with you, there's 25 of them. We can switch five of you, but there's 25 of them.
We can't switch 25 of them because five of you say you had better go.
So they said, you better go find another school for yourself, and if you feel safe, stay there.
So that's why I'm here for temporarily. I'm going to move from this school to mainstream again.
They said, No, it's not, you know, highly unlikely [INAUDIBLE] be leaving. And again, it's his.
So they said they admitted that he'd been experience like said racist abuse at his school,
but also that he was so far behind in work that the school didn't want him there. You know, again, to go back to the wasted lives I tried to.
This is a sort of lengthy interview transcript, but it's quite nice to hear the kind of dialogue sometimes.
So I'll just go through it and then trying to talk to them.
Could you tell me a little bit about how you ended up at the school,
got getting kicked out of school, bad behaviour, other things fights just all led to up here,
went to school, mainstream school at see mainstream and faith went to Peru around the corner twice and then I didn't attend school for two years.
But two years this is about 15 is about 15.
Where was he for two years? And then I'm thinking back to that theory that the knife crime, you know,
like and I'm not saying everybody who's not in school is engaged in kind of criminal activity and stuff,
but I think that you have to think about these issues if they're not not in school.
What were you doing for two years? Nothing. But then he talks about how it's nice, how they treat you as a person.
And he was very critical about his previous school. And.
And all of them say they'd rather stay in mainstream school, but we have no choice, but they're going to be sent out.
And he wanted to go to a different this is all.
No, I wasn't allowed to go to any mainstream school that he goes that I know that's how students become corrupt.
If the mainstream is like that sort of put in a different scene, the interview transcript later on, I wish I could go back to him.
Really, you know, explore this word. Corrupt. I did ask him what it means.
That's how they change people's lives. Isn't it like they're giving us worse education?
Now, the irony is he's actually quite liked this place, right?
But he saw it as worse education because they have their own image of being in the school.
And and again, our experiences in Australia, as well as hear people saying they're embarrassed to tell people where I go about,
you know, I like it here, but I don't really want to tell people where I go because I have an image of my.
Life outside of school, this is the thing that these places really this place really tried to do now and again when I was coming up on the train,
I'm thinking, I'm kind of burglarising one side right now.
I know that not all alternative provision is like this, but I think and I.
But I think that some of the messages from it are really important.
And so they were really understanding and trying to get their head around this issue of gangs right now.
And one of the people told me one of the head teachers or one of the senior teachers about how many of the kids were in gangs,
and many of them had responsibilities to the gangs.
And many of them were kind of senior older people that if they didn't live up to their expectation,
especially the younger ones 13 14, could actually be physically dangerous for them.
The reason I put this in because I quite was flattered by it.
So when you say you can make money from it, how much money and what would you have to do? This is a kid.
It's like all the gang, all the people. And there's the kids and they all sell the stuff to the older people and make some money.
So I say so. The older people would be my age. Yeah, 20 years to thirty five.
Well, thank you very much. And it's like you said you can make hundreds not, you know.
But then he goes, you can make thousands of pounds. So this is kind of romanticising of the amount of money that they can make from from gangs.
And the head of campus literally tells me, you know, you'd be made to work for an elder or older,
as they say, and they pay you maybe 20 50 pounds to be in a spot. They give you a plot, so you need to be in that area.
So we've had experiences with kids who won't come to school because they won't.
Would they have been forced to be on the plot, selling drugs or whatever else? And then it's quite dangerous.
Right? So my time on the spot is nine o'clock, right?
Am I going to get to school on time or am I going to be those kids who's regularly light?
Right now, if I'm regularly late because it's the safest thing for me to do and then I get sent to alternative provision,
that seems to be an issue that has to be addressed here. There's issues beyond the school that have to be taken into account.
And again, the alternative provision sites, not all of them.
This one in particular, was very flexible around that.
And again, it's hence why the term in Australia term flexi schools, because they try to be flexible around these things.
And look, this teacher talks about kid bringing out all this money in.
So to some extent, they are making making money and looking at time.
And so I'm just going to speed on. This is an important point.
I think from one of the young person is Imran, who was talking because hang on a minute with the gang thing talking about it.
Go back. We've been talking about ages ago and go back to it. Just realised you'd be chilling with all your boys meant to you.
That is your boys. But in someone else's eyes, that is a gang.
So I don't really see yourself as a gang, but that's what you're known as fine with 10 of my friends on the block.
That's a gang. Basically what people will call the police straight away.
And again, it's this kind of terrible attitude we have to young people, groups of people and especially a group of young black boys,
you know, like in terms of seeing them as a gang and as as dangerous, which wasn't as part of the school.
I think there are issues around curriculum pedagogy that these schools were. The school was particular trying to address.
I'm going to I'll do this long transcript and I'll skip some other stuff.
So I'd sat in the classroom and then I was discussing this classroom with this boy who'd been in the classroom and basically.
They were supposed to do a presentation, most of them are saying, Oh, I'm not doing the presentation,
and then at the end they all did the presentation, so I'm having a discussion with this.
You it, you can't get kicked out of here that no exclusion policy.
So if you get kicked out, you get kicked out a couple of days and it just waste your time. So no one does.
It's a good school and you come to school. There's more freedom. Now I'd watch the class.
And the teacher had said she was a she did psychology, and I was talking about how she did psychology.
And you said, Oh, is that where they teach you how to [INAUDIBLE] with people's heads? Yeah.
Now, in my view, now in a school, they would have told you off for using that. Yeah, where she engaged with like the teacher.
Just kind of let it go. You know, it's part of their language. Just, you know,
and you can imagine sometimes that those kind of the triggers that actually end up to kind of big fights between teachers and students.
You can't say that call, you know, like, you know, yes, I can. You know, so you kind of that that tension.
They don't tell us off. They help us not tell us what we already know like we are here.
We are behind. It's not like we are being an interrupted. Right.
So so there's that sense of the teachers understanding them today in the classroom.
I thought it was a bit funny. Everybody said they were going to. This is me to do a presentation.
And then eventually you all kind of agree. Like why? Because when I was like a good teacher, she makes you think like, it's for your own benefit.
She just like compromises and stuff. In other schools, you do what they say or you get kicked out here.
It's like compromises you meet in between that kind of political justice I was talking about before that sense of having a discussion and a voice.
Right? So we do compromises with the teacher.
Are those lessons like that, yeah, so did you want to present or did you feel you should present because she had asked you?
I didn't want to, but then she showed me the marking how you get good grades and that and you have to practise get good grades.
So if you don't do it, you basically don't know where you're at. So the kind of like, you know, you know, there's that sense.
And again, it's that kind of relationship with the with the teacher. I'm going to skip things because I realise the time now.
One of the things about the school, and this is this this teacher saying it is there is no exclusion and no, no real punishment's at the school.
I was there one day.
Some kids clearly came and they'd been smoking or were drunk, and the teacher said, Hello, look, you're not really for learning today.
Go home, come back tomorrow and we'll discuss it, you know? So they went home the next day.
There they were, and they had it. It wasn't like you just come back in.
So it was a kind of discussion about what that meant, but it wasn't like, Well, now you're suspended, right?
I didn't want to know what they've been taking. They didn't want to know what they'd been drinking. Just this is not ready for learning today.
Tomorrow, come back and again. Kids understood it. So they've taken away the punishment.
There's no detentions. It's not really that much to fight against. It's kind of like choices.
Well, if you want to walk out and have a cigarette and throw your paper on the floor, then I do it and we will talk about it.
Right. So it's not like we're not going to. We're going to ignore it. We'll talk about it more.
You've done it, but I'm not going to shout at you. I'm not going to make you stay behind for two hours and write lines.
So with that all removed, a lot of the behaviour disappears again.
You kind of like, So look, I had this image of the school when I first went there, but that image that people sometimes have of places like this.
And it was the most friendly, relaxed place like, you know, and and I'd heard,
you know, from teachers about some kid had died from a knife crime at that school,
but they would never have got that from the young people talking to them in this in this environment.
This is the head of campus, so people say we don't exclude and we don't punish, but we challenge, we challenge their thinking.
So we might not shout, Ah, why did you do that? Blah blah blah. We say, OK, alright, understand you are trying to say something to me right now.
I will come back to that. So I put the sole attention to you. That's what we want right now.
Again, there's no exclusion policy. So these are just some concluding thoughts of mine.
I think there's a whole range of things that we can learn in relation to how we do the mainstream.
And I think it's the things are meaningful curriculum, a curriculum that's linked to life.
That notion of contributing justice, rejecting deficit constructions of young people kind of we understand the context in which they come.
We don't necessarily blame them individually. We think about the context in which they're located.
A kind of cultural justice. And in some states, and I put the quote up and it's I remember I did a project in Australian Capital Territory,
the act near Canberra, and I was talking to this principal and we've been commissioned to do a project on disengagement.
And he sort of got started in that. Not really, but metaphorically poking me in the chest.
And I hate that word disengagement. It's the wrong word.
It's disenfranchised, we've not provided the right education for these young people have not provided them anything they want.
We've denied them with an education. So I think it's about how we shift our constructions of young people and young people in need.
The whole thing about clearing the path for learning, I think, is is really essential thinking about their lives,
thinking about their material needs, thinking about, you know? What happens if we exclude thinking about how we build the again?
I've been doing some work and we're doing some work in in in Blackpool, we just got some funding.
Blackpool's got seven times the national average of exclusions. One of the highest exclusion rates in the country around what?
How can a community respond to this issue? Not just the schools, not the kids, but as a community?
What do we need to do better to support young people to keep keep them in schools, listening to student voice and building social capital?
Now I've kind of pulled all those from the this the kind of schools that we've been inviting and visiting.
Some of them will turn to provision some flexi schools, some of other kinds of alternative schools and.
One of the young people often say about how they love these schools,
and one young person said to Glenda, nine, a paper we read, I wish there were more schools like this.
And it's kind of. Well, we don't, you know, we love the school, you know, and the things we've been seeing in some of these schools.
But the problem is once you've done that, you know, start to too.
And I'm not saying we want alternative provision that are so scary and terrible, you know,
but that once you have places actually working with these young people really work well,
then it kind of lets the mainstream off the hook and it kind of says, Well, you know, what about the school down the road?
Maybe you might want to try that. Maybe that's better suited to you if we want a beautiful education system.
Two things about the young people I want to finish with. And I think that it's about the part part of the issue,
and I think that's that's missing in our understanding of exclusions in schools is
really getting an understanding of the young people and how they are what they are.
Two quotes one. First, one is from a head teacher at that or the campus head at that Beasley Street.
Now out there in the streets, it's a bit different.
But here with these other young people, they're quite young minded when they get them into the school environment.
Now on the streets, they're like big men because that's what they've been taught to, to be able to survive out there.
You have to act like it's like a cobra.
Even though the Cobra is scared shitless, but it swells up, it's trying to show you that it's not to be messed with.
So like a lot of kids, but when you get deep down in it now, Bury are kids and these these 13 14 year olds,
you know, involved in all sorts of things out in the street. But when you get to know them on a personal level, they're really just kids,
you know, in a sense, but they've been constructed as this dangerous entity.
The last quote is one of the schools I went to in Australia had this great mentoring system bringing community people in and a lot of them retired.
And and it was a lovely kind of network in that community of support for this, this school.
And it was linked to it, to a mainstream school. And this person is a retired magistrate.
So this is what he says when he when he decides when he's retired, it says, Do you know, what am I going to do?
She goes on, When you go to work, then he goes, Oh, I'll go and have a look.
I walked up the front stairs and I saw in those days there was a couple of boys that were in raggedy clothes.
The dirty, smelly hair. One of them a bits of steel metal hanging out all out of his face.
I was thinking to myself, Why the [INAUDIBLE]? What am I doing here?
It's only a couple of years I was sentencing kids like that. And then I come in and it took a session, probably an hour of talking to these kids,
and then I started to realise, Hey, wait a minute, I've prejudged these kids.
I've been prejudging them wrongly, of course, and prejudging literally sending them to detention.
So now I've totally changed the way I think as I tell the people when they asked me to talk about various places.
It's really education, not legislation will fix the problem with the youth. And I don't mean formal education.
I mean education and all sorts of things. And I think the last two quotes and why I wanted to finish with those is that we have to think about
the human cost of exclusion and the fact that these are young people that we're talking about.
They're not know some of the images they're kind of in,
and I'm not sure you want to create hardened criminals like it anyway, but they're not hardened criminals.
What's the most common reason for being there?
Persistent disruptive behaviour and this is what we do, is put them in a place which kind of channels them into a particular direction.
Thank you.