OP-ED: The Teacher Strikes, and Early Years Funding
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by Fiona McKenzie Johnston who sits on Fashion Roundtable’s Education Committee, as well as Contributing Editor to House & Garden.
Children’s early years have been in the news recently, thanks to the Princess of Wales’s launching of a campaign emphasising the long-term benefits of investing in the first five years of a child’s life. In a report for her Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, she warned how the roots of adult problems, such as mental health issues and addictions, often trace back to those years. We at Fashion Roundtable, and the Fashion Roundtable Education Committee, suggest that we should be looking beyond those first five years, too.
For last week we had the first day, in England, of teacher strikes. Though commonly reported to be about pay, the reasoning is more complex, relating to how much teachers are currently expected to do for a salary which, in real terms (taking the cost of living into account), has dropped by 11% since 2010. There’s an alternative narrative that is often repeated, about generous pensions and long holidays, but the majority of teachers went into teaching not for that pension, but because they wanted to make a positive difference to children’s lives. And it is that element of their job that is becoming increasingly challenging.
Well known is that our schools are facing reduced budgets; exacerbating the issue is that the increase in teachers’ salaries is expected to come out of those same pinched accounts, forcing decisions that cut back on staff, pupil support, and enriching activities. Primary class sizes are the highest in Europe, and secondary class sizes the largest since records began. At the same time, children are arriving at school with increased needs, many of them heightened by lockdown.
At the lower end of schools, there are children still in nappies, and with severe speech and language delays. With sufficient correctly trained staff in place this can be remedied. But look further up, and “there is no teacher training that prepares you for how to emotionally respond properly to a child who comes to you in tears because they want to end their life, or a group of friends coming express their worries that one for their friends is self-harming, or not eating,” reports a recent former teacher, who has changed careers. (Almost one in three teachers who qualified in the last decade have quit.)
The NHS and CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) are also stretched – to the extent that the current waiting time to be seen can be years rather than weeks. This is not only problematic when it comes to treating severe anxiety, which can lead to school refusal and sleepless nights for the teachers doubling as counsellors, but for achieving diagnoses of SEN (Special Educational Needs, such as ADHD or ASD.)
Throughout the country, children are commendably being treated according to need, regardless of diagnosis. In accordance with the Special educational needs and disability code of practice, schools and teachers are doing everything they can to meet children and young people’s SEN, ensuring that those children and young people engage in the activities of the school alongside pupils who do not have SEN, and making clear the steps that they’re taking to prevent children with SEN being treated less favourably than others.
But it’s not easy for schools or teachers if, say, they’ve got a child (or two, or three) with a tendency to violence, and who regularly causes significant disruptions. The child almost certainly needs a one-to-one, but there won’t be additional funding for that until the child has received an EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan). Even then, the amount that a child gets is dependent on the local authority; a child in Hammersmith might be awarded £12,000 per year, a child with the same needs in a sea-side town on the South coast might only be awarded £4,000 per year. Either way, neither of those figures translates into an annual salary for a dedicated member of staff. All too often the one-to-one is the class’s teaching assistant. The reliance on them to stop chairs being thrown across the classroom means that they don’t always have time to run reading interventions with those who need them, or ensure that the four or more dyslexic children in the class have understood the instructions on a set of hand-outs.
Possibly, this child shouldn’t be in a mainstream primary school, but they are because they haven’t got that EHCP, and then, when they do get it, there isn’t a place available in a local specialist school. And perhaps the mainstream primary school is keeping the child, even though they could legally permanently exclude them, because they know that there are domestic violence issues at home. “Teachers are also responsible for checking for signs of abuse and of neglect,” states that same former teacher; and no, out of sight is not out of mind.
There is currently, among primary schools, a focus on trying to get formal diagnoses and, possibly, EHCPs for certain children before they progress to secondary school, in order to increase the chances of their needs being met. For a greater modicum of independence is expected from pupils once there, and teachers are just as thinly spread – the government missed its target for recruiting and training new secondary school teachers by 41% this year.
(My own child went to the first secondary school he attended with those valuable bits of paper, and yet even his tutor did not read them, due to lack of time. My son was frequently put in detention for ‘fiddling’ – and he’s at the high-achieving end of the spectrum for ADHD and autism. Once I alerted staff to his diagnosis the situation improved, but it relied on me turning up and advocating for him. At which point I should mention that the slowness of receiving a diagnosis is not always due to the CAMHS backlog; there are parents who have repeatedly failed to take their children to appointments and assessments.)
Notable – and obvious – is that a larger child with raised fists is more of an immediate danger than a smaller one, and if that child is struggling to keep up in class, due to a below average reading age, the probability of disturbance-creating behaviour increases. Linked is that a child or young person with SEN is five times more likely to be permanently excluded than one without. And over 50% of children and young people who have been permanently excluded from school find themselves in prison at some point in their lives. Prison is currently running at nearly £50,000 a year per person. A qualified teacher salary is between £28,000 and £38,810 a year, which, if you add the employer’s pension contribution (23%) and National Insurance (another 13%) rounds it up to also c. £50,000 a year. The question is how would you prefer to see that £50,000 spent?
The Princess of Wales is campaigning to raise awareness. She’s not allowed to take a political stance, and therefore can’t point out that awareness isn’t enough - but we can. We can make a case for prioritising budget for early years and schools, and, when the time comes, vote for it.