Consequences

"If you don't attend the lesson you'll lose points and won't be allowed to do your Out of School Education,” I warned Jamie. It is a policy that this threat is made to students who refuse to attend lessons.

     “Don't be f***ing stupid,” he replied, “I've already got my two quid for today and I've got a right to Out of School Education so you can't stop that.”

     He was right, of course. The truth is that the threat is often made but never carried out. Out of School Education is booked in advance and has to be paid for whether or not the students attend.

     But what is Out of School Education anyway? It consists of a whole range of activities. Ten pin bowling, skating, orienteering, quadbiking, paintballing, snooker, rock climbing, caving, sea fishing, trout fishing, golf, the beach and a host of other activities. These occur maybe two or three times a week and all paid for by the taxpayer.

     The students are chauffeur driven in school and care home cars to the various activities. To ensure that they behave, students are promised a MacDonalds after the session. As might be expected, good behaviour is not guaranteed and they always get the MacDonald's regardless.

     The justification of Out of School Education is that these are deprived children who would not otherwise take part in such activities. How many children in 'normal' families get so many similar activities in a week?

Teaching and Learning

Maggie got out of a car which looked as if it had barely survived a destruction derby and breezed into reception.

     “Who the f*** are you?” she asked.

     “I'm Dave, the new temporary teacher,” I explained, “you must be Maggie.”. It is policy for everyone to be known by their first name

     “I'm not coming to your lessons you paedophile c***,” she replied, “I don't like you so f*** off.”

     I looked for support to Maggie's care worker come chauffeur for support, but it wasn't forthcoming. She put an arm around Maggie.

     “We encourage our young people to speak their minds,” she said, “if she doesn't like you it's her right not to come to your lessons.” Turning to Maggie said, “It's only a f***ing man, so you're probably right.”

     Later in the day I found Maggie's care worker embraced in a long affectionate kiss with another female care worker in the school's smoking area. There were students there too.

     Maggie spent most of the day at school smoking, eating, cuddling other students and care workers and swearing at anyone who suggested that she attended a lesson. I asked a few times.

     “I know my f***ing rights,” she shouted, “so leave me alone. I don't have to go with f***ing paedoes.” Her care worker nodded approvingly.

     The school had a points system. Up to ten points for a lesson and ten for each break and lunchtime. Students have to get thirty points in a day to earn £2. So long as they don't misbehave during lunchtime or either break then their £2 is secure without the need to attend a lesson.

     At the end of the afternoon break, Maggie declared, “I'm p***ed off, I want to go for a burger. Her carer immediately signed out and Maggie was off, another day's education under her belt.
     When Maggie had left, the School Manager came over to "put you in the picture." He explained that Maggie was due in court the following day for sentencing.
     Maggie had fallen out with another student, Jodie, over some name calling. Bent on revenge, she had called on the assistance of her current boyfriend. They stole a car and went round to Jodie's care home. Having beaten and kicked her senseless. they bundled her into the boot of the car and drove down to the harbour. It was Jodie's good fortune that one of the lifeboat crew 'phoned the police to report  that someone was carrying a body on the harbour wall. A few minutes later and Jodie would have been floating in the harbour.
     The court was extremely understanding. Taking account of Maggie's horrific background and ignoring her string of previous convictions, she was given a probation order.
      "You have to understand what these kids have been through," said the School Manager. I reflected that my childhood would more than compare, but that I'd never once tried to harm anyone. 

How to be Callous

“So I booted it dead centre and it fell to pieces.” Andrew accompanied his graphic description of the destruction of a pensioner's flat screen TV with a demonstration kick which made a hole in the plasterboard wall. It would probably be filled in when someone came to fill in all the other holes.

     Andrew was just back from court where he had been answering for his sixty-third burglary and celebrating another suspended sentence.

     The other students listened with encouraging interest as he told how he broke into a house, trashed every room causing, “thirty thousand pounds of criminal damage.” He repeated this phrase several times with obvious pride and to admiring gasps. “The old c*** was in tears,” Andrew continued.

     The old man was, indeed, in tears. His wife had recently died and Andrew had destroyed the home the couple had built up during fifty years of marriage. The worst loss, though, had not been the property that could be replaced, but irreplacable things like the family photographs which had been systematically torn to shreds.

     The old man's tears were nothing to those on the bench when they heard the case for the defence. Poor sad Andrew had been abandoned by an abusive mother, been through a string of foster homes and care homes and was currently in specialist care and attending an EBD school.

     I expressed the view to the students that the events being described were not something to be celebrated. Andrew frowned and became very threatening. “You're not supposed to be judgemental, you fat c***,” he bellowed, then stormed off to smoke in the school's smoking area.

     A little later in the day I was called in front of the school manager for something called supervision. “Andrew has made a complaint that you have been judgemental,” he explained, “what have you to say about it.”

     I explained that I didn't feel that the way the crimes were being described and celebrated was appropriate so I made that point to the students.

     The school manager jumped to his feet and in obvious rage shouted, “don't you know what these young people have been through, you stupid c***?”

     Probably unwisely, I replied, “post hoc ergo propter hoc.”

     What the f*** does that mean? Shouted the school manager, hopping from one foot to the next in a way that made me think he might need the toilet. I kept that thought to myself.

     “I'm simply saying that, while there's obviously a correlation between criminality and a person's upbringing, it does not provide a justification for a particular crime and it certainly doesn't justify a celebration of it.” I replied.

     By now, the school manager was almost hysterical. “How can someone as callous and uncaring as you work in a school like this?” he demanded.

     “I go where the agency sends me,” I explained.

     “I'll be making a complaint to the agency,” said the school manager and ejected me from his office.
     One of the essential requirements of working with EBD students is that they like you.  If they complain about a member of staff and are persistent in that complaint it is extremely likely that the member of staff will be moved to another school or simply asked to leave. A similar policy exists with regards to those who live in homes with support workers. These students often grow up without ever losing their belief that they have no responsibility for their own actions.

Tommy Atkins

By An Old Pedagogue

Shortly after I took charge of a large town school an incident occurred which showed me how little dependence there is to be placed on the honour or truthfulness of an average big boy. During recess the pupils were in the habit of writing with chalk on the blackboards that completely surrounded the school room. This so filled the room with chalk dust that breathing was difficult so I forbade the writing. One day, after I had been out with the pupils in the yard, I came to the school room door, and saw Master Tommy Atkins alone in the room industriously writing the sentence “Do not write on the blackboards.” I quietly withdrew without the boy’s notice, and when I next entered the room was empty. When school was called the eyes of all were turned to the audacious handwriting on the wall. When quiet was restored I said,- ”Who wrote that sentence?”    
     There was no answer.
     “Now,” said I, “the chances are that those words were written by someone now in this room. I intend to find out who is the culprit. The crime is not a great one, but if to it is added persistent falsehood it will become serious, in my eyes at least. Let the pupil who disobeyed have the manliness to stand up and manage his fault before the school.”
     No one stood up. He boys looked at each other but no one moved.
     “Well, all that did not write the sentence stand.”
     Like one boy the whole school arose to its feet, Atkins among the rest.
     I next had each boy stand up separately , and I asked him on his honour if he had written the line. I shall never forget the look of honest indignation with which Thomas Atkins denied all knowledge of the writing. When this examination was over there was a moment of painful silence.
     “Well boys,” I said, “it just amounts to this: If things remain as at present the imputation rests on the whole school. If any of you can suggest a remedy, I shall be pleased to hear it.”
     There was an indignant murmur over the room, and one boy rose to his feet.
     “I think, Mr. Jones,” he said, “that you are wrong in blaming us all for what one has done. If I had written on the board I would have stood up and said so.”
     “I believe you,” I answered.
     “Then why not believe us all?” said several voices at once.
     “I will be glad to do so the moment you convince me that the writing came there in a similar manner to that at Belshazzar’s feast. None of you believe that, so, as I said before, do any of you see a way out of the wood?”
     Another boy roses to his feet, giggled a moment and sat down again.
     The whole school laughed—boy nature exactly—the one moment serious, the next a giggle.
     John rose again, looked half comically around and said, with surpressed mirth,--
     “When I went to school down East some one broke a pane, and the master couldn’t find out who it was, so he began at one end of the room and whipped every scholar in the building.’

“Well John,” I said, “I attended a similar matinee myself when I was young. The plan has the merit of including the culprit, yet I fancy the rest of the pupils might consider it unfair.”

“The first boy now stood up again. “Master,” he ventured hesitatingly, “I think it is no more unfair than saying that the imputation on us all because some boy you cannot find has told a lie.”
     “You are right,” I said, “and I was wrong in saying so. Only one boy is guilty, and I will never believe until his conduct convinces me that there is another in this room who is so cowardly and untruthful.”
     I rose and quickly went down the room, siezed Atkins by the collar and jerked him to the centre of the aisle, and with a vigorous shove sent him headlong forward towards the platform with a speed that taxed his ability to keep his feet. I whirled him around facing the pupils and cried,--
     “Atkins, who wrote that sentence on the wall?”
     “I—I--I did, sir.”
     “Of course you did. Now I am going to reverse John’s plan. I am going to concentrate on your shoulders the punishment that the down East schoolmaster distributed over the whole school. Go to my room, sir.”
     “Oh, Mr. Jones, I’ll never, never do so again.”
     “I know you won’t. Go to my room.”
     I believe that flogging, like everything else, if done at all should be well done. I don’t believe in a dress parade. I scarcely ever had to whip a boy twice, on the same principle that the lad said lightning didn’t strike twice in the same spot—because it didn’t need to. When it became necessary for a boy to have an interview with me in my own room, he rarely forgot the circumstance. I always taught school on a somewhat free and easy manner. I allowed ample opportunity for free speech and encouraged it, and never laid any claims to that infallibility which many teachers surround themselves with. Boys are quick to detect humbug, and a teacher never loses prestige with them by admitting he doesn’t know everything. Although the incident I have alluded to consumed the greater part of a valuable forenoon, I never thrashed another boy there, and when I asked the pupils afterwards who did any particular thing, some one instantly sprang to his feet and said,--
     “I did, sir.”   

From: "52 Stories for Boys" - Alfred H. Miles

This is a tale from 1902, but I can recall similar "matinees" in schools I attended more than half a century later. I don’t approve of corporal punishment, but I’m well aware of present day indiscipline in schools. 

French Cricket

Reading was my addiction. It was also a punishable offence. I suppose to be absolutely correct, the offence was being in posession of reading material that didn’t belong to me, but if I was reading, it was inevitably from a book, comic or paper I’d taken from a bookcase or that one of the home manager’s children or the houseparents had left lying around.
     Reading was an antidote to boredom. Other children had different strategies. Some would sit rocking and staring into the distance. Some would pick or bite bits off themselves. When the resultant sores became too noticable they would have boxing gloves put on their hands and tied in place. These didn’t stop the picking completely, but they made it more difficult. As an intermediate step, some children would be given a piece of cloth with little stitches to pick off, but they only picked at that if someone was looking.
     Ted was my younger brother but we rarely spoke. His nose was a picked mess and his hands, as well as being gloved were often tied to the chair.
This Saturday was no different from many others in the children’s home. The houseparents played cards, occasionally telling someone to shut up, and we all sat around in our institutionalised boredom.
     I was reading a book of fairy stories. For the twentieth time I read how the Steadfast Tin Soldier melted down into a little lump in the shape of a heart and how there was nothing left of the little Dancer but her gilt rose, burnt as black as a cinder. On reflection, it seems a drastic way to fulfil a dream, but I suppose that then, most of us had some notion of a happier after life.
It was a calm boredom, at least for the boys because our carers for today were two who made no additional demands on us. It never occurred to me that the girls might have a different perspective.
     Sunday 24th June 19xx.  The home manager came into the room. “David, Ted, come with me,” he called urgently. I walked over, but he had to untie Ted.
We were given clean shirts, our faces were washed with the community flannel and we were ordered to go to the toilet - are there people who still wee to order? Our hair was brushed with the communal hairbrush and we were led out onto the lawn. Ted was given a cricket bat and I was handed a ball.
     “Enjoy your game,” said the home manager.
     “What shall we play?” I asked.
     “French cricket,” he replied as he hurried back into the house.
     It was to be many years before I discovered that the French didn’t play cricket and the nature of the confidence trick being played. Here we were with the opportunity to do something different, outside with a bat and ball. But a ball was neither bowled nor struck because the home manager reappeared almost immediately.
     “There they are,” he shouted with a huge grin, as he led our Aunt and Uncle to where we were about to play. “These two are always out here,” he continued. He took the bat and ball. “Have a lovely afternoon,” he waved cheerfully as he disappeared back into the house.
     Now it wasn’t as if we weren’t pleased to see Uncle Harry and Aunt Hilda, and they were loaded with sweets and chocolates, but they just didn’t pick their time very well. As a result they had to put up with the grumpy pair they had just deprived of a game.
     We had a nice drive in the countryside, stopped for tea and cakes and answered awkwardly posed questions in a monotone. I can’t imagine that Aunt Hilda and Uncle Harry enjoyed the experience but they never visited again and never once mentioned it in later years.
     After the visit it was back to the house. Our presents and sweets were taken, “for safe keeping.” I’ve always wondered about that phrase. Are they still safe?
     Talking to my friend James later, he remarked that something similar had happened to him. It was as if visitors had the knack of choosing just the wrong time to visit.

(To add another coincidence, just as I prepared to go to the shop before posting this story I found that a toy soldier, albeit a plastic one, had fallen from the bookcase onto the floor. Is that what they mean by existentialism?)

Curry

(Childhood Memories of Food in the 1960s)

School dinners were always served as if to a template. The plate was divided into three areas. There was meat, or fish on a Friday, even for non Catholics. I don’t recall ever meeting a vegetarian. There was the potato section, boiled, mashed or chips on a Friday if the fish was fried. Then there was the vegetable section, cabbage, carrots, peas, cauliflower and, occasionally, spaghetti.
    Cabbage was a school dinner regular. It would be boiled for hours until the smell filled the entire school and the flavour was transferred to the water. The water was then thrown away.
    “Spaghetti isn’t a vegetable,” I hear you say. It was when I was a boy. Long smooth strands in a bright orange coloured sauce, one of Mr. Heinz’s fifty seven. The BBC once did an April fool spoof news report about the Italian spaghetti harvest, with long strands of spaghetti shown being gathered from trees. A few years earlier and I would have believed it.
    What did foreigners eat? We all knew that.
    The French ate frogs and snails. We imagined them on the plate between the potato and cabbage instead of proper meat. We had no idea how they might be cooked so we imagined them as slimy, the snails with their eyes still on stalks and the frogs still green.
    The Italians ate spaghetti, no meat or cabbage, but platefuls of white strands in orange coloured sauce. Occasionally it made a pleasant change, but every day?
    The Germans ate sausage. Not the firm juicy butchers sausage that went with mash and gravy but something unpleasant from a tin. They ate it with something called saurkraut. We had no idea what saurkraut was, but it was German, so it was bound to be horrid.
    The Japanese ate raw fish, accompanied by rice pudding without milk and sugar in it. Yuk.
    Africans ate each other.
    We got these ideas from comics and from War Picture Library which moulded our view of foreigners and people we still thought of as the enemy. 
    Indians ate curry. 
    Our idea of an Indian was fairly flexible, but we knew that they were brown people who wore turbans and were part of the Commonwealth, which was like the Empire and still ours really.
    We all knew what curry was. We ate it ourselves.
    Curry was never eaten on a Monday, and Friday was fish, so curry was always a midweek meal, usually Wednesday. Those of us who went on to work in factories discovered that curry was  sometimes served in the lunchtime canteen and was obviously made to the same recipe as school dinner curry.
    You always knew when to expect curry. If Tuesday’s dinner was stew, then you knew that Wednesday was a curry day. We always assumed that curry was made with left over stew, but logically, that couldn’t be the case. It was more likely that a double ration of meat was boiled up on a Tuesday for Tuesday’s stew and Wednesday’s curry.
    To make curry, curry powder was added to the previously boiled stew meat. A quantity of sultanas was added to this mixture and it was boiled yet again. There was never any chance of eating anything that was under cooked.
    When curry was served, you had your usual heaps of potatoes and vegetables. Between them was a pile of curry alongside an extra heap of rice pudding without milk and sugar in it.
    As we ate our curry we imagined the poor Indians  who were eating stew with curry powder and sultanas in it every day. We thought how fortunate we were to have a varied diet unlike almost everyone else in the world. We usually left the rice on the plate. With any luck there would be proper rice pudding for afters. How sad, we thought, that Indians didn’t have pudding.

Our School

The fault with folks like them; they are not like us.
They don’t want to learn so we must make a fuss.
If we build our schools we can keep them out.
Our kids can learn to read, their’s can fight and shout.

We don’t hate folks like them, but there’s no disgrace,
If we put them and us in our proper place.
Our kids need teaching, their’s need tight control,
Their kids will run amok, ours will quietly stroll.

We are not PLUs*, we are just concerned,
They’re all on the dole, all our cash is earned,
We pay the taxes, that gives us the right,
To keep our kids away from the their kids blight.

We often meet their kids walking in the street,
We have some extra plans to make our scheme complete,
We won’t have to meet them, no, not at all,
If we enclose our homes within a concrete wall.

Most of them are burglars, to avoid this sin,
We will have some armed guards to stop them coming in,
If we need a plumber he will have to be,
A graduate from Oxbridge, with a CRB.

Don’t think we are Tories, oh good heavens no,
We respect the lower classes, Laski tells us so,
We just don’t want them coming to our schools,
Our kids will be clever, theirs will remain fools.

We have learned from Plato, men have different hue,
Some are bronze and silver, there are gold ones too,
There’s a place for every one, colour, creed and race,
Just so long as they are kept in their proper place.

*PLUs = People Like Us