An everyday story of disaffected folk

But Miss, I’m not ***king swearing!

I work as a Learning Mentor in a post-industrial town in the North West of England. There are young people in this comprehensive school who live in households where nobody has worked in three generations. This leads to a certain degree of disaffection, and unwillingness to complete coursework, because really, what’s the point? At one point in the seven years that Excellence in Cities has funded the work of Learning Mentors there were 6 mentors employed in the school. This has now dwindled to one. The number of disaffected pupils in the school has not reduced appreciably, although overall numbers in the school have fallen. Excellence in Cities funding ceases in March 2008, and my contract ends at the end of August. The difficulties these kids face (or their barriers to learning, as it says in the jargon) will not have gone away, but what the heck? The money’s been spent, so end of problem- don’t know why I didn’t think of that!
So, last week in the bungalow I was working quietly with a few of our regular kids. One is a Young Carer who looks after her mother. We learned last week that her father is terminally ill. This girl looks as though she carries the weight of the world on her shoulders, so that makes her a target for the bullies. So I’m trying to work on self-esteem with her, but it’s not going so well this week, what with her father phoning her up at regular intervals during the day to tell her how scared he is.
There are also two sisters whose granddad has liver cancer. This is more of a problem because he is the main support for the family, the one house they know that always has electricity and food when mum has spent her benefit on heroin. These two girls are 11 and 12, but if you passed them in the street you’d put them at 6 and 7. In spite of living in a world where it’s normal to be woken up by police drug raids, (“We couldn’t come to school cos there was a lockdown at ours this morning, Miss”), these are the sweetest, most innocent children I’ve met. They like to play games and make clothes for their teddies, and colouring in cards for their granddad makes them able to go back into lessons again. I don’t suppose it translates into anything Ofsted is interested in, but it makes me happy. There was also a Year 11 boy whose mother has died and whose father is currently drinking himself to death. He comes into the bungalow when he needs a quiet place to gather his thoughts before going back into lessons. I don’t usually do much for him apart from making cups of tea and making sure there is a constant supply of tissues. Sometimes he wants to talk, but usually he prefers to sit quietly and listen to his ipod.
Oh, I almost forgot. Now that the school can’t afford mentors, they give me teachers who have gaps in their timetables. Well, we couldn’t make them redundant could we? But on this particular day, my teacher colleague was off sick. But it’s ok, they’ve sent me a supply teacher. Yes, he is a newly qualified art teacher, and actually he’s dyslexic so finds the work we’re doing a bit hard to understand, but he seems quite good at drinking coffee so that’s just fine. So you can picture the scene: kids working ok, a bit emotional but trying hard, teacher minding his own business, mentor going between the kids trying to keep things calm. And then I saw HIM walking down the path, in a new tracksuit and box-fresh trainers. Nobody told me he was out. And they certainly didn’t tell me he was coming here. He is a year 11 boy who hasn’t attended fulltime school since Year 8. He was permanently excluded and sent to the PRU, but they excluded him and we got him back again. Last year he had to work one to one with a mentor in a separate room because he kept threatening other kids. So I can’t say I was too unhappy when he went to Young Offenders for 12 months. And then I heard he was charged with gun crime, and that meant he would have left school before he was released. Except here he is, looking well, if a little agitated. He’s off the drugs now, he says, because he’s going back in a few days. If you pass your drug tests you get a Playstation in your pad. His brief managed to get him out on tag before his trial. One of the conditions is that he attends school for an hour and a half each day. They’ve agreed that I’ll do basic skills with him. What do you mean, am I trained in teaching basic skills? Do I have any materials? Of course not, but Johnnie Be Good is standing there and he’s been promised, and he doesn’t like it if people break their promises. He punches the wall. Why is he waiting? The teacher is remarkably enterprising and locks himself in the toilet. So I think fast: we’ll write letters. Everyone needs to be able to write letters of application, so we’ll work on that today. I’ll just phone over to Attendance to let them know he’s in- wouldn’t want anyone to think he was in breach of his bail conditions. Speak to ex-police attendance officer, Bill. He sounds alarmed for me, says he’ll get Assistant Head to phone me. She duly rings. Oh, had she forgotten to mention it? Yes he won’t be a problem, just needs a little TLC, really thought that mentors would be less judgemental. And on Wednesday all went well, if you don’t count a bit of racist graffiti on the walls, and a few sexually explicit cartoons drawn on the desk (did I mention that he was once the star of a porn movie?)
Then it was Thursday. Thursday was not a good day. There were the usual people in need of TLC, a few boys who are unteachable in their Spanish lessons, disrupting the class, and who are therefore deemed to be no trouble at all in the bungalow. (Did I mention that I don’t speak Spanish, and they didn’t have any textbooks with them, just some photocopied worksheets? No? It’s par for the course.) And a girl from Year 10 who would make a hooker blush in her choice of clothes for school. This girl, Britney we’ll call her, won’t go to lessons. She doesn’t like them. And if we try to make her try some she turns up dressed in the sort of low-cut top that lets you see her bellybutton piercings. She knows we won’t try that again in a hurry. So, feeling more harassed than ever, I welcome Johnnie Be Good into the bungalow. I think that it will be best if I keep him and Britney with me, away from the fragile kids and the annoying Year 9’s. So I have some work prepared for them, and I can keep popping back to the others, who are supposedly supervised by a different supply teacher. And then he starts threatening Britney. Her brother is the one whose evidence put JBG in Lancaster Farms. The Assistant Headteacher knows this, but does not think it’s a problem (“They have short memories round here, because of the drugs”), so thought it best not to worry me. How kind! Fortunately rugby playing former head of inclusion unit (when we used to have one), arrives for a chat and sees that all is not well. His intervention may well have saved the school from the sort of report we wouldn’t want in the local press. (You know the sort, Local school negligent about pupil safety, pupil murdered by other pupil, something like that.) We once made front page in The News of the World, but that’s another story.