Reflecting on the ambitions for young people set out in Greater Manchester Children’s Health & Wellbeing Framework (2018- 2022), to make Greater Manchester a place which nurtures young people’s development, our Programme Manager Sonia Johnson speaks to students and teachers based at our partner schools in the North West about what we need to do to ensure that schools are safe and nurturing places for young people. Below are Sonia’s reflections.
At Khulisa, we are always thinking about young people, and how the work we do in schools and pupil referral units (PRUs) can make the most helpful impact for them and the choices that they make as they work their way through life. We have been talking about the difficulties that schools and PRUs face in managing challenging and disruptive behaviour and the impact that this has on teachers, support staff and even on their resources; and we have been exploring what is needed to ensure that our schools and PRUs are not just places that deliver an educational curriculum each day, but that become environments that are known for being safe and nurturing, where young people feel listened to and heard, and are able to express their thoughts, feelings and emotions while safely exploring their behaviour, through consistent and appropriate discipline and boundaries. Environments that in some cases provide the love, attention and values that are absent from within the young person’s family life experiences.
Our work in the North West
Over the last 3 years we have worked with more than 110 children at ESSA Academy in Bolton, and have recently began delivery in one of our new schools in the Greater Manchester area.
In a recent report released by The Office for National Statistics (ONS), Greater Manchester’s figures for violent crimes in the last twelve months were shown to have one of the biggest rises in England and Wales with a 26% increase in violent crimes that caused injury and a 67% rise in violence without injury, similarly a 61% increase on possession of weapons recorded as the highest rise in England and Wales.
So we spoke to pupils and teachers on our recent programme about some of the challenges they face each day around crime, violence and disruptive behaviour, to hear what they thought…
The young people we work with: an on the ground view
She described her hopes for the future as a waste of time, and reflected on the reality that she saw ahead of her, how despite having a dream, she firmly believed that she would never achieve any of it and would remain trapped in the life that she had, which she described as powerfully negative.
One young person on the programme, shared of her aspirations to become a police officer when older, and told us how she had witnessed her next door neighbour being murdered in the local park through knife crime. She told us that she now struggled to sleep at night as she thought about what happened whenever she closed her eyes. At the age of eleven years old, and stuck in a cycle of being late for school, attending detentions on a daily basis and now a frequent visitor to the ‘Internal Exclusion’ room, she has the highest levels of negative behaviour marks against her name among the pupils in her key stage group. When we spoke to her about her life, she shared how she felt unable to break the cycle that she was in, and how she felt trapped within a family that didn’t listen to her, with a parent that gave her bad advice and a school system that simply punished her every day for failing to arrive on time.
On our Face It programme, she was warm, intelligent, very self – aware and a pleasure to work with, despite carrying, what seemed to be, the heaviness of the world on her small shoulders.
She described her hopes for the future as a waste of time, and reflected on the reality that she saw ahead of her, how despite having a dream, she firmly believed that she would never achieve any of it and would remain trapped in the life that she had, which she described as powerfully negative.
Another young person shared how tired she felt going around in circles, trying to meet the expectations that her peers placed on her to be disruptive and aggressive in class, and of how she was expected to uphold her reputation for violence, hanging out in gangs and getting into fights. She shared that when she joined the school mid-term, she had only been accepted by the kids she called ‘the bad ones’ and reflected on the fact that her neighbourhood had determined how she would be perceived by both teachers and pupils alike.
The school had recommended the young people we worked with, as they were each facing either step out to another school for a monitored period, or permanent exclusion from school. Each young person had been on anger management programmes, had spent copious amounts of time in the school’s internal exclusion department and all were deemed as failing to achieve and progress within the school system.
On closer inspection, it would seem however that these young people were struggling to communicate the way they felt about life, as they themselves were stuck in their own ‘internal exclusion’ a world on the inside, a consequence and reflection of the world they saw on the outside. For these young people and lots more that we spoke to on the programme, the hope of a good future seemed an impossibility and a reality that didn’t belong to them. Every single one of them had seen or heard of serious harm caused by violent crime and nearly all of the young people we worked with in the group told us of the adverse childhood experiences that had occurred in their own lives.
At Khulisa we know that sadly, this is a reflection of the majority of kids in schools, rather than the minority.
What teachers believe we need to do
We also talked to teachers who shared of their frustration managing extreme levels of disruption and violence in the classroom to hear about some of the key common feelings they had.
Teachers said…
- They wanted young people to know that they understood, but were restricted by the need to de-escalate and control behaviour as a priority.
- They felt an inability to give the young person the time that they really needed as this invariably disrupted the ability for others in class to continue learning.
- They felt the school support and behaviour policies lacked the flexibility for them to address behaviour compassionately.
- They felt ill advised by the adverse childhood experiences of the young people they were expected to teach.
We asked teachers what they thought would help the young people they worked with who were struggling in school.
and they said…
- Young people needed consistent sanctions for behaviour that were clear and fair and not a reflection of the pressure that a teacher might be under on any given day.
- That young people should have mentoring programmes to help them find the root of their behaviours.
- That young people should know that we are all in this together and that school could provide the stable, warm but firm family that they lacked.
- That young people felt nurtured and invested in.
The teachers we spoke to were equally honest about the hardship of providing this level of support and care, feeling a real difficulty in bridging the gap and building relationships with young people because of behaviour, and also feeling that even when there were opportunities to engage and get to know their young people, for example, in after school detentions etc., that these times were often usurped by a need to punish and administer discipline, because of the extreme levels of defiance and aggression they experienced. Teachers reflected also, that a big part of their battle was feeling the need to lead punitively while really wanting to make a real difference.
It would seem then, that that our school systems and policies could benefit from reviewing the lens that they see behaviour and discipline through and that there is still a journey for us to take in order for us to ensure that our schools become places that nurture, restore, empower and guide our young people towards lives that are truly filled with hope for the future.
We do need answers to these challenges now, because ready or not, our young people are coming!
