Further reading support work in schools

Index Schools and colleges as organisations

Page 3 -18

Children and young people’s development

Page 19 -32

Communication and relationships

Page 33 - 47

Health and Safety of children & young people

Page 48 -54

Safeguarding children and young people

Page 55- 95

Equality and Diversity

Page 96 – 109

Other articles of interest

Page 110 -124

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Key stages in Schools in the UK

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Types of schools in the UK Academies While there are different types of academies in operation in England, they all have the same status in law as ‘academies’. Academies are publically funded, independent schools, held accountable through a legally binding ‘funding agreement’. These schools have more freedom and control over curriculum design, school hours and term dates, and staff pay and conditions.

Free schools, academy converters and traditional academies all have this status, yet there are a number of differences between them. This is focussed on: — Who sets them up; — Why they are set up; — Whether there is a predecessor school; and — What the ‘provider’ has to demonstrate in order to be given permission to set one up.

Free Schools — What are they? New state schools (which includes independent schools becoming state schools for the first time).

Who sets them up? Teachers, parents, existing schools, educational charities, universities, community groups. In order to do so, the group must form a company limited by guarantee and choose members and directors to run it. Free school companies must use the DfE model memorandum and articles of association, meaning that once constituted the company will be an academy trust.

— How are they run? Free schools are independent, free from local authority control. They are held accountable through a ‘funding agreement’- a contract with the Government.

— How do they get permission? Free schools must submit an application to the Department for Education. They must demonstrate that there is a clear demand for that type of school from the parents in the area.

Traditional academies — What are they? Usually, they are underperforming existing schools which are allocated to an academy sponsor who will take them over.

Who sets them up? Academy sponsors can be universities, FE colleges, education charities and business sponsors.

— How are they run? Traditional academies are independent, free from local authority control. They are held accountable through a ‘funding agreement’- a contract with the Government.

— How do they get permission? The Department for Education ‘brokers’ between academy providers and the underperforming schools.

Academy converters — What are they? Usually, they are high performing schools already in existence, who opt out of Local Authority control to gain independence and autonomy.

— Who sets them up? They are existing state schools.

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— How are they run? The school governing body signs a funding agreement with the Government and are independent from the Local Authority.

— How do they get permission? Outstanding schools apply to the Department for Education for approval.

Maintained schools While the number of academies in England is expanding, the majority of state schools are maintained schools. This means they are overseen, or ‘maintained’, by the Local Authority. These schools must follow the national curriculum and national teacher pay and conditions.

There are four main types of maintained schools. Their differences are over: — Who employs the staff; — Who owns the land and buildings; and — Who controls the admissions arrangements.

Community schools — What are they? Schools which are controlled and run by the Local Authority.

— How are they run? The Local Authority employs the staff, owns the land and buildings and determines the admissions arrangements.

Foundation and trust schools — What are they? Schools run by their governing body.

— How are they run? The governing body employs the staff and sets its own admissions criteria. The land and buildings are usually owned by the governing body or, in trust schools, a charity.

Voluntary Aided schools (VA schools) — What are they? The majority of voluntary aided schools are faith schools. A foundation or trust (usually a religious organisation) inputs a small proportion of the capital costs for the school and forms a majority on the schools governing body.

— How are they run? The governing body employs the staff and sets admissions criteria. The land and buildings are usually owned by the religious organisation.

Voluntary Controlled schools (VC schools) — What are they? VC schools are like VA schools, but are run by the local authority.

— How are they run? The local authority employs the staff and sets admissions. The foundation or trust (usually a religious organisation) owns the land and buildings, and usually forms a quarter of the governing body.

While academies and maintained schools form the majority of schools in England, there are two other types of school that are different from the ones already discussed.

They are different from academies and maintained schools because of: — How they are funded; and — How they can select their pupils.

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Grammar schools — What are they? State funded schools which select their pupils on the basis of academic ability. Grammar schools can also be maintained schools.

Independent schools — What are they? Schools that charge fees to attend, rather than being funded by the government, and can make a profit. They are governed and operated by the school itself. They are lightly regulated by government and inspected by a range of bodies.

— Who sets them up? Independent schools vary from those set up by foundations in the middle-ages to those founded by new companies and charities.

— How are they run? They are funded by fees, gifts and endowments and are governed by an independently elected board of governors.

Source: newschoolsnetwork.org

Following information is adapted from Ofsted Types of Independent Schools http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/15658/1/Types%20of%20independent%20schools%5B1%5D.pdf Faith Schools Parents often choose to place their children in a faith school so that they can acquire the knowledge, understanding and respect for their faith and may learn about its distinct cultural elements. However, the law also requires that independent schools promote a respect for and appreciation of other cultural traditions. Inspectors should ensure that any independent school they inspect is providing its pupils with an understanding of the range of beliefs and cultural traditions and is preparing them to take their place in modern British society. Whatever the ethos and aims of the school, it must help its pupils to become good citizens: respectful and tolerant of the views of others and making a positive contribution to society as a whole.

Evangelical Christian independent schools Background Historically, England is a Christian country, and many of its institutions and traditions are rooted in the Christian faith. This is particularly true of its schools. Within the maintained sector most voluntary aided or voluntary controlled schools that have such a Christian basis are primarily Church of England or Roman Catholic. There are also a smaller number of schools with a Free Church background. In the independent sector there are also many schools that have a Christian foundation or seek to promote a Christian ethos. The majority of these schools offer provision which is broadly similar to schools in the maintained sector, and in which religious education is simply one part of the curriculum. However, a significant number of schools are more overtly Christian in their approach, and seek, throughout the curriculum and the life Page | 7

of the school, to promote a specific pattern of evangelical Christian belief and practice. These are often referred to as ‘Evangelical Christian Schools’ These schools have a number of common features.  Typically, no or low fees are charged, enabling access for all families in the Christian community, but this may restrict the resources or accommodation available to the schools.  Bruderhof schools follow a modified American curriculum from kindergarten.  Christian Trust Schools have usually been established by independent evangelical churches, or groups of churches, many of which are described as ‘charismatic’ – that is they are distinctive and demonstrative in their styles and ways of worship.  Accelerated Christian Education schools aim to provide ‘a God-centred curriculum’, and provide individualised pupil materials known as PACES (Packages of Accelerated Christian Education).  Because the curriculum and ethos of the school is based on the Bible, some of these schools may also promote a creationist view and reject an evolutionary view of the world.

Christian Schools Trust The Christian Schools Trust is an agency for cooperation and mutual support, which links around 40 independent Evangelical Christian schools, but each school keeps its independence. It has an advisory programme and organised regional and national courses and conferences; it produces a range of curriculum materials and discussion papers. 16. These schools have generally been established by independent evangelical churches, or groups of churches, many of which are ‘charismatic’ in origin, in order to provide a Christian education. Although the majority of pupils in these schools come from Christian families, most of the schools have open entrance policies, conditional only on parents or guardians subscribing to their aims and ethos.

The schools usually refer to the National Curriculum and make use of GCSE and other recognised examinations. Some of the schools have a fundamentalist understanding of Christianity, which can result in them rejecting some scientific principles and evidence, such as those that relate to an evolutionary understanding of the world rather than a creationist one.

In order to make schools accessible to all families, the fees are often low, or may be waived. This may mean that staff are often volunteers who are paid a nominal salary, and a lack of resources may limit the curriculum and accommodation. Be that as it may, all schools must meet the basic minimum standards set out in regulation, and inspectors must check that they do so and point out any areas that fall short.

Focus schools Focus schools are owned by the Focus Learning Trust and run by local Exclusive Christian Brethren communities. These schools cater primarily for secondary aged Page | 8

pupils but most have extended the age range and make provision for pupils of primary age as well as post-16 students. Although many of these schools are purpose built, a minority are found in unusual settings, for example in parts of business premises. The schools are supported by the local faith communities and generally appear well resourced. Our inspection experience tells us that they frequently employ specialist teachers on a part-time basis to cover the secondary curriculum. Teachers and headteachers are generally not members of the Exclusive Brethren community.

The schools offer GCSE courses in most subjects and some AS and A2 levels with an increasing number of vocational courses being offered in Focus schools. It has not been common in the past for students to go on to attend universities or polytechnics, but a range of tertiary courses in a supported distance learning style programme are available.

Information communication technology (ICT) has been a recent significant change to the curriculum. Schools are connected to a network run by the Focus Learning Trust and can use software licensed by the Trust. They may also make use of video conferencing to other Focus Learning Trust schools to extend opportunities within the curriculum. Pupils may not have access to television, radio or electronic media at home.

Bruderhof schools According to the Department for Education there are two Bruderhof schools, one in Kent and one in East Sussex. They cater for pupils aged between four and 17. They are part of the wider Bruderhof movement whose values are based on living as a Christian community, with each member sharing skills, expertise and resources according to their means and abilities. Each community works to being as sustainable as possible and protecting the environment, including, where possible, using sustainable agriculture, producing meat and vegetables free of chemicals and preserving and recycling materials. The schools operate on these values and principles.

Jewish Schools There are many kinds of Jewish schools, ranging from those in the maintained sector offering a standard National Curriculum with some additional Jewish studies, to the strictly orthodox Haredi schools, most of which are independent. They all seek to promote a love of Jewish life and learning, but can be very different in character. ď Ž In most Jewish schools, there are two curriculum strands: Limmudei Kodesh (religious studies) and Limmudei Chol (non-religious studies), sometimes with less time for the non-religious studies. Religious studies are usually taught by rabbis or specialist teachers. ď Ž Haredi schools promote strict adherence to Jewish law. Haredi families are traditional Jewish families where Yiddish is often spoken. Many of these families are concerned about what they perceive as negative influences in the outside world.

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 Haredi schools often have a different curriculum for boys and girls. Boys’ schools are heavily weighted towards religious studies, with limited time for non-religious studies covering English and mathematics, since schools maintain that religious studies cover the other key areas through the study of the Talmud.

Mainstream Jewish schools In non-Haredi independent Jewish schools, the curriculum is usually aligned with the National Curriculum. It includes the two traditional strands of Limmudei Kodesh (religious studies) and Limmudei Chol (non-religious studies). Where schools have a good curriculum every endeavour has been made to make as many cross-curricular links as possible between the secular and nonsecular studies. One or two schools are close to Zionism and have close contacts with Israel. The connection to Israel is expressed through celebrations and the teaching of Hebrew as a modern foreign language.

Muslim schools Muslim schools can be boarding or day, or cater for both boys and girls. Schools are typically mixed gender at primary age and single sex subsequently.  The schools are consciously Muslim and seek throughout the curriculum to promote an Islamic ethos. The independent schools are generally supported by local communities and are therefore most frequently located in conurbations with substantial Muslim populations.  Although most pupils are British Muslims whose families were originally from the Indian sub-continent, a significant number are converts to Islam or more recent arrivals from abroad. There is a growing Somali community in the UK, and these pupils may be in the majority in some schools.  There are a number of boarding schools for boys or girls, often called Darul Uloom, which offer theological degrees, often to become Hafiz (someone who has memorised the Qur’an) or religious teachers. The non-religious curriculum is usually taught in the afternoons. Darul Uloom schools can also be day schools. Islamic studies in these schools may be in Urdu, Bengali and/or Arabic.  Modern foreign languages provision is usually a choice between Arabic, Bengali, Turkish or Urdu. Arabic is often taught at primary level.  Art can often be restricted. Many Muslim schools will not teach any form of art which portrays the human form or living creatures. However there is no restriction on the teaching of abstract, geometrical or arabesque styles of art Though music is not usually taught, inspectors may find evidence of music being taught through religious worship sessions: the tajweed (recitation of the Qur’an), the singing of Arabic songs (nasheed), the playing of the Duff (drums) and the call to prayer (adhaan). Pupils are taught these from an early age.

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 For physical education, older girls will tend to wear tracksuits and cover their heads. During the month of Ramadan, activities such as physical education may be restricted as many pupils will be observing a fast between dawn and dusk each day.  Daily prayers (Salat) five times a day will often dictate the shape of the school day, so timetables are usually adjusted in the autumn and spring terms to accommodate the midday and afternoon prayers.  Some traditional schools adhere to the practice of sitting on the floor or on low benches, and thus the school may appear sparsely furnished.  Many schools are affiliated members of the Association of Muslim Schools in the United Kingdom.

Sikh schools Background There are currently five schools within the maintained sector, and two within the independent sector. The independent schools provide education for pupils ranging between three and 19 years. Guru Gobind Singh Kahlsa College has students aged from 3–19 while Nishkam Primary School admits five- to sevenyear-olds. Both of these schools are based on the religious teachings of Guru Nanak – the founder of Sikhism. However, Guru Gobind Singh Kahlsa College admits students from a range of faiths. 53. Strict Sikhs do not cut their hair. Most boys will therefore wear some sort of hair covering – usually either a patka (topknot) or a turban. They are also required by their religion to wear a metal wrist band (kara) and carry a comb (kanga) and a dagger (kirpan). Sensible health and safety precautions in respect of these should be observed, the dagger, for example, should be ornamental and not sharp.

54. Sewa, or service, is of great importance in Sikhism.

These schools follow the full national curriculum providing the same breadth and experience that is offered in a maintained school. Sikhs have a very strong musical tradition and this is likely to be reflected in the curriculum.  Sikh studies are generally taught through the stories in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. In addition world religions are taught.  Boys and girls are taught in mixed gender groups for most of the curriculum.

Occasionally girls will be separated from boys when being taught physical education and games.

Stage and theatre schools Background The independent non-association stage and theatre schools providing full-time education for pupils of compulsory school age are mostly located in or close to London. They provide an academic curriculum, as well as professional studies. The main difficulty for stage and theatre schools is balancing the academic and Page | 11

professional demands on the pupils. Most of the schools develop skills across a range of theatrical arts, but a few specialise in dance/ballet. Inspectors should note, however, that there are other specialist schools which are members of associations joined to the Independent Schools Council and will be inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate. These include, for example, all of the English choir schools.

Sometimes young children appear in television commercials and in stage shows, and the school must avoid exploitation. It is worth noting how many pupils actually obtain professional work and checking to ensure that pupils do not work for more than the allowed number of working days in a year. The local authority gives licenses to adults nominated by individual schools, who go with pupils while they work. Some stage schools also admit pupils who have struggled in mainstream schools.

Steiner education Background Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was an Austrian scientist and philosopher. The first Steiner school was set up in Stuttgart in 1919 to meet the needs of workers in the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory, hence the dual Steiner/Waldorf name. The movement grew and there are now approximately 1,000 schools worldwide and many more early childhood settings not attached to schools. Steiner’s philosophy is known as anthroposophy, working towards social, cultural and spiritual renewal. The Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship (SWSF), a registered charity, represents Steiner schools in the United Kingdom. Their council is made up of representatives from each established member school and maintains links with the worldwide movement. There is also a European Council for SteinerWaldorf Education made up of representatives of some 24 Steiner national associations. Each school is self-governing and independent.

Schools are organised with a collegiate structure, without a formal headteacher. The Collegiate or ‘College of Teachers’ makes decisions on educational policy, while general school governance is handled by Trustees – all United Kingdom schools are charitably registered companies. Financial administration, developmental planning and public relations are usually undertaken jointly by teachers and parents working in council with an administrator for day-to-day matters.

Educational practice in Steiner schools is based on the founder’s views that there are three stages in a child’s intellectual, emotional and spiritual development. For example, in the first seven years, the nature of learning is self motivated and associated with the surroundings. Learning is primarily ‘enactive’, via engagement through active feeling, touching, exploring and imitating, in other words, through doing. Through experiential, self-motivated physical activity the small child ‘grasps’ the world in order to understand it – an essential prerequisite for the later activity of grasping the world through concepts. Only when new capabilities appear, at around the seventh year, is the child considered physically, emotionally and intellectually ready for formal instruction.

In the kindergarten – roughly three to six years – children are encouraged to master physical skills before abstract intellectual ones. Cognitive, social, emotional and Page | 12

physical skills are accorded equal value in the kindergarten and many different competencies are developed. Activities reflect the concerns, interests and developmental stages of the child and the carefully structured environment is designed to foster both personal and social learning. The kindergarten is designed to be a warm and friendly place with a homelike environment and the importance of a happy, smooth transition from home to school and close liaison between parents and teachers is encouraged at all times.

Formal aspects of the curriculum begin in Class 1, which pupils usually enter at around the seventh year. Stage 2 last until pupils are 14. The class in which the child is placed depends broadly on chronological age. Streaming is rarely used in the lower classes, which can include mixed age groups, especially in new or small schools.

Approaches to reading and writing are very different from maintained school practice and focus on the chosen narrative through which pupils learn to recognise words and to copy simple short sentences. During this stage, pupils are encouraged to develop their cognitive powers through artistically-structured activities. The later start means that, in literacy, pupils’ attainment will typically be up to two years behind their peers until the age of 10 or 11.

Some special features include:  For the first two hours each day a ‘main’ (or ‘Morning’) lesson is given. This is an extended project for linking learning across subject areas. Main lessons focus on a particular subject for four weeks, such as history, mathematics or biology.  Foreign language teaching, usually German and/or French, is given throughout the school in regular sessions every week from the age of about six, sometimes through games in kindergartens.  The school doctor (anthroposophical) discusses with the teacher the classroom work of each child as well as their medical and pastoral needs.  Both in each lesson and in the shape of each day, a balance is sought between scientific and intellectual work, social experience and creative, artistic activity.

Montessori schools Background The primary goal of the Montessori approach to education is to help each child reach its potential in all areas of life. It is based on the work of an Italian doctor, Maria Montessori, who formulated the principles of this approach during her work with children with special needs and subsequently in her first nursery, The Children’s House. This was established in 1907 for three- to six-year-olds with a curriculum based on self-motivated activities within a carefully considered and prepared environment. The Montessori approach to education may now be found in many countries and is an internationally recognised teaching method.

Main principles of Montessori education Page | 13

 Children develop in unique stages – birth to six, six to 12, 12 to 18. Each stage has its own characteristics, requiring different approaches and environment.  Children are to be respected as different from adults and as individuals who differ from each other. They require a different approach and environment.  The child is an active learner, with the sensitivity and intellectual ability to absorb and learn from his/her environment that is different from that of the adult, both in quality and capacity. Every child learns at a different rate.  Montessori education favours a child-centred approach, starting from what the child can do and gradually building their skills, knowledge and understanding of the world.  The most important years of a child's growth are the first six years of life. This time is characterised by ‘sensitive periods’ (periods of time when the child is absorbed by one aspect of the environment in order to help their development). These are: movement, language, order, refinement of senses and attention to social and cultural aspects of the environment.  Self-discipline is strongly encouraged. The Montessori philosophy identifies that by taking part in spontaneous activities, children are encouraged to become independent. This independence leads to self-direction and self-reliance and growing self-awareness and confidence.

Children in Montessori classes are generally placed in multi-age groups based on periods of development. The most usual groupings are: birth to three years, three to six years, six to nine years, nine to 12 years, 12 to 15 and 15 to 18 years.

Foreign national schools Background The United States of America, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Iran, Japan, Norway, Spain and Sweden all have their own national schools in this country, mostly based in London. The schools were originally set up to serve the foreign communities, who may not all be permanent residents in this country. Some of the pupils may have parents who work for an embassy for a fixed number of years, or have a short term contract with a multinational company in the United Kingdom. Such schools also accept pupils who are permanently resident in the United Kingdom but have dual nationality, where, for example, one of the parents comes from the country concerned.

Special schools, pupil referral units and children’s homes providing education Special schools There are approximately 1200 independent schools which are inspected by Ofsted.

Over 40% of these are registered with DfE as independent schools catering wholly or mainly for pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities, including day schools, residential special schools, and approximately children’s homes which are dually registered as schools. 158. Special schools in the independent sector can be Page | 14

run as not-for-profit organisations or as profit-making businesses. Some are part of larger groups which may also provide care for children and/or adults. In general these schools are small: the majority have fewer than 10 on roll and less than 5% have more than 100 on roll. They typically cater for a broad range of needs, including for example learning difficulties, behavioural, emotional, and social difficulties, or autistic spectrum disorders. Their registration specifies what kind of special educational needs and/or disabilities the schools cater for.

Pupils in residential special schools are very likely to have a statement of special educational needs and all, or nearly all, will have been placed by their local authority.

Because of their special educational needs and/or disabilities, many of the pupils in residential special schools are vulnerable, often more so because they are away from home for much of the year, sometimes placed at some distance from their home area. The schools generally provide education and residential provision for all pupils during term time only.

Children’s homes which provide education: children’s homes are registered with Ofsted and inspected by one of their social care inspectors twice a year. Where children’s homes are providing full-time on-site education for one or more children of compulsory school age with a statement of special educational needs or who are looked after, they are required to register that provision as an independent school with DfE. Most pupils are funded by their local authority children’s services, but on occasions there is a financial contribution from the local health authority.

There are around 26 independent pupil referral units. Most belong to large organisations, but some are individual establishments. They are registered as independent schools and are required to meet all independent school regulations.

They are inspected once every three years under the section 162A arrangements.

They offer full and part-time placements, mainly for Key Stage 4 pupils without statements of special educational needs who have been excluded from a mainstream school or are at risk of being excluded.

Boarding schools In addition to the residential provision in residential special schools and children’s homes providing education, described in previous section, there are three categories of boarding school. 170. Boarding schools may be maintained, non-maintained or independent. Where they are maintained or non-maintained special schools.

State Boarding Schools A state boarding school is one where you pay for boarding and the education is free.

The government pays for the education as it would at any other state school in England. This means you would be paying around £4,000 a term for full boarding.

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Colleges – post 16 Colleges are inspirational places to learn because education and training is delivered by expert teaching staff in industry-standard facilities. From basic skills to postgraduate degrees, colleges offer first rate academic and vocational teaching, in a range of professions including engineering, hospitality, IT, construction and the creative arts.

Sixth form colleges provide high-quality academic education to 16 to 18-year-olds enabling them to progress to university or higher level vocational education.

Independent Specialist Colleges Independent specialist colleges provide further education for young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities.

Natspec (The Association of National Specialist Colleges) has over 70 member and associate member colleges University Technical College (UTC) If you already know the area that you would like to work in aged 14, then a University Technical College (UTC) offers you the chance to experience and learn skills that are precisely for that job. UTCs sit somewhere between a school and the apprenticeship training programme.

A new addition to the education system in the UK they were set up in 2010, by the Baker Dearing Trust, a private foundation. UTCs are FREE, regionally-based and with enrolment catchment areas that are generally wider than normal.

The intent of UTCs is to educate and equip children with skills that prepare them for a career. Learning can be applied directly to the workplace. The UTC curriculum is unique in that it is made up of the usual core academic curriculum plus technical study and practical learning.

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School staff Secondary school structure Senior management team Head teacher or Principal Has overall responsibility for the school, its staff, its pupils and the education they receive.

Deputy head teacher(s) Play a major role in managing the school, particularly in the absence of the head teacher.

Assistant head teacher(s) Support the head and deputy heads with the management of the school.

Subject leaders Heads of department Heads of faculty Curriculum coordinators Responsible for a particular area of the curriculum, including monitoring and improving standards.

Pastoral subjects Heads of year Heads of faculty Curriculum coordinators Responsible for a particular area of the curriculum, including monitoring and improving standards.

Classroom teachers Plan, prepare and deliver lessons to meet the needs of all pupils, setting and marking work and recording pupil development as necessary. Includes advanced skills teachers and supply teachers. Often work in partnership with teaching assistants.

Other key roles 

Key Stage 3 coordinator

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Special educational needs coordinator

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Head of learning support

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Personal, social and health coordinator Page | 17

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School sports coordinator

Primary schools structure Senior management team Head teacher Has overall responsibility for the school, its staff, its pupils and the education they receive.

Deputy head teacher Plays a major role in managing the school, particularly in the absence of the headteacher. Often responsible for a curriculum area and/or specific areas of school management.

Assistant head teacher Usually only in larger primary schools. Supports the head and deputy head with the management of the school.

Early years coordinator Responsible for children in the foundation stage, leading the foundation team of teachers, nursery nurses and teaching assistants.

Key stage coordinator Employed to lead and manage either Key Stage 1 or 2. They usually also have a class teaching commitment.

Special educational needs coordinator Responsible for day-to-day provision for pupils with special educational needs.

Subject leaders and curriculum coordinators Responsible for the leadership and management of a particular curriculum subject. Class teachers may be expected to accept responsibility for an area of the curriculum as part of their normal professional duties.

Classroom teachers Plan, prepare and deliver lessons to meet the needs of all pupils, setting and marking work and recording pupil development as necessary. Includes advanced skills teachers and supply teachers. Often work in partnership with teaching assistants.

SENCO https://www.specialneedsjungle.com/the-role-of-the-senco-what-do-you-need-to-know/

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Child development chart: 0-11 years This chart is an aid and easy-to-reference reminder of typical stages of development.

You will want to consider each child’s circumstances, abilities and needs in using this to assess whether there may be grounds for concern or further investigation. Keep in mind that the sequence of attaining development milestones is important as well as age.

Source: https://www.rip.org.uk/

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Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)

Range of birth defects and neurodevelopmental disorders caused by maternal alcohol consumption during pregnancy.  Increasing instances due to binge drinking culture.  Most common cause of preventable learning difficulties.  At its most extreme characterized by distinctive facial abnormalities.  Affects up to 1% of children effected.

Common effects on children’s development     Need    

Can find grasping mathematical concepts particularly challenging, ‘here today, gone tomorrow.’

Short attention span and limited concentration.

Hyperactivity Don’t always understand nuances of friendship or personal space.

Time for reinforcement, small group work to consolidate Clear directions – need to say their name first to ensure they are listening Don’t overload the child Lots of structures time where acceptable behaviours/ interactions are modelled.

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‘If schools aren’t able to support families, pupils will starve’ Charlotte Santry (TES) 20th April 2018 at 00:00

Hungry pupils are being forced to rummage through school bins for scraps, and more and more schools are having to hand out food to disadvantaged families. The research tells us that hunger is a barrier to learning, but to what extent can schools really take responsibility for tackling child hunger?

Charlotte Santry investigates Nearly all teachers will have come across a pupil who looks grey and withdrawn, and who struggles to concentrate.

This could be for a range of very complex reasons – but increasingly, teachers say, it is simply bec...

“Sometimes the kid will say, ‘I have tummy ache,’” says Caroline Rodgers, headteacher of Brockley Primary School in Chesterfield. “You ask what they had for their breakfast – sometimes they’ll say, ‘Mum didn’t have any food.’ Other times you just get that stare, and they don’t need to say it.”

The signs can be even more obvious; teachers are coming across the heart-breaking sight of pupils rummaging through school bins for half-eaten food, and cramming their pockets full of free fruit, because they don’t get any at home.

Over the past decade or so, food has become a highly charged topic for schools. In the mid-2000s, we had the spectacle of parents smuggling fish and chips to their children through the gates of a school taking part in Jamie Oliver’s healthy eating campaign.

And there have been a series of major political rows over the number of children who should be given a free meal at school – currently, all infant pupils are eligible, along with older pupils from low-income households.

Now teachers are warning that more and more children are coming to school illequipped for learning because they aren’t getting enough to eat at home. “Teachers are telling us that they are increasingly seeing children coming to school hungry Page | 22

because they haven’t been able to have a nutritious breakfast,” says Celia Dignan, senior policy adviser at the NEU teaching union.

Many teachers have taken it upon themselves to hand out food to children who they know are suffering. Some schools are even dishing out bigger dinners to pupils they know are at risk of malnutrition – almost a reverse version of Oliver Twist.

“A lot of schools are having to supplement meals – buying food for children, making sure they give out bigger portions if they know that’s their only meal,” says Dignan.

Unions and charities blame the apparent increase in hungry pupils on austerity measures and changes to the benefits system. Ministers may beg to differ.

'Some families are really struggling' Whatever the underlying cause, it is clear that schools are scraping together money from stretched budgets to subsidise food banks and extra meals for pupils. And that comes on top of the hundreds of millions of pounds the government spends on feeding pupils.

But is any of this making a significant difference, or is it merely scratching the surface? Many school leaders clearly feel that the extra they can do is vital, judging by the extent of their intervention. Rodgers’ school holds holiday clubs, funded by the local authority but heavily reliant on staff and community volunteers. Every child has a packed lunch each day and is sent home at the end of the scheme with any leftover bread and snacks. At Christmas, when the clubs are not held, every pupil in the school is given a “goody bag” containing a tin of chocolates, potatoes, chutney, cheese and bread.

Rodgers accepts that her school goes much further than its traditional mission, but she doesn’t think she has much choice. “The changes to the benefits system – I’m not sure how fair they are,” she says. “As a result, some families are really struggling.”

And she has no doubt about the difference her school is making. Asked what would happen if it did not provide the extra food, she replies succinctly: “It would be terrible.”

Meanwhile, David Moran, chief executive of E-Act multi-academy trust, is trying to raise £1 million from private sponsors to increase his schools’ extra-curricular offerings, including offering free evening meals to pupils.

“We start talking about breakfast,” he told Tes last year. “Well, what about dinner?

How many of our children sit around a table at night and have dinner? Have a proper dinner. Is that something we should be doing?”

Schools are right to take the issue of hunger seriously, judging by international research. The most recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), published last December, found that a quarter of 10-year-olds in England reported feeling hungry every day or nearly every day. This group scored 45 points lower, on Page | 23

average, in reading tests than their peers who reported never feeling hungry, the study showed.

A similar link – but for secondary school pupils – was found in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) survey, which looked at the performance of 15-year-olds. Boys in the UK who ate breakfast scored, on average, 16 more points in science tests than those who routinely skipped their morning meal, after taking account of their socioeconomic backgrounds. For girls, there was a 14-point difference.

However, the research is far from conclusive, according to Natalie Perera, executive director of the Education Policy Institute. “International evidence shows that there are links between hunger in the classroom and lower attainment – with further known effects on pupils’ health and behaviour,” she says.

“However, in England, more research needs to be done to establish whether there is a clear connection between food insufficiency, poor nutrition and the educational outcomes of pupils.”

Perhaps we don’t need hard and fast research evidence that hunger affects attainment. After all, many teachers will have witnessed the difference it makes to their pupils.

“Hungry students often sit with their arms folded on the desk, tired, even at the start of the day or lesson,” says Peter Shreeve, a languages teacher at Cowes Enterprise College on the Isle of Wight, and branch secretary for the NEU (ATL section). “They are often disorganised – missing equipment – and often late to lessons, and struggle to remain fully engaged until the end of the day,” he adds.

His experience echoes that of many teachers who took part in a recent NEU survey, in which nine in 10 respondents said poverty – including not having enough to eat at home – was having a “significant effect” on pupils’ learning.

Dignan says: “A lot of members say that, once children are given fruit, their attention picks up and their concentration improves.”

Breakfast – the most important meal of the day?

Let’s assume for a minute that hungry pupils are less equipped for learning than those who eat three square meals a day. What can, and should, be done to ensure that more pupils fall into the latter camp?

There is clear evidence that breakfast clubs work – at least for primary pupils.

“There’s a logic if you look at the raw economics of it – it’s a very efficient way of ensuring the kids have the energy they need,” says Sir Kevan Collins, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, a research body that has tested the impact of the Magic Breakfast project, which provides breakfasts in schools. The government recently announced it is ploughing £26 million into the scheme.

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The need for pupils to be well-fed at the start of the day shouldn’t even be up for debate, suggests Sir Kevan. “There is a very clear neuroscience line here, that you need to be fuelled to learn,” he says. “If you have hungry or not well-fed kids, that will have an impact on your capacity to learn. That is unarguable.”

But what about later in the day, when the effects of that free breakfast have worn off? Many primary schools typically focus on subjects like English and maths in the morning, when concentration levels are highest, rather than after lunch.

So should more pupils be given free school lunches, to get them through the afternoon? This is an approach that Dignan says many NEU members would support.

Currently, all infant school pupils can claim a free school meal (FSM), as well as older children from low-income households. Changes made this year to coincide with the introduction of Universal Credit will see around 160,000 older children lose out on a free school meal – but 210,000 will gain eligibility.

Despite the net gain, Dignan suggests the overall numbers should be increased further, at least to cover all junior school pupils.

“A lot of teachers have mentioned the distress that [Year 3] children experience when they no longer have FSM,” she says. But aside from the extra costs this would incur, some people would inevitably oppose taxpayers having to pay for the lunches of yet more middle-class children.

Perhaps a compromise would be to extend FSM eligibility to a more limited extent.

But, judging by a 2011 study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the National Centre for Social Research and Bryson Purdon Social Research, merely extending FSM without making the offering universal would have limited educational benefits.

The study found that key stage 1 and 2 pupils in schools where all children were given FSM made between four and eight weeks’ more progress than similar pupils in comparison areas. By contrast, expanding the eligibility criteria to cover more, but not all, pupils did not significantly affect attainment.

While the universal infant FSM policy has proved controversial, there is far more consensus over the benefits of feeding pupils during the holidays; for example, through holiday clubs targeted at children who, tragically, depend on FSM to sustain them in term time.

Provision of these clubs is patchy, but a bill is currently making its way through Parliament that would force local authorities in disadvantaged areas to provide them.

The School Holidays (Meals and Activities) Bill, which is sponsored by Labour MP Frank Field and is thought to have cross-party support from 130 MPs, is due to have a second reading in the House of Commons next Friday.

The NEU supports the bill – if it comes with extra funding for local councils.

But, however self-evident it might seem, there is little proof that feeding children during the long holidays will help them academically, come September.

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A Northumbria University study last year was the first UK-based research to identify a “summer learning loss” among children in disadvantaged areas, but it did not investigate whether hunger played a part in this.

So what can and should schools be doing to alleviate pupils’ hunger – and should more education funding really be spent on it?

Child hunger is arguably a far bigger societal problem than the education system can deal with alone – particularly at a time when headteachers are having to agonise over every penny their schools are spending.

However, schools are more than exam training camps; they play a much bigger role within the communities they serve. In any case, if they don’t step in to help, then who will? “One of the really frightening things is schools are saying, ‘We’re providing all these anti-poverty services but won’t be able to afford to continue this,’” says Dignan.

Cuts to statutory and voluntary services mean it has been left to schools to try to ensure that children are well-fed, she says, adding: “If schools aren’t able to support

Like King Canute, we can’t halt the tide of child poverty.

Child poverty is on the increase, and it matters.

Even a temporary drop into poverty has long-lasting and profound effects on children’s lives. For those raised in poverty, the effects are lifelong.

Sadly, despite Theresa May’s commitment to help those families who are ‘just managing’, the rise of child poverty continues apace.

In Dec 2015, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission warned that after a decade and a half in which child poverty fell significantly, it was likely to rise in the years to 2020. The latest figures show that 4 million children in the UK were living in poverty in 2015-16 and this could rise to 5 million by 2020, according to the End Child Poverty campaign. So this is an issue that affects the many, not the few.

A recent report by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the Child Poverty Action Group shows just how poverty impacts on a child’s life: poor children have less to eat, and more of what they do eat is unhealthy. They are more prone to respiratory illnesses caused or exacerbated by cold, damp housing. And they are more susceptible to mental health problems caused by family financial stresses.

There can be no doubt that poverty matters when it comes to educational achievement. Inequality begins at birth and grows. Developmental gaps of nine months between advantaged and disadvantaged three year olds double to 18 months for four year olds. It has been estimated that children from high income families are exposed to 30 million more words than those from low income families.

Edited text from article in Tes 19th May 2017 written by Mary Bousted Page | 26

Four hundred thousand UK children without a bed, charity warns Problems lead to pupils lacking sleep, which affects school behaviour, concentration and academic achievement Around 400,000 children in the UK do not have a bed of their own to sleep in, according to estimates by a charity working with disadvantaged children.

In the last decade, the number of beds that Buttle UK has donated to families in need has more than trebled: from 963 beds in 2006-7 to 3,217 beds in 2016-17.

Bed purchases account for 27 per cent of the small grants handed out by Buttle UK; 10 years ago, it was only 12 per cent.

Extrapolating this percentage out, using national figures for children in poverty, the charity estimates that there are around 400,000 children in the UK who do not have beds of their own.

“I can’t say there’s an absolute reason why it’s getting worse,” said Gerri McAndrew, chief executive of Buttle UK. “But we do know the numbers of children living in poverty are rising all the time – the huge impact of austerity cuts and changes to the welfare-benefits system.”

'A huge issue' Children who do not have beds of their own end up sharing with siblings, parents or even step-parents, Ms McAndrew said. Others have to sleep on the sofa or the floor.

This comes as no surprise to Dan Morrow, head of Oasis Academy Skinner Street, in Kent. Many of his pupils come from disadvantaged backgrounds. “Lack of beds has become a huge issue in the last two years, in a way it definitely wasn’t before,” he said.

He added that it is not uncommon for eight- and nine-year-old pupils at his school to sleep in cots, because they do not have a proper bed.

And poor-quality or broken sleep takes a toll on children’s ability to concentrate, behave well, and perform academically at school.

“Some children are sleepy during the day,” said Dagmara Dimitriou, director of the Lifetime Learning and Sleep Lab, at the UCL Institute of Education. “But, for other children, it’s actually the opposite – they will be hyperactive, show ADHD symptoms.”

Chaotic lives And, said Ms McAndrew, sleep-deprived children often struggle to focus in the classroom. “If children have a lack of sleep, they’re a bit more irritable,” she said.

“There’s lots of lack of concentration. Symptoms go from being withdrawn and listless, not participating, through to behaviour problems.”

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Tracy Reynolds, a YWCA Yorkshire case worker who liaises between disadvantaged families and their schools, has seen this first-hand. “Often, if they haven’t got beds, then they haven’t got bedtime routine and structure,” she said. “Their lives are chaotic. If they haven’t got routine, then that’s when behaviour problems kick in.”

How to spot children who are not having enough sleep?  Listlessness  Dishevelled appearance  Tiredness  Lack in concentration  Hyperactivity: symptoms similar to ADHD  Behaviour problems  Becoming withdrawn from family and friends  Moving around a lot (which is often an indication of an unstable home life) This is an edited version of an article appearing in the 5 May 2017 edition of Tes. Poverty affects more than one in four children in the UK today. When kids grow up poor they miss out – and so do the rest of us. They miss out on the things most children take for granted: warm clothes, school trips, having friends over for tea.

They do less well at school and earn less as adults.

Any family can fall on hard times and find it difficult to make ends meet. But poverty isn’t inevitable. With the right policies every child can have the opportunity to do well in life, and we all share the rewards of having a stronger economy and a healthier, fairer society.

There were 4.1 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2016-17. That’s 30 per cent of children, or 9 in a classroom of 30.

London is the area with the highest rates of child poverty in the country. Child poverty reduced dramatically between 1998/9-2011/12 when 800,000 children were lifted out of poverty.

Work does not provide a guaranteed route out of poverty in the UK. Two-thirds (67 per cent) of children growing up in poverty live in a family where at least one person works.

Children in large families are at a far greater risk of poverty – 42 per cent of children living in families with 3 or more children live in poverty.

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Families experience poverty for many reasons, but its fundamental cause is not having enough money to cope with the circumstances in which they are living. A family might move into poverty because of a rise in living costs, a drop in earnings through job loss or benefit changes.

Child poverty blights childhoods. Growing up in poverty means being cold, going hungry, not being able to join in activities with friends. For example, 50 per cent of families in the bottom income quintile would like, but cannot afford, to take their children on holiday for one week a year.

Child poverty has long-lasting effects. By GCSE, there is a 28 per cent gap between children receiving free school meals and their wealthier peers in terms of the number achieving at least 5 A*-C GCSE grades.

Poverty is also related to more complicated health histories over the course of a lifetime, again influencing earnings as well as the overall quality – and indeed length of life. Men in the most deprived areas of England have a life expectancy 9.2 years shorter than men in the least deprived areas. They also spend 14% less of their life in good health. Women share similar statistics.

Child poverty imposes costs on broader society – estimated to be at least £29 billion a year. Governments forgo prospective revenues as well as commit themselves to providing services in the future if they fail to address child poverty in the here and now.

Childcare and housing are two of the costs that take the biggest toll on families’ budgets. When you account for childcare costs, an extra 130,000 children are pushed into poverty.

(Updated April 2018. All poverty figures are after housing costs, except where otherwise indicated) Source: http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/child-poverty-facts-and-figures

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Theories and models of child development Various theories of development will influence the way we approach our work with children. Psychologists have different ideas about how children learn and develop.

Some feel that a child’s ability is innate, while others think it depends on the opportunities that they are given. This is often called the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate.

Sigmund Freud Freud stated that our personalities are made up of three parts – the id, the ego and the superego. Each of these will develop with the child and will be subconsciously driven by childhood events and experiences. Freud focused on the relationship between the id (the instinctive part of our personality) and the superego (the conscience), which develops later in childhood.

Erik Erikson Erikson was greatly influenced by Freud. He stated that we pass through eight psychosocial stages throughout our entire lives. At each stage, our psychological needs will conflict with those of society.

John Bowlby Bowlby stated that early attachments are crucial to a child’s development and are a key part of the way in which we build relationships later. (For more information on attachment theory, see learning outcome 3 in this unit.)

Jean Piaget Piaget thought that children think differently to adults. He believed that the way children think and learn is governed by their age and stage of cognitive development, because learning is based on experiences they build on as they become older. As children’s experiences change, they adapt their beliefs. For example, a child who only ever sees green apples will believe that all apples are green. Children need to extend their experiences in order to extend their learning. They will eventually take ownership of this themselves so that they can think about experiences that they have not yet developed.

Albert Bandura Bandura’s ‘social learning’ or ‘modelling’ theory stated that learning takes place through observing others rather than being taught. Children will often simply copy adults and their peers without being told to do so, meaning that their learning is spontaneous.

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Lev Vygotsky Vygotsky believed that culture and social factors both play a crucial role in a child’s development, and that cognitive functions will be affected by the beliefs and values of the society in which children grow up. He also believed that children learn actively, through hands-on experience.

B. F. Skinner Skinner believed that children learn through experience or conditioning. He promoted the theory that our learning is based on a consequence following a particular behaviour. We will repeat experiences that are enjoyable and avoid those that are not. This applies to learning too. For example, a child who is praised for working well at a particular task will want to work at the task again. Skinner called this positive reinforcement.

Ivan Pavlov Pavlov put forward the idea of classical conditioning, which he discovered by accident when carrying out research using dogs. The dogs would salivate when one of Pavlov’s assistants entered the room, even if they did not feed them, as the dogs expected it to happen. He then started to ring a bell whenever the dogs were fed; eventually ringing a bell produced the same response. Because this response was learned, it was called a conditioned response. Classical conditioning is often used today to treat phobias and anxiety problems, by helping people form new associations. In the same way, children can be taught to associate positive experiences with learned behaviour.

Urie Bronfenbrenner Bronfenbrenner developed a theory known as ecological systems theory. This emphasises the importance of different environmental factors on a child’s development, from people in the child’s immediate environment to the influence of national forces such as cultural changes.

Howard Gardner Gardner introduced the theory that all individuals learn in different ways based on their own aptitudes, and not by a single general ability of intelligence. He stated that different ‘intelligences’ do not all progress at the same time, so children may be at a different stage in their understanding of number to their ability with language, for example. Gardner originally outlined eight intelligences, although he subsequently added two more Reggio Emilia This approach, developed in the 1940s, is based around the child being the initiator in their own early learning. When it was first introduced, it was a progressive model of early years care as it had never been done before. Children will follow their own interests, which will be fostered and developed with support from parents, teachers and the wider community. It speaks of ‘the hundred languages of children’ – children Page | 31

use many different ways to explore their world and express their thoughts, all of which should be nurtured.

Adapted from; https://www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/FEAndVocational/WorkBasedLearning /ChildcareandTeachingAssistants/StandaloneProducts/PearsonEdexcelL3CLDCandidate Handbook/Sample-material/Level-3-Diploma-in-Childrens-Learning-andDevelopment-Unit-1-sample-material.pdf

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Do your relationships with students really matter?

It’s a new year, a new term. That means you have a new Year 9 class. And this time, there are a couple of names on the list that have you worried. They are students whose reputations precede them.

Sure enough, Megan starts the first lesson by arguing with you over the seating plan.

It all seems about to kick off. But then Ryan, whom you taught in Year 7, steps in.

“Leave it,” he tells Megan, “Sir’s all right.” Crisis averted. Such is the power of building positive working relationships with your students.

Not only that, but there is more to the picture: good classroom relationships are of paramount importance to learning. There are countless studies saying as much, and a bottomless pile of information, advice and guidance for teachers looking to hone their own relationship-building skills.

What does it say a good teacher-student relationship actually looks like? Would you be able to confidently say whether your own school fosters positive relationships between pupils and staff?

Link to motivation Bridget Hamre, associate research professor and associate director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, has spent her career looking at these questions and she is certain the assumption that relationships matter is based on solid evidence.

“There are now hundreds of studies documenting the types of relationships between teachers and students that help students get the most out of each day in the classroom,” says Hamre. “Students who have positive relationships with teachers end up doing better academically and socially.

“In one early study I did in this area, we showed that students who had conflictual relationships with teachers in kindergarten demonstrated poorer outcomes all the way through to eighth grade...[and there was] greater likelihood of disciplinary infractions.”

These findings are not in isolation; far from it, in fact. In 2009, research by John Hattie found that “it is teachers who have created positive teacher-student relationships that are more likely to have the above average effects on student achievement”. And a 2011 analysis led by Debora Roorda, which investigated the qualities of teacher-student relationships and pupil engagement, found that

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motivation to learn was linked to relationship quality. There are countless other studies to draw on.

Conflict and closeness “Do good relationships cause higher achievement or does higher achievement cause good relationships?

The issue of student motivation is something that Hamre also acknowledges.

According to her, most of the research shows that the two most important factors in student-teacher relationships are closeness and conflict.

“When relationships are close, teachers and students report enjoying spending time together and trusting one another. Students report that they know they can count on these teachers when times get tough,” she says. “As students mature, respect is also a huge issue. So in adolescence, it’s really important to students to feel that their teachers respect who they are as people.”

However, when conflict is high, Hamre continues, teachers report that “dealing with the student drains all their energy, that they are frequently frustrated”, and that they “find themselves getting angry with the student on a regular basis”.

Regularly getting angry with a student is obviously not a sign of a good working relationship, but what is not as clear is exactly what a positive relationship does look like. So, what are the key components and how can teachers ensure they are developing the most effective ties with their pupils?

Behavioural challenges Instead, Hamre says, the evidence shows that it is important to take time to convey messages about behaviour to those students who are least likely to hear them – particularly those who struggle with behavioural challenges. “As a former teacher, I know this can be hard – some students really push our buttons and can drive us crazy. But at the end of the day, teachers are the adults and have a responsibility to do all we can to connect with the students who walk into our room each day.”

In addition, she says, schools need to be able to look beyond the relationships that stand out from the norm: those that are either noticeably positive or infamously problematic. It’s important not to overlook those students who fall somewhere between the two extremes. “I saw a great and very practical example of how to do this,” Hamre says. “At one school where the principal really knows about the importance of relationships, they took the time to write the names of all the students in the school around the room during a teacher meeting.”

After that, each teacher put green sticky notes under the names of any students with whom they’d had positive interactions in the last week, and red sticky notes under Page | 35

the names of any they had encountered problems with. “They immediately saw those students whose names were filled with red – who had, day after day, across classrooms and contexts, negative interactions with adults.

“However, and perhaps equally importantly, they saw the names of the students with no sticky notes at all. These students are the ones who are just disconnected – and they often get missed.”

After this exercise, the school made plans that aimed to ensure staff went out of their way to connect with students who were not getting much positive interaction with adults.

Time and effort An intervention like this one might require a bit of time and effort, but it is relatively simple and should be achievable in most schools, surely? Hamre believes so. All it takes, she suggests, is the right push from leadership.

“There are many schools that recognise the importance of these relationships but, given the demands on teachers and schools these days, I think it takes a determined leader to make them a priority.

Daniel Quin, points out that primary teachers are often “generally better at these relationships” – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that they usually teach just one class.

“Unfortunately, in secondary school, students experience many teachers for short periods of time. This makes teacher-student relationships difficult to develop beyond the superficial. For example, when I was teaching…I might see 200 students in a week – not a good way to develop a relationship,” Quin says.

“At my children’s primary school, their teacher stays with students for two or three years. They know, understand and care about their students so much.”

However, Quin does note that some secondary schools have strong pastoral care systems, with core teachers, that encourage continuity of relationships. This, he says, can make up for all the chopping and changing.

One example he gives involves XP School, a secondary in Doncaster which takes all Year 7 students away for a four-day outward bound residential trip at the start of their first year.

It also allocates 45 minutes at the start of the day to something called “Crew”: not simply an opportunity to take the register and cover administration requirements but a period where form tutors and students deliberately allocate time to forge “genuine and deep connections”.

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Getting the balance right However, XP is a small school – and “size matters”, says Loe. “I think this is one of the key sources of tension for teachers. If you are teaching 12 different classes and you have even reasonable class sizes, that’s a lot of pupils. To just know the name, let alone really know them as individuals and human beings is a challenge.”

Larger school structures also tend to promote “lots of movements and periods of transition”, Loe adds, meaning students are having to break and form relationships with different pupils and teachers more often. “This can be problematic,” he adds.

But Quin isn’t sure that secondary teachers need to be too worried. “My observation on this is that some commentators – not researchers – try to downplay the importance of high-quality, affective relationships between students and teachers,” he says. “They suggest children and adolescents just need good-quality instruction, and that care and relationships is overstated.”

For him, strong student-teacher relationships “are crucial but aren’t everything”. “I think that children and adolescents fundamentally want to learn, particularly at school,” he says.

“Students need to know that we care about them, trust them and believe in them. It’s also really important to give students voice and opportunities for leadership – too often, school is about being controlled and told what to do – and none of us likes living in that kind of an environment.”

Chris Parr is a freelance journalist What positive student-teacher relationships look like “Be relentlessly optimistic. Every day is a new day, and one which will bring challenge and opportunity, so be resilient – day in, day out!”

So says Andy Samways, director of the research and teaching schools at the Unity Schools Partnership, a group of 19 primary and secondary schools in Suffolk.

He believes that it is “mutual respect” that underpins the very best relationships in his schools.

“Fostering strong relationships takes time, commitment and authenticity on the teacher’s part. It’s about showing a genuine interest in your pupils, doing your best to connect with them… taking time to notice each individual, and being fair and consistent.

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In all schools, teachers need to remember that “every child brings their own real-life challenges, issues and emotions, which will be influencing them in so many ways before they can even get to school”, he says.

“Celebrate successes in all shapes and forms – capitalise on the power of a goodnews phone call home to the family or a congratulatory letter championing the struggles and successes associated with learning.”

For Kate Atkins, headteacher of Rosendale Primary School and chief executive of the Great North Wood Education Trust in south-east London, developing trust is the most important factor in relationship building.

“Students need to feel safe within their learning environment. This can be created by having consistent systems within the class, regular routines and a sense of fairness,” she says.

To this end, the school uses the Kagan Cooperative Learning system, designed to ensure that students get equal time to talk and participate in lessons.

“Finally, with some students you need to take time to develop a relationship with them,” Atkins says.

“This has meant that our teachers have played table tennis or basketball with students at lunchtime in order to develop a more positive relationship.

“Time to talk, away from the pressures of the classroom, can be hugely helpful.”

TES digital 10/8/18

Making positive connections with students is like doing a jigsaw Relationships with pupils have to be put together piece by piece, writes Clare Erasmus – teachers need to take their time to build a complete picture and not give up when something doesn’t seem to fit.

Building healthy relationships with the students you work with is important, but don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy. Because it isn’t. You wear many hats as a teacher – from academic specialist and personal motivator to behaviour monitor and pastoral support worker – and the relationships you develop with students reflect this.

It is all about building trust between you and the young person in numerous ways, and this takes confidence, time and a whole lot of resilience.

I like to think of the relationships that exist between teachers and students as jigsaws: every piece matters and is a crucial part of the whole picture.

But what do those jigsaw pieces look like? They can be summed up with seven Cs. Page | 38

Connect and care First – and this may seem like an obvious one – you need to learn to enjoy being around the young person in front of you, and to recognise that they have a background and a life that takes place outside your lesson. Students are not robots; they all learn at different rates and are animated human beings who are slowly carving out their identities.

Of course, they will get it wrong – on many occasions. Show that you are still concerned for them and interested in their wellbeing regardless. For the disaffected student who sees no reason to engage with school, find one thing they are interested in and try to connect with them around that thing. And if there is nothing happening in their lives that they seem interested in, encourage them to join – or get the school to create – an extracurricular club for them to take part in.

Put aside your prejudgements and spend time chatting with the young person in these non-competitive extracurricular environments. The key is to invest in them, and to make them feel valued and part of the school community. When students do make mistakes and challenge the rules, help them to learn how to navigate their way out of situations. Don’t just punish them.

Ensure there is meaningful reflection time, that you use restorative language and have a conversation with the young person about ways forward. Be prepared to do this again and again and again. And be prepared to be flexible. There will be some instances when it is not the child who has to change, but the school environment.

Consistency If the students have had to deal with a series of supply teachers because of an absent teacher, their trust in being able to form a solid relationship will be eroded. Obviously, you can’t help being absent when you need to be, but do be aware of the effect that this will have on the students and be prepared to work harder when you return.

Be as consistent as you can be. If your expectations fluctuate, the signals students receive will be confusing.

The advice is simple: be in the classroom; be consistently waiting for students with a greeting at the start of the lesson; be consistent with your expectations, especially around behaviour; be consistent in treating students with dignity and respect.

Challenge If students feel that your lessons are inaccessible or irrelevant, then they won’t feel like they’re learning, and this will compromise your relationship with them. Set up a safe and stimulating environment in which you can stretch and challenge the students. They will enjoy this as long as they see that they can make marginal gains, and as long as what you are teaching feels relevant to the world they live in.

Let students know you care about your subject and about them doing well. Let them learn from their failures. If you invest in them and in your lessons, they will be more Page | 39

likely to invest in you. Talk to the students and keep asking questions that can take their skills to another level of higher-order thinking.

Communicate Show students you value their contributions. You can do this by telling them at the start of a lesson what you were impressed with in the previous lesson. You can also showcase their work, single students out with verbal feedback privately or in front of the class, flag up achievements to other staff and celebrate students in assemblies or newsletters.

Reprimand privately, but praise publicly. Look for the positives in each student and let these feed your attention, remembering that assessment scales represent just one aspect of “achievement”. Being kind, helpful, truthful, encouraging, curious, resilient around failure, determined, responsible and meeting deadlines are all positive. So send notes home to parents highlighting all students’ achievements, whether they are academic or not.

Calm Naturally, there will be times when late nights and the daily strains of this profession will take their toll, and you will feel your blood pressure rising. But try to manage your own stress levels, as they will affect your relationships with students.

Leaders should make sure that the school has measures in place to support staff wellbeing and colleagues should endeavour to look out for one another. Simple things such as offering a cup of tea can make all the difference. And from a whole-school perspective, it’s crucial to have a quiet room to relax in during breaks, as well as opportunities to take a reading from your emotional barometer and flag this with a supportive colleague.

If you are feeling the pressure, inadvertently taking things out on a student you have a tenuous relationship with is not the way forward and, in fact, will set you back. If and when this does happen, be ready to apologise. This demonstrates that you are human and make mistakes, too – something that can help to strengthen your relationship with the student in the long run.

Collaborate If you are clashing with a student, don’t let it become personal. Connect with the head of year or head of house, or a subject teacher the student is working well with.

Find out about the bigger picture, and about what works and does not work.

Be consistent as a staff team, making sure that all efforts are part of a coordinated attempt to find opportunities to enable the student to succeed and feel valued.

Whatever happens, don’t give up on the child.

Every effort you make matters and every positive reinforcement counts. If relationships are jigsaws, we shouldn’t abandon them when something doesn’t seem Page | 40

to fit. Instead, we should stare at the board, search for the missing pieces and keep trying until we can complete the whole picture.

Clare Erasmus is head of faculty and head of mental wellbeing at Brighton Hill Community School in Basingstoke TES 10/8/18

If a relationship is broken, fix it

When serious discord exists between a student and a teacher, the bond is rarely beyond repair, but be prepared to put in the work if you want to get things back on track, writes Jarlath O’Brien

I can recall with aching clarity the first time I realised that a relationship I had established with a child was in trouble. It shook me, and not because the low point was when Lucas ran across the car park screaming that he was going to punch me in the head (which he then proceeded to do) but because I had always prided myself on making serious headway with children who found school a difficult place to be successful.

One of the fundamental attributes of any good teacher is the ability to get on with and, frankly, to like young people of all varieties. When we come face-to-face with a new class, we make it a priority to show all the children that we are stable, reliable adults worthy of their trust. We do this, and more, in order to establish the classroom as a safe space for children to learn, and to coexist with us and their peers. We then ensure that we build on this as the days, weeks and months pass by.

It is this groundwork that pays off if there are problems with our relationships later on. But, as I learned from my experiences with Lucas, it takes more than good foundations to fix a broken relationship.

So, what else did repairing my relationship with Lucas teach me?

First, when things go wrong in a relationship with a pupil, you, as the teacher, will probably be the one who initially has to do most of the running. If you’re determined to sit it out until the child makes the first move, you’ll be in for a long wait.

However, things will get better more quickly if you involve colleagues who can support you along the way. With Lucas, it took a sustained effort to help him to overcome and manage his very powerful feelings of shame and anger. One of my colleagues in particular worked really well with Lucas, so it made perfect sense to recruit him to help Lucas feel more settled.

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Second, it is important to realise that, although it might not feel like it at the time, the relationship is probably not completely broken. It might be tarnished or damaged, but – except in the most extreme cases – relationships are not built or destroyed by one-off events. This is where emotional investment comes in.

The school that Lucas attended was one for children with behavioural difficulties. Working there, I came to understand more about how emotional investment manifests itself and this consequently helped me to change my thinking about behaviour. I could see that some of the children felt that they had very little to lose: their responses to difficulties and conflict reflected that.

They had experienced rejection on an industrial scale and had a finely tuned system of self-protection. Why wait for the – as they saw it – inevitable rejection that was to come? It was far better and safer to sabotage a relationship at a time of their own choosing.

But for those who had built up trust and a feeling of safety, and who had started to see themselves as people who could be successful in school, it was easier to overcome difficulties if and when they occurred.

I learned that the first time a child re-enters your class after a situation is crucial. They will be looking for reassurance from you, so your first words, your first gestures, your first requests or demands and your initial body language all matter. They may front it out with some bravado, such as refusing to come into your lesson or proclaiming that they “don’t give a shit”, but inside they are nervous. Hopefully, you can see this for what it is: avoiding failure and protecting themselves from rejection.

Definitely don’t compound this behaviour with reminders of past problems in the form of a veiled threat. I’m sorry to say that when I was a newly qualified teacher, I once said to a child: “Yesterday was a nightmare. I don’t want any more of that funny business in my lesson this morning.” What a welcome.

I have found using success reminders to be a helpful way back in, too. Doing more of what’s worked in the past can be a good method of refocusing. Concentrate on the big “white square”, not the “black dot”, as behaviour expert Bill Rogers would say.

Finally, remember there is a chance that we, the adults, have erred. I regret that I have escalated situations in the past and – although not all teachers will agree with me – I believe that we need to be grown-up about such things and show contrition. That’s the real key to getting things back on track with pupils like Lucas.

Jarlath O’Brien works in special education in London and is the author of Better Behaviour: a guide for teachers TES 1/8/18

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Ensure your dealings with parents are a duet, not a duel

Good relationships with families will go a long way towards ensuring children achieve their potential in education, says Nancy Gedge.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: project homework is the bane of my parenting life. If I never have to make another cardboard castle, river valley, 3D blood cell or Second World War diorama, I will be a happy woman.

Little did I know before I had my children that when I planned homeworks involving papier mâché Tudor houses, the instant parents collected their offspring and waved me goodbye, they would be out there, in the playground or on social media, having a moan to their friends. I know this now because I’ve done it.

And while the adults chunter, the children listen. You can almost see their little ears flapping, and their little mouths dropping open with the realisation that adults do not all agree with each other. Adults are powerful in the lives of children, and young people can usually be relied upon to side with the one who holds the most power.

We teachers like to think of ourselves as influential in children’s lives and, to an extent, we are. But the people with the most influence, who will be around long after the teacher has faded into a shadowy memory, are parents. “Working in partnership with parents” is one of those phrases that sounds great but, in the real world, it can easily get reduced to the odd meeting along the lines of “this is how we teach phonics”, where we talk at rather than talk with parents.

But expecting compliance from adults with complicated lives can backfire. What mums and dads think and say matters, and bickering between parents and teachers has the power to make – or break – a child’s education.

It’s not only the parents who talk. School staff are just as bad. If you’re not careful, before you know where you are, rumours are flying. Opinions based on a fleeting meeting or a single incident can soon become school fact. And in the same way that reputations can follow children, they can follow parents, too.

I once worked in a school where we were explicitly told not to gossip about parents and, frankly, it was nice. Every year, you started fresh. Another opportunity to work together, rather than against each other. Because when the adults work together, it can only be good for children’s education. And while I wouldn’t recommend expecting parents to dish out the punishments on your behalf, a simple “You listen to Miss, she’s all right”, from a parent, is a powerful statement.

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Of course, like children, we are always going to have different feelings about different individuals. But let’s face it, we’re the adults here. We have to be on the same side.

Nancy Gedge is coordinator of the Ormerod Resource Base at the Marlborough School, Oxfordshire and the Tes SEND specialist. She tweets @nancygedge TES 10/8/18

For Effective Communication

As anyone working in secondary education knows, staff at every level have to deal with many different types of people and have a wide range of relationships to manage. The difficulty can be in knowing how to manage so many different needs, demands and expectations. What can be most challenging and stressful is managing a particularly difficult relationship.

How can we do this successfully? We are of course, all human. We all have days and times in life when things seem more challenging and it is important to remember that.

Conflict can result from a number of behaviours including unbalanced teamwork, disagreements over how to deal with particular students, and a lack of support maybe from managers or co-workers – and even self-doubt which can sometimes lead to defensiveness. In the pressured environments of schools, these feelings and behaviours are likely to be magnified.

It is important to be upfront with others when there are clear issues that need to be addressed for a better working relationship.

Increasing our understanding and improving the way that we respond to conflict can make for happier staff and happier schools. “Effective challenging” needs to steer a clear course between being too aggressive and too submissive. Some people are not very self-aware, so maybe you just need to tell them constructively what the issues are or what you need from them. We suggest:    

Asking a direct, open question: “When, how, why, what, where?”

Giving feedback. Be honest about how a person’s behaviour or attitude is affecting others.

Offering advice on help and the support that is available if appropriate.

Remembering that effective challenging is a two-way street.

Also useful is being able to identify different types of people to better frame our responses and behaviour to get results.

Key of course, to any relationship, is communication. Poor communication is so often the root cause of many relationship problems and communication is invariably better Page | 44

in some relationships than in others. Many teachers are adept at communicating very effectively with pupils and students, but might be less successful when talking with other adults.

Before you can start to work on your communication skills, you first need to think about what helps you and what prevents you from communicating as effectively as you would like. Think about the people that you enjoy communicating with: your friends, your family and colleagues. Identify the attitudes, values and skills that make this easy. Write these down under the heading “aids to communication”.

Next, think about the people you struggle to communicate with and go through the same process with the heading “barriers to communication”. Look at your answers to both and this should give you a clearer understanding of what you need to be able to communicate well.

Listening is a key part of the communication process. While poor listeners are likely to interrupt, argue, or jump to conclusions, good listeners in contrast will encourage, ask questions when they don’t understand something, and look at things from another person’s perspective.

None of us of course can ever be sure how another person will react and anxiety is a normal part of the process. If you fall victim to this you will be less effective than you might otherwise be. But there are times when, if effective, it could make such a difference to your working life.

Source: https://www.educationsupportpartnership.org.uk/resources/top-tips/tipseffective-communication

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How to avoid being a social barrier for pupils with SEND Teachers need to ensure children with additional needs are not thwarted socially by intervention, says this Sendco Few people enter the teaching profession, or work within the education system, who do not have the very best intentions for those whom they work with. However, could it be that sometimes these good intentions are stifling the social interactions of some learners with additional needs by impairing their ability to develop positive relationships with their peers?

Special educational needs applies to a myriad of learning and/or physical differences, so it would be foolish for me to say that all students with identified needs struggle with their social interactions, yet it may be more common than we realise.

The greatest barrier hindering children with additional needs talking to peers has to be significant amounts of one-to-one adult time, which has the potential to be more common in a primary setting than a secondary one.

Effective intervention Following the Lamb Report (2009) and the subsequent work of Rob Webster and his team at the UCL’s "Maximising the Impact of TAs" project, most schools should by now realise that we need to move away from the "velcro" teaching assistant (TA) approach. However, it is still possible for the most vulnerable young people to spend a considerable amount of time in adult company. This is carried out under the misguided notion that this is in the best interests of the young person, in terms of keeping them safe. However, it could be preventing them from interacting with children their own age.

I have also experienced the "under the microscope effect", whereby a youngster with additional needs is constantly under a watchful eye, and every misdemeanour or mistake is immediately reported back. Young people need to have the freedom to make mistakes, even with their social interactions, as this is how they learn.

It is also possible that some young people with additional needs spend time away from the main class in small intervention groups. These can be positive in terms of focusing on key skills, but they can narrow the field of potential social interactions.

Alternative options Similarly, some teachers may decide to group all the young people with additional needs together. This may be for ease of access when supporting children in the classroom; however, some young people may find themselves constantly sitting with the same person/people in every class, which again holds them back in terms of developing crucial social skills.

So what can we do differently?

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1. Schools should definitely be moving away from the velcro approach to TA support, and should be giving young people an opportunity to work independently (once, of course, they have been given the strategies to do this – there is nothing to be gained from just leaving them to it and watching them flounder).

2. Special consideration should be taken when arranging the seating plan. For example, could they be placed next to a supportive student? Or near to someone whom they could collaborate with, who is not part of their usual friendship circle?

3. It could also help if schools take a more restorative approach when interactions do go wrong for young people who experience difficulties with social communication. This could potentially be achieved by taking a more flexible approach to the school's behaviour policy, by ensuring that the young person gets the support and strategies that they need in order to be able to respond appropriately in the future, rather than just a punitive approach.

4. Wave-three interventions (those that take place away from the main learning) should be targeted and time-specific. Short, sharp bursts are usually more effective than it just being the norm that certain children partake in literacy and numeracy in another room, ad infinitum.

5. It is also worth encouraging all young people with additional needs to attend school trips. This can sometimes be a tricky area, as some school trips may be too stressinducing for some young people. However, young people with SEND should be encouraged to attend trips and extracurricular activities as much as possible. It is through exposure to different settings and different people that they can really start to develop their social interaction skills.

Gemma Corby is Sendco at Hobart High School, Norfolk.( TES 26/6/18)

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Know how - How to take a balanced approach to risk assessment | 16 March 2004

Is the growing culture of anxiety leading us to raise a generation who has never learned to play and experiment freely? What is a balanced approach to risk assessment? PJ White explains, very carefully, while watching out for hidden dangers.

1. Risk assessment is not about eliminating risk, it is about managing it. That means taking steps to minimise dangers, without losing what is worthwhile - such as the chance to play and opportunities for growth and learning. Some element of risk is unavoidable. After all, if there were no risk in life, there would be no insurance companies. Then where would we all be?

2. The jargon is useful. A hazard is something that has the capacity to cause harm. A risk is the chance of hurt or injury actually occurring. If you can remove a hazard, do so. If you cannot, reduce the chance of harm occurring until it is so low that it becomes acceptable. Have a procedure too for swift action to minimise any injury that might occur. If you do all this, and the risk is still unreasonably high, don't do the activity. This may call for fine judgment. It is not an exact science.

3. Risk assessments should be written down and reviewed regularly. This will encourage staff to learn, understand and integrate risk assessment into their work.

Do it systematically and thoughtfully, not mechanistically. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Organisations should have standard risk assessments forms.

Involve children and young people if appropriate. They may have a clearer idea than you about the hazards in a particular environment.

4. You don't need to carry out risk assessments of environments that you don't control, such as attractions you visit. Those operating them should have their own risk assessments covering your group. Check that they do before you visit. Then concentrate on the risks involved in getting there.

5. Statistics suggest that playgrounds are not, despite many people's worries, particularly dangerous places for children. On the other hand, you will never eliminate the hazard from paddling in the sea or going swimming. Water is always potentially hazardous. That means you need to take appropriate measures. An outright ban is seldom appropriate, so armbands may be a better option.

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6. People can be hazards too. It is not just about trailing wires, playgrounds with damaged equipment, poisonous substances and machinery. Children can be harmed by adults and other children. Think about taking children into traffic and you realise that not only are other drivers potential hazards, they are very difficult to assess, because they are unpredictable and never under your control.

7. Employers have a legal responsibility to minimise risk of injury to staff as well as children in their care. Take health and safety seriously. Don't forget the harmful effects of stress, particularly anxiety overload caused by worrying about risk assessments.

https://www.cypnow.co.uk/cyp/news/1032100/resources-know-how-how-to-take-abalanced-approach-to-risk-assessment

Health and safety in schools In an article in The Sunday Telegraph Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector of Ofsted, said that schools should stop “wrapping their children in cotton wool”, because overzealous health and safety policies are denying them the chance to develop “resilience and grit”.

We couldn’t agree more.

RoSPA’s mantra is “teaching safely, teaching safety”. We need to make sure that children are safe in school, but that they receive enough of a challenge to learn meaningful life lessons. There’s a fine balance to be achieved when exposing children to controlled risk and challenge which helps them develop their full potential; we recognise the problems this poses to schools and how difficult it can be to convince others that risk has been properly considered and adequately controlled.

Marcus Bailie, head of inspection at the Adventure Activities Licensing service and member of RoSPA’s National Safety Education Committee, works with this issue every day and understands that schools and adults often worry about exposing children to real risks. However, both schools and adults are much more likely to want children to be challenged. Challenges can be defined as: 

involving a chance for gain or benefit



involving a risk or loss or harm

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progressively entered into

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willingly entered into

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going outside the comfort zone

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involving at least some degree of uncertainty of outcome.

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However, some schools are already meeting the issue head-on, providing students with valuable practical activities within the curriculum in which they learn to deal with risks: encouraging school trips, inviting local communities into school to share experiences and understanding, and getting children out into the natural environment and the ‘real world’. For those that would like to do more, but aren’t sure where the boundaries of risk, liability, fun and challenge are, there is help and advice available.

There’s a clear case for getting children out and active, and not overprotecting or wrapping them in cotton wool. The current generation of pupils face a host of health challenges linked to inactivity, with rising levels of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, so the benefits of well-managed out of school activity and physical challenges are clear. Young people aged 16-23 are also the most at-risk in the UK’s workforce, and many children lack basic life and health skills such as being able to swim. Schools are ideally placed to provide environments where children can experience and assess risks.

To help schools achieve this, we believe that government should make personal, social and health education (PSHE) lessons, which must include elements of personal safety, compulsory across the country. This would ensure that teachers and other staff would receive the right levels of support and training, and that such activities are being carried out in a consistent and structured way.

While some schools may feel constrained by fears related to health and safety, it is important to keep in mind that legal requirements and good practice are there for a reason – to keep people safe while carrying out worthwhile activities. However, it is important that schools continue to provide appropriately-challenging activities.

For more information, advice and resources, see www.rospa.com/school-collegesafety/ Posted: 11/08/2017

Sensible Health and Safety in Schools – The Myths May 24, 2015 https://www.seton.co.uk/legislationwatch/article/sensible-health-and-safety-inschools-the-myths/

According to research by the University of Exeter, children come second in the list of groups most affected by health and safety myths. In this article, Michael Evans looks at some of these myths and at how schools can take a sensible, rather than a “better safe than sorry”, approach to keeping pupils safe.

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Schools have a statutory requirement to abide by health and safety legislation. This applies to risks to staff, pupils and visitors as well as to any contractors in the school.

All work activities carried out by the school, including off-site activities such as school trips, are also covered.

An increase in risk consciousness has led to health and safety often being used as an excuse to stop activities or disguise unpopular decisions. This has given rise to a number of myths and misunderstandings, and in some cases it has been used as a catch-all phrase to cover something completely different.

Focus on the real risks The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) points out that the management of health and safety should focus on real risks that could potentially cause harm. It should not involve wasting time on trivial matters and unnecessary paperwork.

When an over-cautious approach is adopted, says the HSE, pupils will miss out on challenging and exciting activities, plus other learning activities that enable them to develop new skills. Importantly, health and safety in schools is not about banning activities.

Overall accountability for health and safety lies with the employer, although day-today responsibility is normally delegated to the Head and the school management team.

The employer will vary according to the type of school. It could be a local authority, a proprietor, an academy trust, a charity, a company, a partnership or a board of governors.

The HSE stresses that in any organisation, sensible health and safety starts at the top and relies on every member of the management team to make sure that all health and safety arrangements are appropriate and proportionate.

The priority is to create a safe learning environment where pupils are given an appreciation of risk and how to deal with it. This means that control measures will be put in place that will do what is reasonably practicable to manage and reduce significant risks.

The classroom checklist “Traditional� classrooms are typically lower-risk environments and the HSE has provided a classroom checklist which, while not mandatory, can be quite useful for those working there.

It is a tool for school staff to use in order to raise awareness of areas of concern. It covers issues such as where an uneven floor, a blocked gangway or trailing wires can possibly cause trips and falls. Furniture should be in good condition and trollies should be provided for moving heavy equipment. Pupils should be advised about good practice when using computers.

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Electrical safety is another issue. Plugs and cables should all be in good repair and in addition to regular visual checks, portable equipment should be tested at suitable intervals to ensure that it continues to be safe to use. Any damaged equipment should be taken out of service.

If the school contains asbestos, it is important that staff are familiar with its location and condition. Similarly, it is important for them to be given guidance with respect to securing pieces of work to walls and ceilings that might contain asbestos.

Fire exits should be unobstructed, kept unlocked and easily opened. Fire evacuation notices should be clearly displayed and staff and pupils should be familiar with evacuation drill.

Rooms should have sufficient natural ventilation and a reasonable room temperature.

Measures should be in place to prevent unwanted glare and heat from the sun.

The HSE points out that this list is not exhaustive and it is up to school staff to identify any other hazards that might be apparent. For instance, design and technology workshops, science laboratories, art studios, textile, drama and PE are not covered and there could be inherent risks in these activities.

Some of the higher risks that a school might need to manage include vehicle and pedestrian movements, such as those associated with cars and buses delivering and collecting pupils at the start and end of the school day. There will also be risks associated with any refurbishment or construction work that is taking place at the school. Adventure activities can form an important part of the school curriculum and any risks associated with these will also need to be managed.

Health and safety myths It is easy to fall prey to health and safety myths and misunderstandings. There are many instances where activities have been curtailed or prohibited, with health and safety being given as the reason. In fact, the HSE now has on its website the findings of a Myth Busters Challenge.

Many of these seem to have no logic, while others simply use health and safety legislation as a cover for something else. An example of this was when parents were taken to task after their daughter took a flask of hot drink on a school trip. They were told that there was a no hot drink policy “due to health and safety”. The HSE pointed out that although the school might have a policy with respect to children having hot food or drink in their packed lunches, this should have been clearly communicated to parents rather than putting the blame on a health and safety catch-all.

In another case, a school governor stipulated that for “health and safety” reasons bamboo canes supporting runner bean plants in the school garden should have cane toppers. The HSE’s response was that this seemed to be plain common sense and it was a pity that it should be represented as a “health and safety requirement” when there was no such thing.

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“Health and safety” was the reason that a pupil in another school was banned from taking in his pet baby chick as part of a presentation. Bird flu was quoted as the main risk.

Over-caution has led to dozens of other cases. Dew on the grass was given as a reason for the postponement of a sports day for 3- to 4-year-olds. Another school refused to apply sun cream to a child in a reception class “for health and safety reasons”.

A proportional approach was recommended after several schools banned footballs in school playgrounds and pupils in a secondary school were told not to push a fellow pupil in his wheelchair because they had not received appropriate training.

In a school where premises were owned and administered by a private company, staff were told that due to health and safety concerns they were not to use Blu Tack to display work on windows because it contained a chemical that could cause glass to shatter. Since this was plainly not true, the reason for the ban certainly had nothing to do with healthy and safety.

With some justification, the HSE feels sensitive that in the past it has been wrongly blamed for a great many of the health and safety myths that have crept into school life. Its Myth Busters Challenge Panel can provide a useful resource to help schools avoid the more commonly occurring ones.

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Child-on-child sex offence reports 'tip of the iceberg' 9 October 2017 www.bbc.co.uk Reports of sexual assaults by children on other children are rising, according to police figures seen by BBC Panorama. But those reported cases are only the "tip of the iceberg", according to one police child abuse expert.

Emily - not her real name - was 15 when she was sexually assaulted by a boy in her class, unnoticed by her teacher, who was at the front of the room.

But after reporting the ordeal to the police, she says she was bullied by her classmates.

"About 10 to 15 pupils were all swearing and shouting at me, like 'you're a grass'‌ I got some comments like 'he should have raped you'. I was tagged in photos. I was called a liar."

She says her head teacher was unsympathetic. "He'd say 'well, maybe this isn't the school for you. You can leave, you know, we suggest you do and make a fresh start'."

The number of reported sexual offences by under-18s against other under-18s in England and Wales rose by 71% from 4,603 from 2013-14 to 7,866 from 2016-17, according to figures from a Freedom of Information request.

A total of 38 out of the 43 forces in England and Wales responded.

The number of reported rapes among under-18s rose 46% from 1,521 to 2,223 over the same period, according to 32 police forces that supplied a breakdown of figures.

Reports of sexual offences on schools premises also increased from 386 in 2013-14 to 922 in 2016-17, according to 31 police forces - including 225 rapes on school grounds over the four years.

Simon Bailey, the national police chief lead for child protection, said: "We are dealing unequivocally with the tip of the iceberg ... we are seeing an increasing number of reports, we are seeing significant examples of harmful sexual behaviour and the lives of young people blighted and traumatically affected by sexual abuse."

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James and Anna's daughter, Bella, was six when they discovered she had been sexually assaulted in the playground for six weeks by two boys.

"She burst into tears, she just dissolved in front of me," Anna says.

Anna and James went straight to the police, but were told that as the boys were under the age of criminal responsibility they could not be charged.

The family say they had to fight to get the police to make a record of the incident.

They are now taking legal action against the local authority, as they say the school failed in its duty of care.

"We have all of these unheard victims... and they're unheard because there's no register, because there's no crime," Anna says.

Since March 2013 a total of 1,852 children under the age of 10 were reported to police for sexual offences.

The youngest was a four-year-old accused of attacking another boy, aged five, in Northumbria.

Teachers have a duty to report an alleged assault by an adult, according to the Department for Education, but there is no such obligation if a child is accused schools are advised to follow their own child protection procedures.

"School leaders and schools want to get it right, but they're not always getting the help and support they need," Sarah Hannafin, policy adviser for the National Association of Headteachers, told Panorama.

"There needs to be some more clarity in terms of the specific procedures that schools must take."

Of the sexual offences perpetrated by under-18s, 74% resulted in no further action, according to responses from 36 out of 43 police forces in England and Wales.

Mr Bailey said such cases are very difficult to prosecute.

"You're dealing with people who'll be reluctant; you're dealing with cases whereby there's been a relationship in the past.

"It's very much a case of the Crown Prosecution Service deciding to charge, invariably on the word of one person against another."

The Department for Education said: "Sexual assault is a crime and any allegation should be reported to the police.

"Schools should be safe places and they have a duty to protect all pupils and listen to any concerns."

Panaroma programme on subject was shown on 9/10/17 Page | 57

Until you see someone go through this, you can’t connect with it Jon Severs spent three days shadowing two Met Police units charged with tackling online sex crimes against children. What follows lays bare the harrowing experiences that officers face every day in the fight to bring offenders to justice. But police fear their efforts are not enough – and are pleading with teachers to help by making children realise the risks.

Dan fiddles with the cast on his left arm. It’s there for arthritis and he claws at its end, where the blue material meets his hand. It’s partly a nervous tick, the clawing.

Mostly, he does it when he thinks I am uncomfortable – or when he thinks I am about to be uncomfortable – with what he has said or is about to say. Over the course of our conversation, he journeys to the end of the cast with the fingers of his right hand again, and again, and again.

You see, our discussions are very uncomfortable. Dan – we can’t use his real name for security reasons – is one of the most experienced officers working within the Metropolitan Police (Met) Predatory Offenders Unit (POU), or the paedophile unit, as you or I might know it. What he sees every day is what most people would never want to see, what most people could not see without a severe and lasting impact on their mental health.

“I have to see the baby rapes, I have to see the abuse of children. Every day,” he says. “We get psychological support. But everyone has a limit. Some may break along the way.”

Over the past five years, Dan has witnessed a change in the pictures he sees. Where once it was clear children in the images were under duress, or you had adults in the frame abusing the children, suddenly you had self-generated images: children’s selfies. And it wasn’t just pictures, but videos.

“These children are exposing themselves,” Dan explains. “There are no adults in the picture [and in some cases] there are children touching children. The only time you see an adult is when you see the little square in the corner of the screen – that’s the person they are talking to via the webcam, and that is usually a man masturbating.”

The internet changed things. Then broadband changed things even more. Not just how children could be abused, but the nature of the abused and the abuser. Now, anyone can become an abuser; now anyone can be abused; and now, often, neither see themselves in those categories.

For some, online sexual abuse is now just “being a teenager” – it’s even, as one victim put it, “a bit of a laugh”.

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This is why I was sat in an office with Dan, on the sixteenth floor of the Met building near Earl’s Court in central London. It’s why I spent three days shadowing the POU and its sister unit, the Sexual Exploitation Team (SET). It’s why I am writing this article.

The Met – indeed, every police force in the UK – is worried about online sexual abuse and the fact that it’s often a pathway to physical sexual abuse. The messages of warning to children are not getting through. The seriousness and the prevalence of the offences are not getting through.

The police want help.

They want teachers to help.

Dangers of Snapchat Detective inspector Dave Kennett reads through the case sheet that his colleagues have prepared. On it are 11 crimes that have been reported overnight in the Met police jurisdiction and that have been selected as possible cases that may fall under his team’s remit to investigate, rather than that of the borough police. As head of the SET, he’s looking for a particular type of case.

“Exploitation: is there a power imbalance in the relationship?” he explains. “That could be because of age, because there are drugs or money involved, because the boy is the school captain of the football team, the boy could be a gang member. The definition is quite subjective and it is up to us to try to interpret the law.”

Every single case on this list has an online element to it – the police include anything involving social media and the internet in this category. Nine out of the 11 cases originated on, or were facilitated by, messages on Snapchat. Several involve rape.

Kennett ends up accepting all but one as his team’s responsibility.

This is normal, he says. The number of cases that make it past the borough police to his door averages about 10 per day. Often, it’s teenage girls being groomed by older men, but it’s just as likely to be peer-to-peer, where offender and victim are of similar age. Almost every case has an online element to it.

The victims in these online cases are getting younger, Kennett says. They are now regularly as young as eight years old.

To be clear: these are primary-aged children who are either groomed by strangers via their phone and in chatrooms, and who then send explicit pictures and videos of themselves to those strangers; or these are children sending each other explicit images and being exploited as a result.

Kennett reels off examples from memory. He has plenty of them. A nine-year-old girl groomed via Instagram, who sent naked pictures of herself to an adult male; an 11year-old boy who was groomed in less than 20 minutes via Instagram, and sent explicit images of himself to a “girl” of 13 (in reality, a suspected adult male Page | 59

paedophile, though the case is unsolved); a 12-year-old girl who sent explicit images to another 12-year-old, which were then passed around the school.

These cases, and more like them, add to the numerous examples of older children who have been groomed, who have shared explicit images and video via social channels or chatrooms. There are also the cases in which children have sent images and videos voluntarily.

And then there are the cases where it is children – those under the age of 18 – doing the grooming.

“You get young offenders,” explains detective inspector Philip Royan, head of the POU. “In a couple of cases, I have found a vast array of imagery of young girls on a young person’s computer.”

It may surprise you that a child of 8 or 9 – maybe even younger – could be groomed via the internet in less than the time it takes for you to read this magazine. And it may surprise you that a predatory offender (ie, someone who seeks out such images and manipulates others to get them) can be a child. This does not fit with the stereotypes of older teens simply making mistakes or old men in flasher macs with bags of sweets in their pocket. But that’s the thing with online sexual abuse, says Kennett: you have to forget everything you thought you knew about it.

“Online is different [to old-style contact abuse],” he explains. “We need to get rid of those perceptions of contact abuse when we are talking about online exploitation.”

To do that, you don’t just have to start from scratch with how you envisage an offender, but also with how you imagine a victim. It’s about resetting what you thought was safe and what you feared. It’s about recognising just how messed up things have become – and taking some collective blame for it.

Becoming a victim Every creation or distribution of a sexually explicit image, or video, of a child is a crime, but there are many different circumstances in which such a crime can take place.

At one end of the spectrum, you have two teenagers in a relationship who share explicit material of themselves exclusively with each other. That is a crime, but not one that the police will typically pursue.

“If they share images between them, and they are not shared to others and there is no exploitation, there is a crime, but who do we arrest? Who do we give a sexual offences record to?” asks Kennett.

“We are not in the business of criminalising teenage sexual discovery.”

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A step up from that is a child sending an explicit image of themselves to another person with whom they are not in a relationship, and where there has been no grooming or exploitation – the receiver of that image is usually a member of their peer group. If the person receiving that image does nothing with it, then again it is unlikely to arrive on a crime sheet. But if that image is shared, you may begin to see some police involvement.

Then you have those cases in which someone is actively seeking explicit material.

This could be between children of the same age. Kennett says this is often about blackmail, where the aim is to offer non-distribution of the images in return for the (usually) girl doing something they don’t want to do: to have sex or engage in some other sexual practice with the holder of the image; hold drugs or weapons for a gang; or provide access to other girls. It could simply be about bullying, too, he says.

The offenders may groom their victim, or they may get the images through other means (coercion, hacking, stealing from friends’ phones, etc).

Finally, on the far end of the spectrum are predatory offenders. Here, an adult offender will groom a victim to get an image or video, and then use that as leverage for further explicit material generation or, in the most extreme cases, to engineer a meeting for sexual contact with the child.

You may not be shocked by the first two categories. The idea that young people send each other explicit images of themselves is now almost accepted as part of growing up. Many adults do it, too. But Dan talks extensively about how the desensitisation to sexual imagery or acts leads to the problems we see at the more extreme end of exploitation – the latter two categories mentioned above. Porn is to blame, he says.

“Social attitudes have changed,” he explains. “In the past, if I wanted to see some porn, I would have to buy a magazine and I would have to use those images time and time again. Those images, which were very ‘vanilla’, would then make an imprint on how I viewed women as I grew up and how I viewed sex.

“Now, as a teenager, you have porn sites with hundreds of not just images, but full videos, and those videos are in different categories of sex. They may include threesomes, anal sex, bukkake, scat. That makes those things mainstream.”

Kennett explains that this leads to replication in teenagers’ own lives. “It is now the norm that sexual activity will take place between two young people and they will film it,” says Kennett. “It is the norm to take explicit pictures of yourself.”

Dan adds: “We see a lot of bathroom shots, guys and girls exposing themselves – these kids share them with each other.”

The omnipresence of porn and society’s reaction to it – along with the technology to make videos and images being in the hands of most children – has not just made the creation of sexual images and video normal, but made niche types of sex mainstream.

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Even schools have stopped being shocked. Dan cites an example in which parents raised concerns at a school about their daughter sending explicit images to another student, who in turn distributed them to others in the year group. The response was: this is normal behaviour, don’t worry, it’s teenage experimentation, it will blow over, we have some great PSHE resources we can share…

Just think about the message that all of this conveys, he says. Think about how this acceptance, this normalisation, influences the behaviour of teenagers.

From a victim’s perspective For example, let’s look at peer-to-peer abuse from the perspective of the victim, where the offender and victim are the same age or very close in age. You are 13 years old and a boy in your year (it is almost always a male offender) asks for an image of you exposing yourself. You do it, because everyone does it, right? He says you are pretty, he says he likes you. It’s just a laugh, just one picture.

And then you send it. And then he says he is going to send the image to your friends, to your parents. Unless…

Another example, and this time there’s a predatory offender: you’re on a social media platform or in a chatroom, or you are playing games online, and a message pops up from what seems to be a young girl or boy, and she or he is saying you look great, really pretty, and they want to see more of you – can you send them a picture?

They’ll send you some pictures back.

You don’t know them, but everyone does this. This is normal, right? You send it. It’s just a bit of fun. You send more, and then they ask for videos and you send those, too.

If you’re lucky, your parents might spot the messages at this stage and report them, or a friend will. But when the SET officers intervene, they say the children are embarrassed, but they rarely perceive the seriousness of the situation.

“Because it is not physical, because it is all online, it is not real to them,” says Danielle Power, acting detective sergeant in the SET. “They just do not see the danger.”

She says she has dealt with many cases in which the victim even says they think the situation is funny.

If this activity does not come to the attention of the police, then it goes one of two ways, says Kennett: “The [offender] will admit to being a horrible 50-year-old and will say I am going to send these pictures to your mum or friends, and now I want you to do x or y. Or they just keep going, they just want the images, and they keep going.”

In one case the team worked on, the offender sent an 11-year-old child a video of what he wanted her to do. It was a sexually explicit video. And it was a video featuring another 10- or 11-year-old child.

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Yet another scenario: you are 15 years old and someone contacts you to tell you they are a modelling agent. They tell you that you could be a model. They ask you to send them some images. They tell you it needs to start with some glamour stuff. And you agree, it can’t do any harm. Then they tell you it needs to be porn – it’s great money, a great place to start out, everyone does it. No one will see it, it will be distributed abroad. And you do that, too, because those videos – you’ve seen plenty of them – seem harmless. Maybe even glamorous. You’re safe in your room – they can’t get you. Everyone does it.

Power had a case like that. The “modelling agent”, posing as a female, was a man in his twenties living with his parents. He’d tricked countless girls into creating explicit material.

Sometimes the approach is less subtle, she adds. “A man was getting girls to strip on a website called AdultWork – he handled everything, including the payment from the website that was meant to go to the girls,” she recalls. “Rather than the girls being paid after 28 days from the website, he would pay them himself in advance. And he would give them extra money, so saying something like, ‘Here is 500 quid for a holiday.’

“He would then say ‘You now owe me £700’ and tell them they had to be recorded having sex with him, so they could upload the video in order to earn the money back to pay him. One victim was 16. [The offender] put a deposit down on a flat, he gave her drugs, and the videos just got worse and worse. It was violent, extremely explicit.”

One final example: you are in a chatroom and a message pops up. You open it to find a video of a man masturbating, asking you to expose yourself. (This is what some offenders do now: it’s a numbers game, and if they don’t get a hit, they move on.

After all, there are plenty of other girls on social media.) It’s no longer shocking to see a man masturbating on screen because you’ve seen material like that before. You may have even seen classmates doing it. And it’s normal to expose yourself, too, right? It’s only online. It’s harmless. It’s only a bit of fun.

“Sometimes the kids watch and think it is a laugh, and the person will ask them to expose themselves, and often they do,” says Dan. Talking about the risk Then he tells me about large groups of children creating explicit material together. He saw something recently that shows just how bad things have become.

“The most I have seen is nine girls in the same room,” says Dan. “And they are kissing each other, doing things to each other, while a man masturbates on his webcam. And the girls are saying things like 'Yeah, go on, look, he’s wanking’, and then they are saying ‘wank over me’, and they are taking their clothes off and touching each other. These are girls aged 9, 10, 11, 12.”

He tries to find the words to describe just how horrific this was, but gives up.

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And then, after a long pause, he says: “We really need to get a grip on this.”

We’ve told children to be careful. We’ve told them more than once. Some children may even parrot the warnings back to you, those tales of danger, snippets of advice, those stories of when things go wrong. But how much have we really communicated?

How much detail have we really gone into – as parents, as teachers, as a society?

Because children don’t seem to realise that the pictures and videos they send to a boyfriend – or a would-be boyfriend, an online groomer or a random man on a social media platform – could end up all over the internet, shared between paedophiles on specialist websites, on bestiality websites, on gore websites.

Dan, Kennett, Power and the others have to sit through graphic videos of people having sex with animals, and they have to trawl through videos of things such as Mexican drug cartels decapitating a rival with a chainsaw. Because that’s the sort of site on which paedophiles hang out. That’s the sort of place where they swap selfies and videos. It’s where that sort of thing is acceptable.

Children don’t seem to realise you can never delete the images, that they exist everywhere and anywhere simultaneously – that they may resurface at any time. Dan explains that the same images crop up over and over again. The police delete them, they resurface – it’s a cycle that never ends.

Children don’t seem to realise that it is not all normal, the things they see in porn, the things they do to each other, the things they send to each other. They’ll realise later, when they get into a real relationship. They’ll recognise how serious it really was. But now?

Children don’t seem to realise how much information about themselves they are giving to an offender. “They will talk about who their friends are, where they go to school, where they have been. They even send pictures of themselves in their school uniforms,” says Kennett. And they don’t know that when they send an image or video from one phone to another while the location settings are on, some simple software can tell the offender exactly where they are located. They don’t know that all of this might mean that the offender knows where their bedroom is, that the offender can watch the bedroom, that the offender can see when they leave, when they arrive, when they are alone.

Finally, children don’t seem to realise that simply sending a naked photo of themselves to a stranger, or to someone they thought was a friend, someone they thought they loved, might eventually result in a rape. It might end in a situation where they want to take their own life. It might, in the most extreme cases, eventually result in murder. It’s rare, but it’s not as rare as you might think – or hope.

“Self-harm and suicide are a risk. There are many documented cases of this,” says Kennett. He urges people to watch a video message by Canadian teenager Amanda

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Todd (bit.ly/AmandaToddYouTube), who went on to commit suicide after being exploited online.

But maybe children do realise it. Maybe they are aware of everything that has been documented in this feature. And maybe they still do it because they don’t believe they will become one of Kennett’s cases, one of Dan’s cases, one of Power’s cases.

So some blame the kids. The attitude that we as adults did all we could, that this was unstoppable, even that “she was asking for it” is far too common, says Kennett. “The victim-blaming can happen across the board – police, social services, schools – and we guard against that, we watch for it, we make sure that does not happen here,” he says.

Taking responsibility But Power still sees it in the eyes of juries, when a girl is kicking off while on the stand, full of bravado, full of anger, full of “this has not affected me, I don’t care”.

They don’t see beyond that.

And we are quick to blame the social media companies, too: they let this happen.

They provide the link. If it wasn’t for them, our children would be safe.

But Dan says it’s not the fault of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram or anything else.

“Yes, there is a moral obligation [for social media companies to help], and many do actually help us, but are they the problem? In reality, how can Google really control it?” he asks. “We have to get out of the blame culture. We are blaming a commercial organisation for human behaviour. We are taking aim at the wrong place.”

And it’s definitely not the fault of the children, he says: “Something has gone wrong.

And it is not the children’s fault. We have to fix this, not blame them.”

It’s no one’s fault but our own, he stresses. So what can we do?

First we need to recognise that there is no profile of a victim: they could be as young as 5 or 6, and they may not be a vulnerable child, but the top-set girl with all the friends and all the confidence.

And then we have to recognise that we have opened the door to an environment in which children think all of this is OK, and we need to find a way to close it. Or at least to manage that environment.

“You would not send a child to the park on their own with no advice,” says Dan. “You would not let them cross a road without advice. We warn them about strangers. And for all these things, we drill them on the rules, on safety until we are satisfied they are safe. And even if the parents do not do that, there is extensive advice about all that in school. We have all this covered. But the internet? Smartphones? We just let them do it.”

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He says we all need to talk more openly about the dangers, as well as the need to scaffold internet access; and we should restrict use of phones until we know children are as safe as they can be.

We also need to be unafraid to talk about sex and porn, highlighting the myths, explaining that all those videos on all those porn sites are not reality, and that this thing you watch can create multiple issues, that you can even become addicted.

“We need to get over the embarrassment,” says Dan, “to talk to children about pornography and say to them, ‘You are going to see things that are not normal – threesomes, being tied up etc – and these are not things everyone does, but porn sites make it seem like they are.’ We can’t do that if we are too embarrassed to talk about sex.”

And we should not hide away from what our children can be exposed to.

“The information has to be age-appropriate, age-relevant,” says Dan. “We should be warning children at all ages, but doing it in the right way.”

You might argue that this is not the job of a teacher. The police have a lot of time for that opinion.

The officers at the Met have all sat their own children down – they have restricted their internet access, scaffolded their knowledge of the net and talked to them about porn.

“My son would definitely say I am overprotective,” admits Kennett. But he says sometimes teachers are the only ones young people will listen to.

“The teachers, I think they are in a very difficult situation,” he says. “It takes time to learn all this stuff – time they don’t have. This is not their job, this is the job of parents. But the problem – or the reality – is that it is often the teacher that is the most trusted person in a young person’s life.”

He adds that they may be the only person willing to have this conversation, too.

But it’s just words, right? After all, schools have tried. Teachers have got great PSHE resources, great safety advice in the computing curriculum. They’ve done their absolute best.

It has no effect.

Well, ask yourself, says Dan, did you really mean it? Did you really understand it? Did you go far enough? Did you feel it?

“It is not about sex education, about internet-safety advice, about firewalls on the school wi-fi,” he says.

It’s not about a new SRE curriculum.

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The officers stress that words are not enough on their own.

An emotional connection to what you are talking about is key to children understanding how serious this is, as well as keeping them safe.

This is why this feature has detailed so many cases and why the details have been so graphic. It is why we have given Lorin LaFave four pages to tell the story of how her son, Breck, was groomed and murdered. And it’s why the Met has opened up to us.

If teachers and parents – society as a whole – do not understand how serious the danger is, if they do not understand what really happens and if they don’t get scared – if they don’t fear the pain of this happening to someone they love – then how can we expect children to take it seriously?

“Is it put across in schools in a procedural way? Do [teachers or parents] do it just because they have to? Without that emotional connection – without that deeper understanding – I don’t know if it will have an impact,” says Power.

“Until you see someone go through this – until you see the videos, read the grooming messages, view the videos that are extorted out of these girls, see what can happen next – you can’t really understand it, you can’t connect with it and you cannot be passionate with it.

“That’s the problem: as a society we can be very similar in our reactions, as the girls are – it’s online, no harm done. But it is harmful. It ruins lives.”

Jon Severs is commissioning editor of Tes. With thanks to the Metropolitan Police – and DI Kennett, acting sergeant Power and ‘Dan’ in particular – for their time, cooperation and for enabling this feature to take place What is the scale of the problem?

Owing to the nature of how sexual offences against children are recorded and prosecuted, it is incredibly difficult to get a full picture of the prevalence of cases involving online factors.

And, according to the Met’s officers, prosecution for lesser crimes is sometimes the only option due to a lack of evidence or other factors.

Tes contacted every police authority in the UK to ask about the number of cases of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in the past three years. Many did not hold, or could not divulge, the figures, and for some forces the crimes were being categorised differently.

Below are the figures from those forces that could supply information, which clearly show a rise in the number of cases.

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So you think you know what a typical victim and offender look like?

You probably have a picture in your head of what an offender looks like. And you probably think you know what makes a child vulnerable to being groomed, or the type of child that would send an explicit image of themselves to another person.

You’re almost certainly wrong on all counts.

Both boys and girls can be victims, from every section of society, every background and every state of mental health.

“Any child or young person who has access to the internet is a potential victim,” says detective inspector Dave Kennett. “There is no ‘type’ of child or young person this happens to online.

“Just because they’re from a good home with loads of money, or if they are outwardly confident, or a high-achiever – they can still be a victim. It is classless, and it is across the cultures.”

Offenders, too, do not always match the stereotype. They can be fathers, brothers, sons, policemen, teachers, doctors or even children themselves.

Police officer ‘Dan’ explains that some offenders have always had, and always will have, an attraction to children. And then there is the new type of offender, born out of the same societal shift that has made children more likely to become victims.

“You arrest some people and they now say, ‘Thank you for stopping me, help me,’” says Dan. “These are offenders who have become overexposed to porn – some will masturbate seven or eight times a day, at their desk, at work. They start getting erectile dysfunction when viewing the more ‘normal’ porn. Offenders talk about this a Page | 68

lot. So they try to find harder stuff. They move on to threesomes, then BDSM [bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism], and eventually they get to bestiality.

Eventually, some start looking at children.”

At the extreme end of the spectrum, the addiction can be grotesque. “You have these guys in their masturbatoriums,” explains Dan. “They sit there with tissues that are soiled and they have wee bottles and some have buckets they have defecated in.

These guys believe any time not masturbating is wasted time.”

And the abuse can go beyond sex. “Sometimes the abuse reaches the point that the offender will ask the child to cut themselves, to write the offender’s name with a razor blade on their arm,” he reveals.

Dan draws a parallel with domestic violence: it becomes about control.

You can’t stop those who have always been attracted to children from being so, he believes, but he does think you can help new offenders to change – if you get the chance: the suicide risk among those caught downloading, distributing or creating explicit imagery of children is among the highest of all types of offender.

Catching a paedophile It is incredibly difficult to catch a predatory offender. The police are usually reliant on the victim telling someone what is going on, or the parents discovering messages and making a report.

“I would suspect there are many, many cases we never see, but where exploitation is happening – be that because the child does not see it as exploitation or they are too ashamed to tell someone,” says detective inspector Dave Kennett.

Often, the child will not want to cooperate. The police cannot force them to unlock their phone to see any conversations. But even if the police do gain access, they often only have a URL or username to go on – and getting the personal details behind those can take months. Social media companies are not set up to respond to the large volume of requests they receive from police forces around the world, and legal complications arise due to contrasting laws in different countries. It can take six months to get one email address.

The situation is further complicated if the grooming occurs on a platform such as Kik. “Kik – this is a big problem,” says Kennett. “It is a chat app that is encrypted and it is very, very difficult to track offenders. So what we see a lot is that the first stages of grooming happen on Instagram or Snapchat, and then as soon as a rapport is built, they transfer the chat to Kik. Kik does help [the police] where it can, but it is very, very tough to get the information.”

A lot of the time, offenders are successfully convicted following “old-fashioned police work”, according to Kennett (the exact methods of which are kept secret in order to avoid ‘instructing’ paedophiles), but teachers can help increase the conviction rate.

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“For us to be able to do our jobs, we need to know what was said, when it was said, and on which platform and device. Very often [a child] will talk to a social worker or a teacher about the exploitation and we need them to get this information. We need to work more closely with those people, and they need to be more aware of how crucial they can be to investigations,” he says.

Acting detective sergeant Danielle Power adds that victims are often unwilling to disclose details, but if teachers are patient, information will emerge. “The victims do realise [what has happened] eventually,” she says. “But what they need to come to that conclusion is someone they can trust, and the space with that person to spend the time thinking it over. Teachers are key here – they already have that trust. You have to keep being there, keep going back to them and at some point they will likely say something to you.”

Beware the child facilitators One area of grooming that is rarely spoken about is the way in which paedophiles can use children they have already groomed to groom others.

“There are cases where the original victim, who may not be particularly vulnerable, then passes that offender to her friends who are more vulnerable, and that offender then has more power over those victims,” says detective inspector Dave Kennett.

“You get female facilitators,” adds acting detective sergeant Danielle Power. “That can be quite common. You will get girls that are groomed and then they groom other girls to be part of that suspect’s group.”

And ‘Dan’ says you also have to be aware that adults can be groomed and are often used by paedophiles to get to children.

“They abuse the children for the paedophiles and take pictures and videos, or they hand over the children,” he says.

Tes talks to…Lorin LaFave Breck Bednar was murdered in 2014 by a man who groomed Breck online. Here, his mother tells Will Hazell why she believes schools have a crucial role in protecting young people from internet predators.

Breck Bednar had a knack for figuring out how things worked right from when he was just a little boy.

“His favourite activities were building, making, putting things together,” remembers his mother, Lorin LaFave. “He just had that sort of brain.”

His precocious intelligence took him first to Lego and then, unsurprisingly, to technology and computers.

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“It was just a really natural fit for him,” says Lorin. “He was always learning how the computer worked and how to make it faster and more efficient.”

He had already decided his career would either be in technology or that he would be a pilot – he had joined the Air Cadets to learn more about flying – when, in 2013, he came into contact with Lewis Daynes on an internet gaming platform.

Breck was groomed online by Daynes over a number of months. And then, in February 2014, aged just 14, he was lured to 18-year-old Daynes’ flat in Essex where he was stabbed to death.

Lorin has relived her son’s murder, and the events that led to it, many times over.

First, because she had to, through the investigations, the trial, and the apologies of the police for not acting when she urged them to. But now, she does it because she feels she needs to.

She’s a campaigner for internet safety at the Breck Foundation – a charity set up in his memory to help young people stay safe online. She wants teachers to help her keep other young people safe.

An American, Lorin moved to the UK with her husband, Barry, shortly before Breck was born. Though the couple later divorced, Breck was brought up in a loving family environment with his younger siblings, who are triplets.

Lorin was a teaching assistant at Breck’s primary school. “I would observe him playing with the boys who had the same sorts of passions…this creative, clever group of boys who loved to build and make things,” she recalls.

The Lego gang Lorin nicknamed them the “Lego gang”.

After primary school, Breck fell temporarily out of touch with the boys because they went to different secondary schools. But, in Year 9, the Lego gang got back together through an online gaming group.

Lorin was relaxed about Breck spending time with his friends online: “I knew those boys…so I felt really confident that it was a nice place for him to play.”

But because the boys used to talk to each other over the internet while they were gaming, and with Breck’s room next to the kitchen, it wasn’t long before Lorin overheard an unfamiliar voice. It sounded like a “deeper, man’s voice”.

“I went into Breck’s room and said ‘who are you online with?’” Breck pointed to a picture on his screen of a “really attractive, young boy” who looked like a “California prom king”.

“Immediately I didn’t feel that the voice fitted the picture,” Lorin says.

Instead what came into her head was the image of a “40-year-old, fat paedophile sitting behind a computer in his underpants”.

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It’s a trope we’re all familiar with, but Lorin thinks this was one of her “first big mistakes”.

“I and others have this stereotype that all predators are older men that look creepy,” she explains. “A lot of the time, predators can be the children’s own age, or slightly older, and then the child doesn’t think they’re a danger.”

Daynes told the boys he was a teenage tech millionaire, and variously claimed to live in New York, London and elsewhere. He also said he was doing undercover work for the US government and the FBI. Early concerns Unsurprisingly, Lorin was sceptical. But when she voiced her early concerns with Breck, he would reply that his friends had been “gaming with this guy for years”.

This is a message that schools need to communicate to their students, she says: “Just because a person is a friend of someone else you know and trust doesn’t make that other person safe.”

Lorin tried to find out more about Daynes, and, at first, he was engaging. “I could see why the boys looked up to him,” she says. “He was well spoken…he would be able to converse with me in a way that an adult would.”

He was also evasive, however. “I would try to ask him questions about living in New York; I would try to ask him about his work, but he would always sort of brush me off,” she recalls.

Lorin first started to suspect that Daynes was exerting a malign influence on the boys when she noticed changes in Breck’s personality.

“The reason I felt that Breck was being groomed right in the early days was because his ideology was changing,” she says. Daynes tried to turn the boys against religion and the US and British governments.

Breck also became less responsive to his mother, and started objecting to simple chores around the house. His constant refrain was: “I shouldn’t have to do this because Lewis says I shouldn’t.”

“I started becoming the bad guy, which is what will happen with a predator,” Lorin explains. “They will turn the child against the parents, the family or any safe relationships.”

It was at this stage that Lorin shared her concerns with teachers she knew. Though she could see something was wrong, she wasn’t sure what Daynes’ interest was in the boys – she thought it could either be sexual, about radicalisation, or maybe an attempt to get the boys to participate in some sort of “mass hack”.

But none of the teachers she spoke to thought she should be worried. “The kind of advice I got was, ‘Don’t worry, all boys go through this phase.’

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“I used the ‘g’ word – I said ‘groomed’, and nobody had advice for what to do.”

The fact is that “Breck was not on anyone’s radar”. He was an intelligent, well-liked young man who didn’t have “cuts or bruises”, and wasn’t “crying or being bullied openly”.

Another of Lorin’s key messages is that it doesn’t matter whether a child appears obviously vulnerable or not; the groomed child “could be any sort of child”.

Eventually, Lorin contacted Surrey Police. She couldn’t have been clearer about her concerns: “I said I needed to speak to the department for grooming – once again, I used the ‘g’ word.”

The call handler was unhelpful to say the least, says Lorin. “They said, ‘Tell your son to go on a different website.’ This was the most ridiculous advice on the planet because none of our children is on ‘a’ website. They’re using social media, they’re using different apps and messaging services.”

Nevertheless, Lorin handed over all the information she’d managed to glean about Daynes, and she was assured three times that police intelligence would be checked.

“I hung up the phone thinking I had it in hand,” she says.

This was perhaps the biggest missed chance to save Breck’s life – had the police done the check they would have seen that Daynes had been accused of raping a boy and possessing indecent images in 2011, though he wasn’t charged. Surrey Police have since admitted making serious mistakes in how they handled the case, and have issued an unreserved apology.

Next, along with the parents of the other boys, Lorin organised an intervention meeting. They laid down a simple ultimatum: the parents would have to meet Daynes in person – “just a coffee, a chat” – otherwise the boys would have to break off their contact with him. The friends defended Daynes to the hilt and said that he would never agree to meet with the parents.

The parents then banned their children from making contact with him.

But unbeknown to Lorin, Daynes had instructed Breck to secretly record the meeting on an MP3 player. He knew the parents were on to him.

“Everything became that much more dangerous because it went underground,” Lorin says. On the advice of the police, she had confiscated Breck’s technology, but once again Daynes was one step ahead – he’d secretly couriered a brand new smartphone to Breck so they could continue to communicate.

The last time Lorin saw Breck alive was before he went away on a school trip to Spain. “We hugged and kissed and said goodbye to each other, and when he left, I was just so, so proud of him,” she says.

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A ‘viral’ murder He had seemed back to his old self. But what Lorin didn’t know was that while Breck was away, he was being “obsessed over and stalked” by Daynes, who was bombarding him with “non-stop text messages, voicemails, calls insisting that Breck get in touch”. He claimed he had important news about his company and that only Breck could help.

When Breck returned from Spain, he went to stay with his dad. Daynes told Breck to give his dad a cover story that he was going over to his friend Tom’s house. Daynes then sent Breck £100 for a taxi to drive an hour away, to his flat.

Breck was tied up with duct tape and murdered in a sadistic and sexually motivated attack. Horrifically, Daynes posted news of the death online, which went viral.

Breck’s siblings received texts saying “so sorry to hear about your brother” before the family and police even knew what had happened. Daynes is now serving a life sentence for the murder.

“I decided to set up the foundation two weeks after Breck was killed,” Lorin says. “I have to have something good come out of this horrible thing because I can’t bear it otherwise.”

The Breck Foundation has the tagline “play virtual, live real”, to remind young people that friends made online are not the same as their real friends.

Lorin says of one of the foundation’s core messages is, “Never, ever meet up in a private place when you’ve met online.”

The foundation has created simple safety messages with the letters of Breck’s name.

However, Lorin says schools also need to deliver online safety “in an engaging and interesting way – it can’t be a list of rules”.

She recalls that Breck himself had an e-safety assembly at school, but reported it to be “boring”.

“If it’s boring, they’re just going to shut off,” she says. “If I had to give one message [to teachers] it would be to be seek out the resources, videos and stories that are available, sit the children down in a different setting…and open up discussion in a really honest and engaged way.

“Let them talk. Let them talk about sex, about their fears, about what they’ve seen, what they’ve heard, without them being worried that they’ll get in trouble, because it needs to be as real as possible. It cannot feel like a normal school lesson.”

Schools also need to do more to increase awareness among parents, grandparents and other carers. To improve attendance at such meetings, she suggests schools hold family barbecues, or offer “movie nights” to keep children occupied while their parents are given information.

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Lorin believes society is becoming more aware of online safety but she thinks “it’s a never-ending battle”.

“The problem is that technology moves so quickly, there are more predators finding new ways to reach children, and through new apps. It’s a constantly evolving scenario.”

And, of course, there’s always a new generation of young people, teachers and police to educate: “Sadly we’ll never get to a point where we can just tick it off and go ‘we’ve fixed that problem’.”

But in teachers, Lorin says children have one of their strongest allies.

“Thank goodness for teachers,” she says. “Some people will say, ‘Well, PSHE lessons should be taught at home.’”

But while “we can’t rely on every parent to be knowledgeable in every area, we can train teachers to properly educate every child; that’s the best way to reach as many young people as possible”, Lorin says. “I have the greatest respect for teachers who devote their lives to ensuring that those young people they look after become the best selves that they can.”

The Breck Foundation’s safety messages Lorin LaFave has devised a simple way to remember how to stay safe online: B – Be Aware, originally, but more recently, it has come to stand for “believe”. “We have to get people to believe that there’s dangers,” says Lorin.

R – Report: “It’s better to report something that ends up being harmless than to miss a report that could save someone’s life.”

E – Educate: “Everyone needs educating in these areas, but also ‘empowerment’. We have to empower young people to help look after each other,” explains Lorin.

C – Communicate – “It’s so important we communicate these messages, we get young people to communicate with us, that we communicate with our children.”

K – Keep safe: “Our ultimate goal”.

From TES 2017

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Think you know all the risks to children online? So did TV’s Kaye Adams...until a stranger stalked her daughter Kaye Adams talks about the importance of checking privacy settings online She shared how a stranger contacted her daughter, inviting her to a conventionShe contacted global security expert Will Geddes who designed a safety guide He listed and explained some of the newest and most terrifying pitfalls online

By KAYE ADAMS FOR THE DAILY MAIL PUBLISHED: 23:08, 25 July 2018 |

Dancing around her bedroom, miming to pop songs, my daughter was oblivious to who might be watching the videos she was posting online of her harmless fun. And until recently, to my shame, so was I. It was only when Bonnie, then ten, started receiving increasingly keen messages from one viewer that alarm bells began ringing.

Complimenting her on her looks and talent, the fan — a stranger — begged her to attend a ‘user convention’.

Flattered, but unnerved, Bonnie was sensible enough to confide in me. I felt sick to my stomach.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the popular site she had been using, www.musical.ly — but I’d failed to ensure she had adequate privacy settings.

For weeks, anyone could watch her videos. Worse, they could message her privately and might have worked out her location from clues such as her school uniform hanging on the door.

I shudder to think how easily she could have gone to that ‘convention’. As it was, we installed privacy settings and she never heard from the man again.

It was a wake-up call. Suddenly, I realised just how vulnerable our children are, so trusting that they don’t realise what information they are giving away.

They are being exposed to risks in ever more sophisticated ways — and can also fall prey to blackmail and identity theft. The internet can suck your child into danger in seconds.

Not long after Bonnie’s experience last year, our family had another brush with the dark side of the internet. It was when Snapchat — the social media app most beloved of teenagers — introduced Snap Map, a feature that allows users to track their friends’ whereabouts.

My elder daughter, Charley, then 14, joined, but I was blissfully ignorant of this until she went on a sleepover.

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She had been gone an hour when my friend and colleague, TV presenter Nadia Sawalha, rang: ‘Do you know where Charley is?’ she asked. ‘Because I do.’

She had just learnt about Snap Map from her own 15-year-old daughter, Maddie. I was stunned as Nadia reeled off the exact address and the names of the other girls on the sleepover — all gleaned from Maddie’s phone.

While Maddie is a genuine friend, Charley had 2,500 other ‘friends’ on the site, most of them total strangers and all with access to her exact location. Anyone could stalk her. I disabled the app.

The experience made Nadia and me determined to learn about the dangers and to help other parents understand them.

We filmed a short Facebook video about Snap Map — it received 28 million hits in the first three days.

That’s when we realised there are thousands of parents like us, eager to protect their children, but not sure about the dangers.

So we called in global security expert Will Geddes to help us write a guide for parents.

Will has spent the past 25 years working beside the world’s best hackers, coders and programmers.

What I learnt from him terrified me. But I’ve also learnt that ignorance is no excuse.

From the moment our children start using a computer, they should know not everyone online is friendly.

So, how can you protect your children? Here, Will Geddes explains some of the pitfalls .

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HOW FAKE SNAPS CAN TRAP KIDS I was recently called in by parents worried about their teenage daughter, who was secretly selling off her possessions.

They feared she was buying drugs. Instead, the girl confessed she had been approached online by a stranger who had accessed her social media and created fake porn pictures of her.

He was threatening to send the photos to her schoolfriends and teachers unless she paid up.

I advised reporting the threat to the police. Extortionists are usually bluffers who target children as they are more likely to be intimidated by threats. When you don’t pay, they often just seek another victim.

But pay up and the demands will continue or increase and the victim may be lured into ever more compromising behaviour.

The family were shaken, but never heard another word.

Remind your child not to trust anyone on the internet. Unless you know them in the real world, they are strangers. Explain that they should never send a picture they wouldn’t want all their friends or family to see.

Insist they never use a site that requires the use of a webcam.

BEWARE MASSIVE GAMES CHARGES Those phone games might seem harmless fun, but they are big business. These days, game purchases make up 85 per cent of the £28 billion global app market — and even free ones may have in-app purchases designed to squeeze money out of children. One Smurfs game involved selling baskets of berries to decorate the Smurfs’ village. The game was free — but the berries weren’t. One child ran up a bill of £1,200!

Don’t give your child’s phone or computer access to your bank account. Turn off oneclick shopping on accounts such as Amazon and, if you let them use your phone, don’t save your credit card details.

WHY YOUR CHILD’S AN EASY TARGET Criminals know how heavily we rely on our computers, so a common trick is threatening to disable them unless you pay up.

Often, their gateway into your computer is your child, who may be less careful about clicking on suspicious links or images. So warn even very young children of the dangers of visiting websites to download free music, films or games. Many are packed with hidden viruses that could allow hackers to control your computer.

A new ‘malware’ scam — involving harmful files being sneaked on to your computer — emerges on the internet every 4.2 seconds.

It goes without saying that you should regularly update all your software and security settings.

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Remind your child to back up their devices regularly, if they know how, or do it for them, either with an external hard drive you plug into your computer or using the cloud (a safe way to store data).

KEEP YOUR LOCATION HIDDEN Most phones have built-in tracking software — useful if they’re lost or stolen. But be wary of apps that transmit information about your location, such as Snap Map or Find My Friends. It’s safest to turn these off. Go into settings on your child’s device and, under the privacy menu, click the option to ‘disable location sharing’. The wording may differ between devices.

Alternatively, if it’s an app using your child’s location legitimately — such as a taxi or weather app — then consider clicking ‘only while using’. Explain to your child that they should fully shut down the app when it’s not in use.

DANGERS OF BUYING ONLINE A client’s teenage son had used a ‘buy and sell’ app to purchase some jeans. The friendly seller told him he could have loads more cut- price clothes, too, but they needed to communicate privately off the site via email. The boy was thrilled when the seller agreed to take second-hand tech in lieu of cash.

“Above all, they should never communicate off-site and never meet in person without an adult” The seller duly arrived at my client’s house — at a pre-arranged time when she was out — and took her son’s iPhone, iPad and Mac. But surprise, surprise, the clothes never turned up. And the seller had used a false email address, so they couldn’t be traced.

Above all, they should never communicate off-site and never meet in person without an adult. Ensure they ask questions. Does the photo show every angle of the product?

Is the seller easy to contact or report through the site?

One boy thought he was buying a boxed PlayStation games console for £200. He was so excited, he didn’t question the listing title, which clearly stated: ‘Sony PlayStation brand new box.’ And that’s what he got — an empty box. As the listing was accurate, there was nothing he could do.

ALWAYS THINK BEFORE YOU CLICK The internet is awash with dodgy sites designed to filch banking and other personal details.

It is called ‘phishing’. Criminals place links in internet pages, emails or messages, often offering something free, but actually linking to sites where your child’s data — and yours — can be stolen.

“Tell your child never to click on a link in a message or email unless they know the sender personally”

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Tell your child never to click on a link in a message or email unless they know the sender personally.

Help your child to spot the telltale signs. Phishing messages are usually urgent. There are often spelling mistakes. The sender’s name may be similar — but not identical — to a legitimate site.

If a suspicious page is already open on your computer and you can’t close it, shut your browser window immediately or restart the device completely. Run anti-virus software to ensure the phishing message hasn’t left anything nasty, such as spyware, on your device.

Ensure your child shops only on secure sites with a locked padlock symbol (or ‘https’) at the start of the web address during checkout and payment.

WATCH OUT FOR WEIGHT-LOSS PILLS Unscrupulous sellers target children and teens with advertising on social media for everything from fake perfume, weight-loss pills and teeth whiteners to illegal recreational drugs.

One mum recently approached me concerned because her 14-year-old son had started exercising excessively. He also had wild mood swings. When she checked his room, she found anabolic steroids he admitted to buying online.

Getting hold of these products online is scarily easy. They can be extremely dangerous in the wrong doses, or they may be counterfeit.

While a website may look professional, that doesn’t mean it’s reputable. Many online pharmacies purport to be based in the UK or U.S., but are actually in Hong Kong, selling products from unregulated labs in China.

Tell your child they must never take medicines bought online.

HELP THEM COVER THEIR TRACKS Everything your child uploads on social media potentially stays online for ever. Mostly it’s harmless, but 90 per cent of employers now check the ‘digital footprint’ of job applicants.

Meanwhile, companies are desperate to harvest data from your child in order to target them with adverts. They are also likely to sell this information on.

That’s why it’s vital not to overshare on social media and give only the minimum information on shopping sites and so on.

Check your child’s online privacy settings. Encourage them not to give their full name, date of birth or any optional information when setting up any online account. Use different usernames on different sites and use software called VPN, which can be downloaded from the internet, to conceal your location. Avoid freebies, too: some huge privacy breaches come from children filling out innocuous-looking surveys or quizzes.

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The epidemic of sexual assaults in our schools: Over the past five years, campaigner LAURA BATES has spoken to thousands of teenagers about relationships. What she’s learned will appal every parent Laura Bates revealed the extent of sexual assaults among young people She says at schools within the UK around one rape happens each day Female student's clothing have been blamed for sexual harassment Laura says teachers should be taught how to deal with harassment and assault

By LAURA BATES FOR THE DAILY MAIL PUBLISHED: 00:23, 30 August 2018

The first time I went into a school to talk to about sex and relationships, I thought there might be some confusion over contraception, or funny questions about body parts.

Instead, I heard a group of students in their early teens joking that ‘rape is a compliment, really’, and ‘it’s not rape if she enjoys it’.

That was five years ago, not long after I’d set up the Everyday Sexism Project, a website which collects people’s experiences of gender inequality — from sexual harassment to discrimination to assault.

I was shocked by the huge number of examples that poured in from teenage girls, so I started visiting schools to talk about sexism and healthy relationships.

Since then, I have visited hundreds of schools and spoken to thousands of teenagers. I hoped that first visit might be an exception, but sadly the views I heard have proved shockingly common.

Bombarded every day with gender stereotypes and sexist images, from advertising to music videos, video games to online porn, young people are scared, confused and sometimes jaw-droppingly misinformed about sex.

I’ve spoken to young people who don’t know it’s possible for a boyfriend to rape his girlfriend. If he’s your boyfriend, they told me, you have no choice but to have sex with him. A rapist is only a stranger in a dark alleyway, not someone you know, even if they’re not giving you any choice.

We’d like to think these problems don’t happen at school. It’s where our children should be safest. Yet the evidence — and the experiences I hear about — suggest that is far from true.

It’s not an exaggeration to describe what’s happening as an epidemic of sexual violence in schools. Yet victims are often blamed, shamed or disbelieved. Many don’t tell anyone what took place.

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In September 2015, a BBC investigation revealed that, over the previous three years, more than 5,500 sexual offences had been reported to police as having happened in UK schools. The figures included more than 600 rapes.

Allowing for the average length of the school term, that’s around one rape a day. And because reporting rates are low for sexual offences, the real figure is likely to be higher.

At least a fifth of offences were carried out by children, ‘peer-on-peer’ abuse, but details of the rest are not known.

A YouGov poll found almost one in three 16- to 18-year-old girls experienced unwanted sexual touching at school.

This could mean that almost a third of teenage girls are being sexually assaulted at school. Sadly, schools don’t always cope well. Parents have contacted me in despair after their children have been raped at school, then made to go back into the same classroom with their abusers.

One mother wrote that her daughter was forced to move to a different school because pupils bullied her, even though she was the victim of a sexual assault, and the school took no action.

Many female students told me about reporting sexual harassment to staff only to be told ‘boys will be boys’ or warned their behaviour or clothing was to blame.

Last December, the Government issued guidance to schools on how to deal with sexual offences, including the fact that students should not be put back in the classroom with a peer who has assaulted them, but that guidance isn’t always followed.

I believe teacher training should include content on dealing with sexual harassment and assault, and schools need dedicated funding to support better training.

Sexual violence at school is sadly widespread and, in my experience, there is no one particular type of school where these problems happen, and no one specific type of student involved, either. Girls are particularly affected and there can be a deep undercurrent of misogyny and sexist bullying in some schools.

Figures show over 70 per cent of 16- to 18-year-olds said they heard sexual name calling such as ‘slut’ or ‘slag’ used towards girls at school several times a week.

The impact may be reflected in figures released this week, which revealed almost a quarter of 14-year-old girls in the UK have self-harmed in the past year (compared to 9 per cent of boys).

Some of these misogynistic ideas may come from online pornography, which presents a very male-dominant view of sex and often shows women being hurt, humiliated or abused.

Access to porn is very widespread among the young: a BBC survey found that 60 per cent have seen it by the age of 14.

Young people I work with often link porn to worrying ideas. One girl shared her experience with the Everyday Sexism website: ‘I am 13 and I am so scared to have Page | 82

sex it makes me cry nearly every day.’ She’d seen porn on a boy’s phone at school and it looked ‘so scary . . . and the woman is crying and getting hurt’.

This might sound shocking but it is a message I have come across again and again. In one school I spoke at, they’d had a rape case involving a 14-year-old boy. A teacher asked him: ‘Why didn’t you stop when she was crying?’ He replied: ‘Because it’s normal for girls to cry during sex.’

Of course the vast majority are not behaving like this, but sexual assault is still far too prevalent, and shockingly under-reported.

The misinformation means sexual relationships can be scary and confusing for boys, too. A young woman at university wrote that she was having sex with her boyfriend for the first time when he started trying to throttle her.

When she managed to push him away, he broke down in tears of relief. He told her he thought that was what women expected.

It’s easy to suggest the answer is just to try to stop young people from accessing porn, but that’s very difficult to achieve. And it wouldn’t solve the wider problem of gender inequality and sexual violence, which doesn’t stem from porn alone but also from deeply ingrained attitudes, normalised sexual harassment and everything, from music videos to video games, that presents women as objects to be dominated by men.

Evidence suggests one thing would make a huge difference: good-quality sex and relationships education. Talking to the young in an age-appropriate way about sexual consent and forming a healthy relationship can be life-changing. It helps them to understand that abuse isn’t normal and that they have the right to reach out for help.

It gives them the tools to form respectful relationships later. And instead of just responding to sexual abuse, it helps prevent it happening in the first place. Experts, teachers and parents all agree it’s a good idea.

However, it isn’t happening. Some schools do a great job, but many don’t. It is not compulsory to teach about sexual consent and healthy relationships and a survey found 75 per cent of young people never learn about consent at school.

The Government has promised to make relationships and sex education (RSE) compulsory, but it is dragging its feet, moving the start date from 2019 to 2020. It is vital there is no more delay.

It’s also easy to think this issue need not be tackled from a young age, but that is a big mistake. Research shows that a quarter of children are 12 or younger when they first watch online porn.

Parents can support their children, too. From a young age, we can teach children about their rights to their own body and the importance of respecting other people’s bodies.

Pointing out gender stereotypes around us is a great way to show children that sexism doesn’t have to be normal, and it shouldn’t limit their ideas about who they are and what they can do.

We can let our children choose from a wide range of toys and clothes, instead of assuming girls will always wear pink or boys never want to play with dolls.

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We can avoid the sexist jokes and sayings that make it easier to devalue girls and women later.

Every child has the right to be safe at school. It’s time we see this epidemic for what it is and take action to fix it.

Nearly one in four girls aged 14 self-harmed in past year, study shows Findings prompt concerns that shortfall in social care funding and lack of support in schools leading to 'crisis in children's mental health' Nearly a quarter of girls aged 14 have self-harmed in the past year, an alarming report shows, prompting renewed calls for the government to address the “crisis in children's mental health”.

A study by the Children’s Society estimates that nearly 110,000 children aged 14 may have self-harmed across the UK during the same 12-month period, including 76,000 girls and 33,000 boys.

Almost half of teenagers who said they were attracted to people of the same gender or both genders had harmed themselves. Children from lower-income households also had a higher than average risk of self-harming.

One in four children worry about their appearance, poll shows One in 10 teenage girls referred to mental health services last year Children needing specialist mental health treatment up by a third The findings have prompted concerns that a shortfall in social care funding and difficulties accessing mental health support are pushing a growing number of teenagers to "crisis point".

One young person told the charity: “I felt like self-harming was what I wanted to do and had to do as there was nothing else I could do. I think there is help for young people but not the right kind of help.

He added: ”Feeling not pretty enough or good enough as other girls did contribute towards my self-harming.”

The research found girls were significantly less happy than boys with their lives as a whole, and with each aspect of life measured in the survey. The largest gender gap was for appearance – over 1.5 points difference on a 10-point scale.

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It comes after a study by the University of Manchester last October found self-harm among teenage girls (10-19) had risen by 68 per cent in three years.

Matthew Reed, chief executive at the Children’s Society, said: “It’s vital that children’s well-being is taken more seriously and that much more is done to tackle the root causes of their unhappiness and support their mental health.

“Schools can play an important part in this and that is why we want the government to make it a requirement for all secondary schools to offer access to a counsellor, regularly monitor children’s well-being and have their mental health provision assessed as part of Ofsted inspections.

“Issues like appearance, gender stereotypes and sexuality should be included in the new Relationships and Sex Education curriculum.

“However, early support for vulnerable children and families in the community, which can help prevent mental health problems from developing, is also vital, and ministers must urgently address the £2bn funding shortfall facing council children’s services departments by 2020.”

Dr Bernadka Dubicka, chair of the child and adolescent faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists said the huge rates of self-harm among were largely due to a shortfall in social care funding and family support, as well as a lack of community child and adolescent psychiatrists.

“These disturbing figures highlight the sheer number of young people continuing to struggle with mental health issues,” she said.

“Bullying at school – including being teased about your sexuality - has been highlighted as a particular worry for young people, and so we welcome the additional funding promised by the government for early intervention in schools.

“Children must be able to access help for their mental health difficulties from services before they fall into crisis.”

Cllr Roy Perry, vice chairman of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, said cuts to local authority budgets meant councils were finding it increasingly difficult to support children.

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“Many councils are being forced to cut early intervention work, including youth services, which helps children avoid reaching crisis point, perform better at school and avoid mental health issues in later life,” he said.

“This is why we are calling for councils and schools to be given the funding to offer independent mental health counselling so pupils have access to support as and when they need it."

Dr Max Davie, officer for health promotion for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) said: “Mental health is one of the biggest health epidemics of our time and is strongly linked to social disadvantage. These latest figures further emphasise this and highlight just how urgent the need for appropriate action is.

“We know that poor mental health can lead to poor employment prospects and an increased risk of drug and alcohol use, so it is important that support is fully inclusive, joined up and offered to children and young people early to give them the best possible chance in later life.”

He said that to ensure the best possible outcomes, primary care, local authority and child health services must collaborate to support all children no matter how they enter the mental health system.

A government spokesperson said: “Making sure children and young people have the right mental health care when they need it is vital. That’s why we are investing an extra £300 million to provide more help in schools, which will include trained staff to provide faster support to children.

“We’ve extended our pilot scheme to deliver training in 20 more areas of the country this year to improve links between 1,200 schools and their mental health services, and as part of our long-term plan for the NHS we will announce more on how we will improve mental health later this year.”

August 29/18 Independent

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One child in every primary school class has been sent a sexual image by an adult, major NSPCC study finds One child in every primary school class has been sent a sexual image by an adult, a major NSPCC study has found.

One in 25 children aged seven to 11 told researchers an adult had sent them a naked or semi-naked picture or video on an app, site or game.

One in 20 secondary pupils aged 11 to 16 also said they had received such an image, equivalent to one in every secondary class, according to the survey of nearly 40,000 children.

One in 50 primary and secondary children admitted they had sent a nude or seminude picture to an adult, raising fears online grooming is far more extensive than previously thought.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, NSPCC chief executive Peter Wanless said the “appalling” targeting of children demonstrated the need for new laws to rein in the social networks and force them to proactively detect groomers using their sites.

“Those images and messages are sent through social networks and texting apps, which recklessly expose children to content and behaviours completely inappropriate to their age,” he writes.

“Technology has developed at such a pace that government, legislation and society have failed to keep up. And one result is that social networks have become a gateway to child abuse.”

He is concerned grooming is happening so frequently it has become normalised with children targeted by both strangers and by adults they know.

Responding to the NSPCC survey, the biggest of its kind ever conducted, one primary schoolgirl said: “A complete stranger asked me to take my clothes off and send him a picture. When I deleted the game, I went on another site and the same person asked me to have sex with him. I told him to ‘back off’ and then deleted that game. I have seen this person on many sites that I play and I decided to just block him.”

A secondary schoolboy said: “My coach sent me a video of Santa stripping naked.”

Exchanging sexual images also appeared to have become normalised. One pupil aged 12/13 said: “A girl from my primary [was] sending half naked pictures because it’s what everyone does.”

The scale of grooming was revealed by the case of paedophile Derek Hutton, 49, who approached 9,000 children over two years after creating 407 accounts on the MovieStarPlanet site using multiple false identities.

He was jailed for 10 years for 14 offences including attempting to engage in online sexual activity with under 13s at least 500 times and engaging in online sexual activity with under 13s more than 200 times.

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Although his accounts were ultimately blocked by moderators for the site which is aimed at tweens and teens, he still had enough time to groom his victims and persuade them to move to video chat platforms.

In his Telegraph article, Mr Wanless said it was a “landmark moment” for government to crackdown on such online threats by creating an independent regulator with the power to investigate and fine social networks that failed to do enough to catch groomers.

The NSPCC wants social media firms to exploit the technology they use to target ads and personalise users' feeds to identify paedophiles whose use of multiple fake identities the charity believes could be more effectively picked up by algorithms.

“Sites must be required to take proactive steps to detect grooming, so that abuse can be disrupted before it escalates,” said Mr Wanless.

The NSPCC is also calling for statutory annual “transparency” reports from the social media firms, detailing how many child safety reports they receive, how many are acted upon and how quickly they are resolved.

“In order to tackle the problem head on, we need to know the scale of the threat that we’re dealing with,” he said.

The NSPCC petition for new laws to crack down on the “wild west web” has 29,000 signatures so far: http://bit.ly/2BTX0Bm https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/30/one-child-every-primary-schoolclass-has-sent-sexual-image-adult/

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Above from Telegraph

30 AUGUST 2018

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'What's driving the teenage self-harm epidemic?': Child psychotherapist Louis Weinstock on how young people are coping with stress

By LOUIS WEINSTOCK PUBLISHED: 00:02, 5 August 2018 You Magazine

More and more young people are cutting themselves as a way of coping with stress. Child psychotherapist Louis Weinstock examines the reasons why A 14-year-old girl feels so overwhelmed by thoughts and feelings about her father’s sudden death that she starts to cut her arms with a pair of scissors. Why? Because each cut brings an instant but temporary relief from her heart-shattering grief. It may be difficult to understand, but this teenager’s behaviour is far from unique. More young people than ever before are turning to self-harm: intentionally damaging or injuring their bodies by cutting, burning, strangulation, head-banging, skin-picking, hair-pulling and self-poisoning as a way of dealing with the unique stresses of 21st-century life.

Secondary schools have witnessed a surge in cases, with 70,000 incidents estimated in the past year alone, and NHS England figures show that the number of girls treated as hospital inpatients after cutting themselves quadrupled between 2005 and 2015, while the number of boys admitted had more than doubled. These figures are shocking. And yet they show how more and more young people – typically adolescents, and three times more girls than boys – are turning to self-harm as a coping mechanism.

Dangerous though it is, it can bring a sense of relief or control to a situation (internal or external) that feels confusing, overwhelming and beyond control.

So why do people deliberately harm themselves? We all do things that damage us, from smoking and drinking too much to binge-eating. We humans sometimes choose things we know aren’t good for us to bring temporary relief to the thoughts and feelings inside ourselves. Psychiatrist Armando Favazza describes self-harm as a ‘morbid form of self-help’. Studies tend to confirm this: that the main reason people report engaging in self-harm is to reduce emotional distress. Another common reason is self-punishment, although either motivation can lead to a temporary sense of relief.

One of the most incredible recent neuroscience discoveries was that we experience physical pain and the emotional pain of social rejection in the same parts of the brain, including the anterior cingulate, a hook-shaped piece lying an inch behind the forehead. Paracetamol was proven in a similar study to relieve the pain of social rejection, and it seems, from the clients I have worked with, that self-harm can also provide this kind of emotional ‘pain relief’. There is some evidence that after selfharming, endorphins are released which create a mini-euphoric state. This explains why some adolescents self-harm at the end of a stressful day. These discoveries challenge the idea that self-harm is just attention-seeking behaviour. client of mine started self-harming – first with nail scissors, then burning herself with a lighter – when she was 11 years old as a way to cope when her parents were fighting.

Self-harming, she said, was a way of ‘anchoring’ her inner turmoil. She showed me a graphic novel about a lesbian girl who self-harmed, with a brilliant depiction of the girl before and after she had cut herself. The ‘before’ image was captioned: ‘difficult to understand’, next to the ‘after’ image, of the girl’s cut arms, were the words: ‘easy to understand’. The complex inner world of a teenager takes time, patience and Page | 90

compassion to understand. Sadly, young people often don’t have access to these things and so they find their own ways to make their inner turmoil tangible, understandable.

Although self-harm can bring relief and a sense of control in the short-term, it can very quickly become compulsive. The deep sense of shame soon overrides the release it brings, and then the young person can find themselves looking for a quick way to bring relief to the shame. The constricting grip of this negative feedback loop is well known to drug addicts. Additionally, people who self-harm are more likely to try to take their own life, but equally most self-harm does not end in suicide.

So why are we seeing such an alarming rise in self-harm among our youth? Young people seem to have it better than ever before, yet the rise in social media use and the ‘attention economy’ have a significant role to play. I run a social enterprise called Bounce Works (bounce.works) that uses digital technology to improve young people’s mental health. However, we are competing for their attention with powerful corporations such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat that use slot-machine psychology to hijack our attention and dopamine reward system, targeting our base instincts, especially emotions such as fear, envy and outrage. The computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier calls these companies ‘behaviour modification empires’.

I can’t help but feel that every time a young person scrolls through a social media feed, it’s a bit like self-harming. Looking at how beautiful and successful everyone else is feels like injecting a repeated dose of envy, social rejection or the fear of missing out, mainlining straight into their deepest sense of unworthiness. This also helps to explain why self-harm is so much more common among girls. Girls growing up in a ‘selfie’ world become image-conscious at a much earlier age. According to one recent study, a third of seven- to ten-year-old girls believe that they are judged on their appearance and a quarter feel the need to be perfect. Eating disorders are a type of self-harm more common to teenage girls, and the two co-exist in about 25 per cent of cases. For some, self-harm can replace an eating disorder and vice versa, especially if the crutch of the self-harm method is taken away from that person when they aren’t psychologically ready.

There are other aspects to the online world that are troubling. Georgia, 16, told me that it’s impossible to switch off after school: ‘I don’t have the ability to be on my own; I am constantly in contact with my friends. I can always see where my friends are, as everyone posts wherever they go...I know instantly if I haven’t been invited.’ She would regularly wake up in the middle of the night to check her phone to see if she had missed out on any conversations or events. Young people are more connected than ever before, but they are, as US professor Sherry Turkle brilliantly put it, ‘alone together’.

Humans are social animals: we have a biological need to connect with others, but it’s only really those warm, face-to-face connections that help us to feel safe. One of my clients, who spent a lot of time on online multiplayer video games, once told me that the previous night he had been playing a game and chatting with more than 100 friends from around the world: ‘But as soon as I turned off the game I felt lonelier than I’d ever felt before…and I don’t know why.’ Within the digital world lies a promise to us that we never need to deal with discomfort or boredom. The bus ride or queue, the silent moments in conversation – all can be filled with entertainment or productivity.

But discomfort is a part of life that we can and should learn to be with. For our young people, the idea of spending time in solitude or self-reflection is increasingly triggering Page | 91

huge levels of anxiety. Yet the more time they spend inhabiting the disembodied, online, Photoshopped version of themselves, the more disconnected they become from their own bodies and their authentic self. Self-harm is a way of bringing yourself sharply and swiftly back into your body when you are feeling overwhelmed.

Young people also feel pressure to succeed at a young age, from their families and from the education system, which is still based on the Industrial-era factory model, and overly focused on teaching things that can be measured or tested. I’ve worked with a number of clients who started their self-harming journey around the time of their GCSEs. Children who are overscheduled or from broken families can turn to self-harm at times of increased pressure as it provides a private form of release that, unlike teen drug and alcohol use (which tends to be more social), doesn’t require flexibility of schedule. It’s easy to self-harm on your own using things you may already have in your bedroom.

The rise in self-harm comes hand-in-hand with an equally worrying rise in anxiety and depression. According to one government-funded study, one in four girls aged 14, and roughly one in ten boys the same age in the UK are depressed – double the rates observed a decade earlier. It’s even more concerning, because we know that self-harm is highest among young people who also display symptoms of anxiety and depression.

How are these challenging emotions underlying self-harm spreading so fast? One cause is ‘emotional contagion’, the phenomenon of one person’s behaviour or feelings spreading to another. Facebook demonstrated in 2012 precisely how emotional contagion works in our networked age when it ran a secret experiment to see if it could manipulate people’s emotions on a mass scale by tweaking their newsfeeds.

Facebook’s own report concluded that ‘emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness’, and that emotional contagion can be achieved without ‘direct interaction between people’. Given that over a third of 15-year-olds in the UK are ‘extreme internet users’, online for at least six hours a day at the weekend, we can safely assume that emotional contagion is at work here.

There has also been a marked increase in the past decade in references to self-harm in movies, songs and on social media. But before we blame these people or the sites that host this content, in my experience, a young person would only ever ‘imitate’ what they see in these media if they feel distressed already and therefore identify with the underlying message. One of my clients with a history of self-harm told me she couldn’t let herself watch 13 Reasons Why (the controversial Netflix show about a teenage suicide) as she knew that she would be triggered, but her non self-harming friends could watch the show and actually enjoy it. We should be wary when we hear about schools reporting that ‘copying peers’ is the most common reason for the rise in selfharm. It feels to me there is judgment in this, that their pain is somehow not real. Why do some young people self-harm and others don’t? Why are some more vulnerable to emotional contagion and others less so? Young people self-harm when they are distressed, when they feel under too much pressure, when they don’t have time or space, when they don’t feel safe.

The dramatic rise in self-harm is a mass cry for help from a generation in distress. But there is hope. In the UK, more schools are now practising value-based education, which is less about competition and more about building honesty, cooperation and compassion into the curriculum. Schools are also becoming more responsive to mental health issues, many introducing lessons on emotional resilience and mindfulness from a Page | 92

young age. We have to be careful, though, that mindfulness isn’t being used like medication, dosing kids up so that the school keeps its spot in the league table.

There is also a growing interest in self-compassion, which is about learning to be a good friend to ourselves – it’s the ideal antidote to self-harm in an age in which young people, girls especially, have become hypercritical of themselves. The good news is that the teenage brain is also very ‘plastic’, which means with the right input it has a high chance of changing for the better.

Mostly, though, the clients I’ve worked with give me hope. Recovery from a pattern of self-harming is not only possible, but likely, given the right support. One client I worked with started pulling out her hair during her GCSEs in response to huge pressure from her parents and school to achieve. In the evenings, in the privacy of her bedroom, she would tear out big clumps as a way to reassert a sense of agency, and also to punish herself for not being ‘enough’. In our sessions, she figured out that the strongest act of self-compassion she could do was to stand up for herself, to say ‘no!’

So she did, telling her parents and her teachers that she needed them to back off. The next week I heard that she had stopped pulling out her hair for the first time in two years.

Louis Weinstock is a psychotherapist, coach and meditation teacher who specialises in working with children and families. For more information, visit louisweinstock.com

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What can parents do?

Louis Weinstock on how to spot warning signs and the ways to help your child

Louis Weinstock on how to spot warning signs and the ways to help your child* Pay attention Is your child showing signs of distress? Are they withdrawing into themselves? It can be easy to dismiss your teenager’s behaviour as ‘hormonal’.

Listen Check in with them; say that you’ve noticed they seem more upset. Be curious. If they don’t want to talk, suggest texting or emailing you if that’s easier.

Stay calm This is essential for them to open up. Young people are secretive about their self-harm as they fear their parents’ anger and punishment. Create a ‘safe space’ for these discussions. Say, ‘I’m so sorry to hear how much pain you are in. I’m here for you if you want to talk.’ Don’t bombard them with questions.

Validate Name the emotion you see in your child, for instance saying: ‘It seems like you are really angry with me. I’m sorry about that.’ Having our feelings validated helps us to feel anchored. When someone tries to fix us, it can make us feel as though our feelings aren’t valid.

Triggers Help them write down some of the triggers that create the urge to self-harm.

Alternatives Think together of other ways to cope with strong feelings. Direct substitutes include using an ice cube or flicking a rubber band on the skin. Then talk to your child about reducing the risk, eg, by removing blades or medication.

Get help If you’re worried about your child and self-harming, speak to your partner or a friend. Get professional help if needed. Ask your GP for a referral, look for help privately or find help online (see below).

Internet boundaries Discuss the potential harm of internet use with your child. Create a healthy boundary together, such as no internet in the bedrooms.

Love All children need to know that they are loved, regardless of how well they do in their exams or how many likes they get on Instagram. Show your love by being fully present with them at least once a day, with no devices and no distractions.

For more information on self-harm, and to get help go to samaritans.org, youngminds.org.uk, childline.org.uk and read healthtalk.org’s self-harm guide

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‘No excuse’ to segregate pupils with disabilities Pioneering researcher tells World Down Syndrome Congress that all children benefit from fully inclusive education There is “no excuse” for segregated education on the basis of disability, according to a world-leading expert on Down’s syndrome.

Professor Sue Buckley called for “full inclusion, right from the start” when she addressed the World Down Syndrome Congress in Glasgow.

“There’s no excuse – an inclusive education model is best for all children, so we all need to fight for that change,” she said. “Segregation on the basis of disability is not acceptable in terms of human rights, social identity, social learning, education or developmental outcomes.”

The emeritus professor of developmental disability at the University of Portsmouth said that “children learn from other children” and that there should be “full inclusion right from the start” so that, in class, children with Down’s syndrome feel “I belong – I’m not a visitor”.

Professor Buckley said: “Development isn’t fixed at birth, however many chromosomes you have. The brain’s ready to do all sorts of wonderful things, but what it will actually do, and what the child will learn, will depend on the learning environment around them, and their opportunities to learn. So, yes, it is influenced by genetic make-up, but [also] very profoundly influenced by social and learning environments.”

In 2016, Professor Buckley received an award from the US-based National Down Syndrome Congress, “for improving the lives of children with Down syndrome by developing innovative research-based education techniques”. Many of these have focused on reading and she told the congress in Glasgow that studies show “when children with Down syndrome are fully included in mainstream education…they have better-spoken language and they’re more likely to learn to read”.

She added that spoken language should be on the curriculum from the earliest stages of education and that there was still considerable progress to be made as “many teenagers could significantly improve their spoken language”.

Professor Buckley began her career as a clinical psychologist working with people with intellectual disabilities at a time before children with Down’s syndrome had a right to go to school, and when they were routinely described as having a “mental handicap” or even a “subnormality” – rather than people understanding that Down’s syndrome “just meant they didn’t meet their milestones at the same rate as everyone else”.

She adopted a baby with Down’s syndrome from one of these institutions and pioneered early intervention services and inclusive education – as well as founding the charity Down Syndrome Education International – but faced hostility along the way.

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In 1983, she produced a video about her research into how children’s with Down’s syndrome could be helped to learn to read, and recalled: “I got hate mail. How dare I suggest children with Down Syndrome might learn to read?” Her department head even had to field a call from an education official calling for her to be sacked.

The World Down Syndrome Congress, which takes place every two years, is being held in Scotland for the first time and concludes tomorrow. Professor Buckley praised the “huge efforts on inclusive education being made here in Scotland”.

By Henry Hepburn TES 26 July 2018

Segregation on the rise in post-16 education Figures from the Education Policy Institute show there is a growing gap between disadvantaged learners and their peers

By George Ryan TES 25 July 2018

There are 25 per cent more disadvantaged students in colleges than in sixth forms, new data on post-16 education shows.

The latest figures from the Education Policy Institute’s (EPI) annual report on the state of education in England show that in 2016, 45 per cent of disadvantaged school leavers went to an FE college or provider compared to 36 per cent who attended a school sixth form or a sixth-form college.

When the most disadvantaged pupils are removed from the statistics, 35 per cent attended an FE college while 57 per cent attended a school sixth form or sixth-form college.

School leavers from disadvantaged backgrounds were also more likely to “drop-out” of their post-16 education than their peers, with 11 per cent not continuing in education compared to 3 per cent of all other pupils.

'Progress is stalling'

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EPI executive chairman David Laws said the analysis shows that, over the last few years, progress on reducing the gap between disadvantaged pupils and other students appears to have been stalling.

The report also looks at how pupils from different backgrounds perform, and, for the first time, looks at the post-16 routes taken by disadvantaged students and their peers. The underlying causes of educational disadvantage are also examined – with several policy recommendations proposed.

The report also finds that post-16 education is becoming more segregated. In 2016, the EPI’s Segregation Index for post-16 education stood at 21.2 per cent – meaning that one in five disadvantaged students would need to alter their post-16 routes in order to match those their wealthier peers.

'Inclusive' colleges 'could do much more' Catherine Sezen, senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges, said: “Colleges are inclusive and help people to make the most of their talents and ambitions and drive social mobility, especially for those who are from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“Unfortunately, a lack of funding has made running a college harder than ever, just at a time when colleges want to provide a full and rich curriculum and support for young people and adults. The balance between balancing the books and meeting students’ needs is not an easy one.

“With additional funding, colleges could do much more. They are already doing so much to help businesses improve productivity and drive economic growth and they are rooted in and committed to their communities and drive tolerance and well-being.

They are an essential part of England’s education system.”

Recommendations for policymakers Some of the EPI's recommended initiatives include: 

Prioritise pupil well-being alongside academic attainment.



Ensure early and sustained additional support for those who are behind with attainment.



Provide access to a broad curriculum that includes out-of-classroom experiences.



Promote a strategy of poverty alleviation – which forms the basis of a programme to improve the attainment of disadvantaged pupils.

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Brookside academy is the Tes alternative provision of the year Brookside academy is a 30-place specialist provision that offers education and yearround “wraparound” and short-break care for children Brookside Academy, in Street, is Somerset’s largest primary academy. But at the heart of the school is a 30-place specialist provision that offers education and yearround “wraparound” and short-break care for children with complex and profound learning needs. The school has won this award in recognition of the fact that, alongside a mainstream primary school, it has built alternative provision that is now renowned nationally for its high-quality teaching, learning and care.

However, this was not always the case. In 2013, Ofsted said that the school was not meeting the needs of some of its most complex students. These findings spurred the school into action – it recruited two more teachers, including its first profound and multiple learning difficulties teacher, and invested in an assistant head with a Sendco qualification. Brookside also restructured its school site, remodelling and extensively refurbishing five classrooms to meet specialist needs. This included the creation of a new bespoke sensory room.

The building work was accompanied by an expansion in its holiday provision – in 2017 this was accessed by 64 families with a child with special educational needs and disabilities. Thirty-four of these were families with a child classed as needing highlevel one-to-one support at all times.

As a result of the changes Brookside made, in February it was commended by Ofsted for developing a “culture of inclusion throughout the school community” so that “pupils across the school, regardless of whether they are from the mainstream or the specialist provision, forge friendships, develop relationships and value the uniqueness of their school”.

TES 22/6/18

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The myth of inclusion

Meet Reece. We join him in Year 5. He has a global learning delay and his expressive and receptive language skills are underdeveloped for his age. Each day, Mandy, a teaching assistant (TA), takes Reece out of the classroom with Sula and Nathan to work on their social language. They practise important skills such as greeting people, talking in turns and not interrupting.

But here’s the thing: Sula and Nathan have communication difficulties, too. And while Mandy does a great job of trying to initiate and sustain conversation among the three children, progress is slow.

Fast forward to Year 9. Reece is sat with Jacqui, another TA, at his designated table in bottom-set science. His teacher is explaining that Mars’s orbit of the Sun is almost twice as long as Earth’s orbit.

It’s not dissimilar to the teachers’ orbit of the classroom. Because Jacqui is on hand to help, the teacher checks in with Reece about half as often as he does with other pupils.

And these are just snapshots of Reece’s time in school. If you were to sit with him every day, you would witness a journey through the education system that is pockmarked with separation, segregation and unintentional outcomes.

Reece’s story is a composite one. He is an example of what it is like to be a child with SEND in the school system. Findings from longitudinal research that I led along my UCL Institute of Education colleague, Professor Peter Blatchford, suggest that Reece’s experience is a typical one.

We conducted two studies: one in 2011-12, the other in 2015-16. The most recent is the SEN in Secondary Education study, which involved 60 pupils with statements of special needs or education, health and care plans (EHCPs) in Year 9 across England. This project replicated our earlier Making a Statementstudy, in which we tracked 48 pupils when they were in Year 5. Thirty of the students involved appear in both studies (see box, page 45).

It is, to our knowledge, the largest classroom observation study ever conducted in the UK on pupils with SEND. Our researchers visited 88 schools, shadowing pupils for up to five days. They also collected comparison data on 260 average-attaining pupils. In all, we

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spent 1,340 hours observing pupils and carried out 490 interviews with staff, parents and pupils.

The findings raise important questions about how schools “do” inclusion. The main one being: do we actually do it at all?

Separation and setting We found that pupils with EHCPs in primary schools spent the equivalent of more than a day a week away from the mainstream class – effectively separated from the teacher, the curriculum and their peers. When they worked in groups, it was mostly with other lowattainers and those with SEND. What we found in secondary schools was very close to a form of “streaming”. Seventy-five per cent of lessons in English Baccalaureate subjects for pupils with and without SEND were taught in attainment groups. Pupils with EHCPs were taught mainly in what they themselves referred to as “bottom sets”, with at least one TA working alongside the teacher.

Compared with average-attainers, pupils with EHCPs spent more time in smaller classes.

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11 per cent for average-attainers), and in classes of 21 or more in 26 per cent of instances (69 per cent for average-attainers).

School leaders tend to justify “ability” grouping across year groups and within classes as part of a wider teaching strategy. We were struck by how this was described as a main form of differentiation. In some cases, grouping appeared to eliminate the need for providing different tasks for pupils with EHCPs. This is problematic. Research has consistently found that while “high-ability” pupils benefit from the positive affirmations of being top of the class, there is a corrosive effect for those in “bottom sets” in terms of their confidence, self-concept and how they view their place in school. As one Year 9 we interviewed (see box, below) put it: “I don’t like telling my friends I’m in the bottom set, because I think they would find me different.”

Becky Francis, director of the IoE, is leading an Education Endowment Foundation-funded trial into ability grouping. She says: “Research shows that pupils in these low-attainment groups make less progress than their peers in higher-attainment groups.

“The present project, Best Practice in Grouping Students, is seeking to address the practices associated with low-attainment groups that research has identified as contributing to these poorer outcomes. The approach includes ensuring that these groups have equal access to experienced, subject-expert teachers, high expectations and a rich curriculum.”

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The potential self-fulfilling prophecies for those placed in low-attainment groups and labelled “low ability” are harder to address, she adds. “Likewise, while all educators believe we have high expectations of our students, there is a need to think about how this actually translates into practice.”

In short, the way we separate out children with SEND into low-attainment groups in secondary, and take children away from the teacher, curriculum and peers in primary, is highly problematic and detrimental to their individuals concerned.

Time with teachers In Year 5, we found interactions with teachers comprised 35 per cent of average-attainers’ overall classroom experience; for pupils with EHCPs, it was 22 per cent.

In secondary settings (where pupils weren’t withdrawn from the classroom as much), it’s less marked (43 per cent vs 34 per cent).

These results matter, because it shows that the pupils who need the most time with the teacher get the least interaction.

Peer interaction We found that compared to those without SEND, pupils with EHCPs have strikingly fewer opportunities to interact with their classmates. For average-attainers in primary settings, 32 per cent of all classroom interactions were with peers; for those with EHCPs, it was 13 per cent.

In secondary schools, interaction among average-attaining pupils accounted for 27 per cent of classroom interactions; for those with EHCPs, it was 16 per cent.

To put it more bluntly: pupils with SEND mix and interact mostly with one another. That has numerous downsides.

For example, as our composite scenario with Reece illustrates, pupils who need to practise and develop their communication skills do so together, rather than with peers who can model good speaking.

And pupils who learn together in particular attainment bands tend to form friendships together. Those with SEND can be a vulnerable group, less at ease with the bustle of a crowded playground. The learning support department often doubles up as a place for them to spend break and lunchtimes. While there is nothing intrinsically harmful about this, it does lead to these pupils being isolated in social as well as learning contexts.

The presence of TAs The explanation for why pupils with EHCPs have fewer interactions with teachers and peers is writ large in our data on interactions with teaching assistants. For typicallyPage | 104

developing pupils, TAs make up 1 per cent and 2 per cent of all interactions they have with peers and adults in secondary and primary settings respectively. Yet for pupils with EHCPs, talk with TAs makes up 27 per cent of all interactions in primary school, and 18 per cent in secondary school.

The bulk of these pupil-TA interactions occur on a one-to-one basis. On the face of it, this is common-sense: if you struggle with learning, more individual attention from a TA looks like an appropriate makeweight for less interaction with teachers and classmates.

Teachers can then focus on the rest of the class.

Yet research tells us there are three distinct problems with this set-up.

Firstly, it leads to subtle forms of separation, such as “stereo-teaching”. This is where a TA will repeat verbatim what the teacher says as she delivers her whole class input. For the teacher, it’s like experiencing a satellite delay, as you hear your words echo in a corner of the room. But more importantly, it interrupts the pupil’s experience of your teaching, as they have to toggle between talk from two adults: not helpful if one of your primary difficulties is related to attention.

Secondly, it fosters dependency and learned helplessness. At worst, pupils “outsource” their learning to a well-meaning TA, who completes tasks for them.

Thirdly, the more TA support pupils with SEND receive, the less well they perform academically, compared to their less-supported peers (bit.ly/DISSproj).

This lack of progress isn’t due to pupils’ underlying SEND or prior attainment, nor because TAs aren’t doing a good enough job. What it is, however, is an indication that the model of inclusion we have drifted towards over the last 25 years stands as a proxy for unresolved questions about how pupils with SEND are taught in mainstream settings.

Conclusions The picture our research paints is best understood in terms of less than effective leadership for SEND. I’ve seen what great school leaders can do to improve the impact of TAs (bit.ly/TA4tips) – and, conversely, the confusion and inconsistency that results when important decisions about TAs’ role and purpose are left unresolved.

But improving how we include and educate pupils with EHCPs in schools cannot and will not be resolved merely by making better use of classroom TAs. The quality of SEND coverage in initial teaching training must be addressed. Tensions and flaws in the SEND assessment system – identified by its original architect, Baroness Mary Warnock (bit.ly/SENDsystem) – must be ironed out. In particular, we need to emphasise that what matters most is the quality of support (what pedagogical inputs are required, who delivers it, and how), not the quantity of support, which is too often couched in the currency of TA hours.

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Schools are the best engines for change. We urgently need headteachers to take responsibility and apply the same tenacity to SEND that they devote to other areas of school improvement. In short: it’s time to make SEND a priority.

We need to take decisive action to make our schools more inclusive and productive environments for our most vulnerable children and young people.

So, what can leaders do?

First, review the institutional arrangements and classroom practices that get in the way of pupils with SEND being on the receiving end of high-quality teaching. Inclusive practice isn’t just where pupils are “in” the class; they need to be “of” the class – actively engaged in learning.

Second, improve the social mix. Schools could take the bold step of introducing mixed attainment grouping for at least some subjects, if this is not something that they do already.

Compared with “ability” grouping, mixed attainment teaching has greater potential to improve outcomes for all pupils. At the least, teachers should ensure pupils with SEND aren’t routinely put together for paired or group work, and create opportunities for them to work with, learn from and interact with others.

Third, school leaders should rigorously define the role and contribution of TAs as an effective part of – not the sole solution to – SEND provision. A good place to start is the free guidance that we have developed with the Education Endowment Foundation (bit.ly/EEFTA).

Finally, schools should institutionalise leadership for SEND in their career progression systems: no-one should move up the leadership ladder without evidencing how great they are at improving outcomes for pupils with SEND. Will any of this happen? I can only hope so. With the issue of selection continuing to rear its head – most recently in the Conservative manifesto – children and young people with SEND and their families need strong and committed leadership now more than ever.

We need to stand up for these young people and stop this inclusion illusion we are currently all buying into, which continues to undermine the life chances of this already vulnerable group.

Rob Webster is a researcher at the Centre for Inclusive Education, UCL Institute of Education. He tweets @maximisingTAs. The SEN in Secondary Education (SENSE) study was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. Download the SENSE study Final Report from bit.ly/SENSEstudy

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I like staying in the class’: What Year 9 pupils with EHCPs say  

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“I don’t like feeling that I need help and that everyone else thinks I need help when I don’t. It’s just sort of embarrassing.”

“TAs sometimes write in my book, which I don’t like so much. I do write really slowly, but they [TAs] make me feel rushed when they take over some of the writing at times. I think the teacher thinks that it looks like I haven’t done my own work. It feels like cheating if they are writing down everything for me.”

“I like staying in the class and learning more about stuff I really need to. I don’t really like going out. If it’s a lesson I like, I want to stay in there. I just get annoyed that I have to go. I’m not as involved as everyone else, because they’ve been in there longer and understood.”

“I don’t really like telling my friends that I’m in the bottom set because I think they would find me different. I don’t find it comfortable telling my friends.

Potentially I want to get out of the bottom group this year. Because I think in some subjects I’m a faster worker than most people.”

What does an inclusive classroom really look like?

Making learning accessible to all pupils needn't be complicated, says Gemma Corby, but sometimes we need to remind ourselves of the basic adjustments that will make our classrooms more inclusive. lot has been written and debated about the best ways to support students with learning difficulties – so much so that it can be hard to sift through all the information that is out there. I think we need to go back to the basics and remind ourselves of just what an inclusive classroom looks like in practice. So, here’s a reminder of some adjustments we can all make.

Think about how you present material

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It's a myth that teachers need to produce a thousand different worksheets in order to meet the needs of individuals. It's not practical and it's not essential. But little adjustments can make all the difference.

"Dyslexia-friendly fonts" have recently been debunked, but it’s still important to consider the spaces between lines and individual words – and to make sure that the text isn't too crowded on the page or screen. The contrast between black text and a white background can also disadvantage some learners, so consider using an offwhite background, and/or coloured text.

When students are working on tasks, it is also useful to have instructions presented on the board as a prompt – and try to include as many visual supports as possible.

This can easily be discounted, particularly at secondary school, but it can support a range of learners with additional needs to understand more complex and abstract ideas.

Consider environmental factors While it is important to have engaging visual supports around the classroom, there is a fine line between supportive and distracting, particularly for students with ADHD or autism. Ask yourself: is there too much clutter? Are there lots of clashing colours?

Also consider where your students are positioned in the room. Most learners with a diagnosis of dyslexia and/or visual stress benefit from sitting closer to the board, while you will need to consider where you are standing to support young people with visual or hearing impairments.

Students with wheelchairs or walking frames should be able to easily get in and out of your room, so they are best positioned near to the door.

Some students with high levels of anxiety prefer to sit at the back of the room or close to the wall, so it would be worth talking to these young people ahead of designing a seating plan. Likewise, consider those students who experience sensory overload. Is your classroom too hot or too cold? Is there a noisy clock ticking or is the buzz of the speakers causing the stress levels of some young people to rise?

Take care in how you communicate The tone, pace and volume of your voice can all affect how well young people with additional needs follow what you are saying, but it may not always be obvious that an individual has not understood.

Some students are very literal and don’t always grasp the subtle nuances of language, so make what you want to say is explicit. Avoid using too many metaphors.

Be prepared to use a student’s name first to ensure that they are listening – and be prepared to rephrase and repeat some of what you say. Understand that some young people find making eye contact and tracking the teacher when they are speaking uncomfortable, so do not make this an expectation.

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Some young people may need specialist equipment such as a particular type of seat, pen or writing slope. Make sure these are available to them. For example, if you know you will be doing some extended writing, have a laptop available for a student who struggles to write at length.

Build confidence gradually We are there to teach our students, not to be their chums, but there is a thin line between exerting a healthy amount of pressure in order to get our students to excel – and pushing them too far.

Some young people may have a fear of reading aloud or presenting to large groups.

We have a responsibility to encourage them, but not to force them into something unwillingly.

Instead, try to build confidence up gradually. For example, a child who is fearful of presenting in front of the class could present to a teaching assistant and perhaps one friend, then build up over time. It is worth remembering that no young person will learn if they do not feel safe in their environment, however carefully you consider any other element of the inclusive classroom. That's the bottom line.

Gemma Corby is Sendco at Hobart High School, Norfolk. (TES 13/3/18)

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How to support children living a life less ordinary Teachers in mainstream schools need to know how to support children with autism Students with special educational needs and disabilities do not, in the mainstream classroom, represent large numbers. But because these young people can present in out-of-the-ordinary ways, and they are educated, in the main, in ordinary schools, it is worth knowing a bit about some of the differences in the human population.

Autism is one that teachers need to know about. It is a spectrum condition, which means that individuals who have it share co-occurring impairments but that these are expressed in different ways. Here is a brief starting point: Social communication Pupils with autism have difficulties in understanding spoken language, tone of voice and body language. Some can communicate well, some cannot. Teachers need to be clear in what they say and do. Idioms, such as “it’s raining cats and dogs”, may be taken literally.

Social interaction Autism affects the person’s ability to understand others and form friendships. It doesn’t mean such pupils can’t have or don’t want friends. Expressing and understanding emotions can be hard – a person my have “all the feels” but not know what to do with them. Social understanding may need to be taught. Autistic people can feel very lonely.

Flexibility of thought The fast-moving and highly social world of schools can be a difficult place for a young autistic person. Rules, routines and timetables can help. Many autistic people have a special interest, which can develop at a young age.

Sensory sensitivity Some people are very sensitive to stimuli. Schools can do much to minimise sensory distraction, from adapting the uniform to keeping a classroom calm and organised.

Anxiety Autistic people can live with (and mask) high levels of anxiety. Some children may refuse to go to school because of it.

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Comorbidity Autistic people may have other, coexisting conditions, such as ADHD or dyslexia.

They can grow up in an unhappy family or a loving one (like everyone). Parenting style does not cause autism. Like all other forms of SEND, it does not sit in a tidy box.

Diagnosis Children with autism are not all diagnosed at an early age (this doesn’t mean they are not autistic). A diagnosis means that the condition is life-long and they will not “get better”. Their autism is fundamental to who they are. A doctor or a clinician will make a diagnosis – not a teacher.

Nancy Gedge is a consultant teacher for the Driver Youth Trust and is the Tes SEND specialist. With thanks to Lynn McCann and Barney Angliss for their advice TES 30/6/18

Suffering in silence There is a special educational need more prevalent than autism – one that is likely to impact on children in every school. But very few teachers have heard of it and even fewer know how to help. Adi Bloom investigates developmental language disorder: the most common special educational need you have never heard of

Dorothy Bishop had her epiphany in the back of a taxi.

“The taxi driver, the way they do, said, ‘What do you work on?’” Bishop recalls. “I said, ‘Specific language impairment,’ and he had no idea what that was. He thought it might be something to do with learning a second language.”

So she decided that the best way to explain language disorders was to say, “It’s a bit like autism.”

“And the idea that he could immediately know what autism was – even though it’s a much rarer condition – seemed something quite wrong,” she says.

Wrong – but all too common, she quickly realised, even within the education system.

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Bishop is professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford. Most of her academic work has been focused on specific language impairment, which is now called developmental language disorder (DLD). She believes that it is the most prevalent special educational need that most teachers have never heard of.

That day, in that taxi, Bishop decided that something needed to change. Too many children were being let down because too few teachers had any idea why they were struggling.

Language barriers Put crudely, DLD is to spoken language what dyslexia is to written language.

“It can be helpful to say that it’s like trying to function in a language that you have a little bit of knowledge of,” Bishop says.

For example, imagine that you speak a small amount of French: you have some vocabulary, some knowledge of grammar. Then you go to stay with a Parisian family, whose dinner-table conversations take place entirely in French. You can make out occasional words – enough to determine what the conversation is about, but not the details or the nuance.

For instance, if you picked up the words “dog”, “chase” and “boy” in a sentence, you would understand that there had been a chase involving a boy and a dog, but not whether it was the boy chasing the dog, or vice versa.

Understanding what is going on, therefore, requires constant effort and attention: you have to try really, really hard to keep up with what the conversation is – or might be – about.

Ultimately, this becomes exhausting, and it is easier to tune out entirely and let the conversation flow around you.

“It’s hard work [for those with DLD],” Bishop says. “Those casual, easy to-and-fro exchanges almost become painful for you to engage with. Whereas everybody else is just chatting away.”

According to researchers in this field, around 7.5 per cent of children begin school with a language disorder that is unexplained by any other condition, with DLD the likely cause. A further 2.3 per cent have a language disorder linked to another condition, such as dyslexia or autism. In a class of 30 children, therefore, an average of two children will need therapeutic intervention for their language difficulties.

This is considerably more than the 1.1 per cent of the population who are on the autism spectrum.

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Children with DLD will have higher than average rates of social and emotional behavioural problems, according to research conducted by Courtenay Norbury, professor of developmental language and communication disorders at UCL. They are also more likely than their classmates to have problems with their peers, and problems paying attention.

Only around 11 per cent of these children meet curriculum targets.

So these are the children in your class who may have been labelled as underachievers, but whose underachievement will have often been blamed on background, disadvantage or low IQ. “Often they’re assumed to be children who are just not going to do very well,” Bishop says. “They’d be looking like a very inattentive child who’s a bit away with the fairies.

In some cases, there will be bad behaviour, acting up a bit.”

So why is there this collective blindspot where the condition is concerned?

Bishop believes that part of the problem comes down to – perhaps appropriately – language choices.

Until recently, the preferred term for the condition was “specific language impairment”; “developmental language disorder” was settled on only after considerable debate and research.

“All these choices of words are very loaded,” Bishop says. “If I say ‘impairment’ or ‘disorder’ or ‘disability’, it makes a big difference. “‘Delay’ is often used very loosely to mean that you’ve got trouble with your language. But it doesn’t tell you anything about whether it’s likely to improve or not.

It suggests it’s just a delay, but you’ll catch up eventually.”

Difficult to spot Another issue is that the symptoms of DLD are more difficult to spot than those of many other special educational needs and disabilities, such as dyslexia, as they can be written off as behaviour or attention issues. They may also be more difficult for teachers to understand and empathise with, according to Norbury.

“I think maybe it’s because we take language for granted,” she says. “We all use it.

We use language skills to negotiate and to calm other people down. We use it when watching TV, listening to the news, following instructions, talking to your friends, texting, knowing where to get on the Tube. Everything we do involves language.

“People with DLD often come across as not listening or not paying attention. And so people don’t recognise language disorder as much as dyslexia or autism, and it’s really hard for people to convey that this is a problem that needs support.”

Because of widespread ignorance about the challenges they face, students with DLD can have an extremely difficult time in education.

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Gemma Corby, special-needs coordinator at a school in Norfolk, encountered DLD when a student was diagnosed with the condition earlier this year, following an appointment she booked with a language specialist. The child had been identified in primary school as having speech and language difficulties, but had not been seen by a specialist for several years.

“He muddles by in school,” Corby says. “But I knew he wasn’t reaching his full potential. He had very high levels of anxiety – I wouldn’t have known, but his dad told me.”

Such “muddling by” is typical for children with DLD, Bishop believes. It is particularly common among girls; boys are more often identified as having DLD, because they tend to misbehave as a result of finding the classroom challenging.

“We think girls [with DLD] just sit quietly at the back of the class, and boys [with DLD] make more trouble,” says Bishop.

In some cases, DLD will go hand in hand with other language disorders, such as dyslexia. But many pupils with DLD are able to read aloud when asked. It is only when asked questions about what they have just read that they struggle.

“Those children, the teachers might not be aware how little they’re picking up as they go along,” Bishop says.

This is another key reason why teachers may not spot children with DLD, according to Megan Dixon, director of literacy for Aspire Educational Trust. She specialises in literacy acquisition, and is, therefore, aware of DLD. “Often, teachers will spot children who have problems forming phrases,” she says.

“But it might be that children with DLD have no problems expressing themselves, but have problems understanding what’s coming in.

“That’s quite hard, because people assume they’re not listening, and they end up being labelled as naughty.”

Alternatively, Bishop says, pupils learn to pass: to scrape by at the bottom of the class.

Often, these children are assumed simply to be not very bright.

For example, an eight-year-old pupil may be capable of telling the teacher a story.

“And you think, ‘That’s fine; they haven’t got a language problem,’” says Bishop. “But, when you analyse their sentences, they don’t use any complex clauses. When you compare them with what an eight-year-old ought to be doing, you realise they were quite limited in what they could express. They’ve actually got quite limited language.”

This is something that Dixon has also observed. Early in her teaching career, there was a boy in her class who would not speak.

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“He stood in the corner, shivering,” she says. “Literally quivering away.”

Dixon assumed that the boy was on the autism spectrum. His previous school had labelled him as low-IQ, and had held him back in Reception.

“Actually, he had very severe language difficulties,” Dixon says. “Can you imagine sitting in a classroom all day, every day, not understanding, and being told off for not doing things right?”

She believes that children with DLD may be misbehaving deliberately, in order to be removed from class. If this happens, she says, it is a failure of the teacher for jumping quickly to conclusions, rather than looking below the surface of the behaviour.

Unfortunately, better diagnosis of DLD will not automatically improve educational outcomes. Even when pupils with DLD are identified as needing speech and language therapy, this does not guarantee the right help for the right length of time.

Bishop has carried out a series of studies on twins, which demonstrates that there is a genetic component to DLD. There is not, however, one biological trigger – a particular gene that can be singled out as causing the condition. Instead, variations in a range of genes can tip a person one way or another.

Ongoing support Environmental factors also play a role. Bishop draws an analogy with height: one’s height depends on a complex combination of genetic and environmental factors.

“Your ultimate height might depend on lots and lots of factors, each of which might make you a little bit taller or a little bit shorter, but the individual effects are quite small.”

Therefore, the go-to solution for language problems – a period of intensive speech and language therapy – can often fail to improve things for children with DLD. “We’ve had this culture of expecting that a short-term blast of speech and language therapy will move children into the normal range,” says Norbury. “More and more, I’ve come to accept that that’s not the case.”

The problem, she says, is that there is often a lot of talk of “closing the gap”. But, by the start of key stage 2, there may be a two-year gap between pupils with language difficulties and those at the top of their class.

“That’s a pretty big gap to fill, particularly as the demands of the classroom get more and more complex,” Norbury says.

“I think education does a fantastic job of moving kids on. But those kids with language problems need ongoing support. If you’ve ever tried to learn another language – you can’t Page | 116

do that in six to 12 sessions. And you have to keep practising. There are no quick fixes, unfortunately.”

There is obviously a complicating factor here. Dixon explains that environmental factors – such as poverty or poor levels of parental literacy – can cause children to manifest many of the same symptoms as children with DLD. “Teachers often don’t understand that there’s a difference between language delay and language impairment,” she says. “A lot of children are below the level that they should be, that you’d expect, when they’re coming into school. And it can be poverty-related.”

These children tend to be given what Dixon refers to as a “short, sharp intervention”, lasting six to 10 weeks.

“A language-delayed child will hopefully make quite sharp progress. A language-impaired child possibly won’t,” she says.

That short intensive session can still be useful for identification purposes, though. Dixon views it as a form of language triage: they will help sort those children with language delays from those with DLD, who require longer-term support.

Training teachers But such labelling of a child would not be universally supported. Within the SEND community, the use of labels and the way in which those labels determine what subsequent support is available has been debated extensively.

Regarding DLD, Simon Knight, director of special-needs organisation Whole School SEND and former deputy headteacher at Frank Wise Special School in Oxfordshire, questions whether children would necessarily benefit from having the disorder attached to their names.

“My concern is that sometimes we end up using diagnostic labels naively,” he says. “What are teachers going to do with that information? How are they going to meet those needs effectively?

“If we don’t furnish teachers with a depth of understanding, there’s a risk that they may respond to a caricatured understanding of what that label is.”

There is then a danger, he adds, that certain resources and interventions will become the default means of addressing DLD in pupils, and that these will be used in place of a personalised response to a child’s needs.

“I wouldn’t want teachers to have a veneer of understanding of what needs are in the classroom,” he says.

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“We can raise awareness; we can ensure that children are assessed appropriately and effectively. But, if that’s all we do, then children are not going to have their needs met appropriately. So we need to be training teachers as well, to make sure they have the skills necessary.”

Bishop understands the nervousness about attaching labels to children.

Teachers have told her that they are concerned about medicalising normal variation among children, or about being seen as lowering expectations.

But she argues that, used properly, the advantages of such labelling outweigh the disadvantages.

“You hear a lot from paediatricians saying, ‘I’ll give this child an autism diagnosis,’ if the child is on the margins, because then they’ll get help,” she says. “That wouldn’t happen if there was active support for people with other conditions.”

Targeted approach The label, she believes, would allow for coherent, knowledgeable responses to pupils with DLD. For example, she says, pupils could be given visual support, to help them to access the words that the teacher is using. So a teacher telling the class about windmills, for example, would stand in front of an image of a windmill while talking.

“It sounds horribly like learning styles,” Bishop says. “But it might be that kids have particular difficulty dealing with material where you’re just describing something but there’s no visual support.”

And any speech and language therapy could also be specifically targeted to the needs of pupils with DLD. “With speech and language therapy, a lot of what’s done isn’t being subjected adequately to good trials,” she says. “It’s not that people don’t want to, but they don’t have the resources for trials. Lots of what’s going on in schools is people making it up as they go along.”

In the case of Corby’s student, diagnosis has certainly led to improvements. The pupil has had weekly sessions with a speech and language therapist, as well as daily activities with a teaching assistant trained in dealing with speech and language difficulties.

“He’s still very anxious – not really able to have a two-way conversation,” Corby says. “But on a recent breaktime he came and knocked on my door and we had a conversation. He never would have done that last year. The thought of having to go and have a conversation with someone – especially an adult, and one who wasn’t his tutor. He wouldn’t have done it.”

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This student is one of the lucky ones. Too many children with DLD remain undiagnosed, and are condemned to a life of underachievement simply because people are unaware that DLD exists.

“People with autism, when in adulthood, they may be employed, because they have the ability to pass exams,” says Bishop. “But often they wouldn’t have relationships.

“With DLD, often it’s the other way around: they can’t pass exams, so they’re restricted to manual jobs.” She pauses.

“Which, of course, there are less and less of nowadays.” @adibloom_tes

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How can I help a pupil with DLD?

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Arrange regular personalised sessions with a qualified speech and language therapist.

Offer more regular sessions with a teaching assistant trained in tackling speech and language difficulties.

Give them smaller amounts of work to complete than their peers in the time allotted. Or, alternatively, offer them more time to complete a task.

Provide visual prompts, such as bullet-pointed or illustrated notes.

Use illustrations to accompany classroom topics. For example, if you are talking about wind turbines, project a picture of a wind turbine on to the whiteboard.

Modify classroom language: keep sentences short and concise, so that key subject words are conveyed clearly.

Avoid metaphor and idiom. For example, instead of saying, “He has the world on his shoulders,” say, “He’s feeling really stressed and under pressure.”

While the teacher is talking, a teaching assistant could condense the ideas and topics covered into a bullet-pointed list.

Remember that, just because children with DLD appear to be listening and able to follow instructions, it does not mean that they have understood.

Ask pupils with DLD to repeat back what they have been told to do – but ensure that this is not done in a confrontational manner.

Children with DLD often find group situations overwhelming, and prefer one-to-one conversations.

In situations where all pupils are expected to contribute to classroom discussions, give those with DLD time to prepare a few sentences in advance.

Find something that a child with DLD can be good at, whether it is art or gardening or drama (which, perhaps surprisingly, a number of pupils with DLD enjoy). This will allow children to see themselves succeeding at something, rather than trying and failing constantly.

Source: Jules Dalby, senior consultant teacher at the literacy charity the Driver Youth Trust

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How to support children with additional sensory needs There is a lack of knowledge about Sensory Processing Disorder, writes Nicole Ponsford. Here, she provides some examples of best practice and resources for helping ‘sensory kids’ flourish We all have sensory needs and, in the main, most adults find subtle and appropriate ways to accommodate them. This could be our favourite winter comfort food to the ways we fidget (eg, curling our hair or doodling).

But there are some people who find managing sensory needs incredibly difficult, if not impossible – and many of them will be in your classrooms.

Research suggests between one in six and one in 20 children have symptoms of Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), a condition where the brain cannot properly process information from the senses and therefore has trouble with responding appropriately.

Until about 10 years ago, it was understood that sensory processing often occurred in conjunction to other special educational needs and disabilities, such as ADHD, autism, Asperger’s syndrome, developmental delays, prematurity, Tourette’s and anxiety.

Now it is recognised as a standalone condition.

And yet SPD appears to be a “new” thing in mainstream schools. We aren’t even sure what to call it. SPD or Sensory Integration Dysfunction students in one school are called, “sensory awareness” or “sensory smart” students in another – and these are the schools that recognise it.

Why is there such confusion and lack of knowledge?

Partly it is because of the condition being defined and dealt with differently across different NHS services both regionally and nationally. Also, schools often don’t “see” the problem. This can be through a lack of training, but also many sensory kids – mine included – often work hard to restrain their needs in front of others.

Emotional outbursts Students can present a full range of hidden and expressed needs. They vary from mild to severe, with a hypo-reactive nervous system (under-reactive) or a hyperreactive nervous system (over-reactive). In more complex cases, a child may have a mixture of the two.

An SPD diagnosis may be reached only as part of a neuro-developmental assessment by child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). To get a sense of extremities of SPD needs, here are some common examples: 

Touch – The child may complain if socks are not on correctly and seem overly sensitive to pain such as small cuts, or have difficulty judging how much strength to use, or wants to touch rather than be touched.

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Sight – Becomes easily distracted by visual stimuli or dislikes having their vision restricted.

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Hearing – Becomes upset when surrounded by a lot of noise, such as large crowds or school bells, or likes to make a loud noise.

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Smell – Seems bothered by smells that most people do not notice or explores objects by smell.

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Taste – Prefers dry, cold food, or prefers hot, sauced-based foods.

There are extra senses when it comes to SPD. They are: “vestibular” (balance), “proprioceptive” (body awareness), “thermoception” (heat and cold), “nociception” (pain) and “interoceptive” (internal body needs, such as hunger).

Each sensory child will have differing needs with different combinations of sensory inputs.

Lucy Short, a mother of a child with SPD, explains this further.

“When he’s with other children he wants to fit in and be like them, so tries to cope with his sensory feelings,” she says.

Those with SPD will also copy the actions of their peers to “fit in”. This often makes it worse for the child in the long run.

“Because he is trying to be so good all day and seem ‘normal’ like the other children”, says Lucy, “when he is home, he is exhausted and angry – and has horrendous emotional outbursts – as his sensory needs are 100 times worse.

Grace Berry, a learning mentor at Milton Park Primary School, adds that unmet sensory needs can be wrongly identified as behaviour needs by schools.

“It’s likely to occur when staff are not aware of the sensory system – and how a child who has a sensory need that is not met can have outbursts.

“This means children are labelled as ‘naughty’ if they are extroverted in their outbursts or ‘fussy’ when they are experiencing a sensory need that is not being met in a healthy way.”

Another factor that can be upsetting for parents is that schools can insinuate parents are looking for “a reason, framework or spectrum that explain their child’s personality, quirks and behaviours”, says Rebecca Huseyin, another parent of a child with SPD. “Very few adults, myself included, truly understand anything about what’s going on in the child’s brain at the various developmental milestones,” she says.

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Once a school recognises “sensory kids”, the results can be immediate. By understanding how SPD affects students, and then putting in place interventions in and around the school, the impact on the students is incredible.

One example of best practice is allowing your “sensory kids” to go into lunch first.

Sensory students often struggle with meal times’ temperature, sounds and smells, so this enables them time to start eating when the environment is calmer and they can have more time to manage their food. It costs nothing, but is a huge benefit for that child – and their parents.

Here are five sensory tips to get you started from Claire Nicholls, a Sendco at an allthrough school in Bristol: 

Train all staff – All teachers need to be aware of potential issues that may become barriers to learning. Try your LEA, a local SEND school or a charity such as BIBIC. Websites such as the STAR Institute (spdstar.org), the Sensory Processing Disorder Resource Center (bit.ly/SPDResource) and SensorySmarts (sensorysmarts.com) offer checklists as a starting point. The Sensory Spectacle (sensoryspectacle.co.uk) and Sensory Spectrum (thesensoryspectrum.com) also offer a wealth of CPD opportunities.

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Identify pupils – Instead of assuming it is a behaviour issue, consider if it is a sensory need instead.

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Use resources – These can include ear defenders, weighed jackets, a sensory tent or den, fiddle toys, wobble cushions or seats. Consider what will work for your learners. Try Sensory Direct – they offer good value multipacks (sensorydirect.com).

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Flexible systems – Be clear about which pupils are allowed something different and why, then communicate this to all staff, including those on supply.

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Think about environment – Overwhelming classroom displays, hot classrooms, general noise, school smells and tactile peers can all be triggers. Watch Jennifer Allison’s TED talk (bit.ly/AllisonTED) for more help. Playtimes and lunchtimes can often be very difficult times. Consider allowing children in early for lunch, alternative eating areas and review your lunchtime activities.

My hope is that the sensory world is a little more visible now – and being a sensory school is within touching distance for both your students and their families.

Nicole Ponsford is the founder of TechnoTeachers, digital leader for WomenEd and leader of @WomenEd_Tech (TES 16/2/18)

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