The Times Education Supplement (1/7/11) headline makes for sad reading: “Infants Expelled to Pupil Referral Units”. http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6092105&navcode=94 The headline is depressing enough: professionally it could have been written twenty years ago. What we saw at that time was an increased number of younger pupils being referred to off-site provision (later to be designated as PRU’s) pupils with a seemingly increasingly complex range of social, behavioural and emotional difficulties, (SEBD).
The terminology was different and the evolution of the descriptor SEBD would have been more helpful had it helped to engage some clearer thinking along the lines of “Now we’ve given it a name, what shall we do with it?” Here’s what I mean. The complexity is in the title: the child has social needs and cannot socialise: the child has behavioural needs and can not behave: the child has emotional needs and is not nurtured, secure or biddable to a point from which they might begin to engage with the needs of others
The notion that the above complexity of needs and the accompanying requirement to produce and deliver long term, sustainable intervention and support programmes when, to quote the article “The units are often used as a temporary “fix”….” is risible,: If this weren’t enough, the PRU’s role is made more complicated because, and to quote again, “Pupils at risk of exclusion are sent to PRU’s for specialist support that it is hoped will see them return to mainstream schools”
We have now what we began twenty years ago: Special Education on The Cheap. The establishment costs of PRU’s are lower than those of Special Schools and the relatively “assessment free” entry requirements means that (as ever) capacity will always be outstripped by demand.
It has been my privilege to be a Head Teacher in two PRU’s: secondary ones admittedly and to manage Behaviour Support Services in two Local Authorities. One of the more painful aspects of the former of the two roles was to tell parents that we were at a point in their child’s programme where we could consider seeking a return to Mainstream. The news was often unwelcome, with parents and carers stating that since being with us, their child had changed, was more settled, less problematic and that home life had improved for the better. They saw a return to Mainstream as an unwanted return to the very environment that had been the reason for their referral to our Centre.
The Advisory Centre for Education advocates that children’s needs should be assessed within the normal mainstream environment. Too often the peaks of extreme behaviours mean that this environment is far from normal as it responds to children whose anxieties are the product of circumstances outside of school. Children are as a result sometimes almost entirely unable to deal with the multiple inputs, instructions, constraints and relationships that feature in the “normal” classroom: the result is that the classroom and its relationship with the child is far from normal: it might be regular, it could be usual but let’s not fool ourselves, it is not normal.
In closing, I observe with some sadness that what we have in place at present is not working. It is neither segregationalist in its intention nor inclusive in its practice. Perhaps we need to reconfigure our thinking along the lines of “as much integration as is possible with as much supportive discrete provision as is necessary” and think about what the approach might mean in terms of developing high impact strategies based on a well focussed assessment of the child’s needs, the family’s circumstances and the adjustments and implications for reintroducing the child to mainstream or retaining him therein.
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