Jack Beaumont is becoming a teacher, at a critical juncture for Britain's most vulnerable students.
My freelance income was floundering. Under increasing financial and romantic pressure, I applied for a job I was certain to get. When I joined a school as a teaching assistant in February last year, there were no teachers to assist. Until fairly recently, the school had been a respite service, only obtaining its school status in 2023. There was no formal curriculum. There was just a team of support staff and 17 children, ranging between the ages of eight and 18, with needs and behaviour that the other special educational needs and disability (SEND) schools in the area were unable or unwilling to cope with. Two or three of the students could sustain a short conversation between themselves, but the rest were either semi- or non-verbal, and only communicated with adults, if at all.
A headteacher arrived shortly after me, and only then came the gradual addition of five teachers, three of whom left within a month. It was known that one gave in their notice after being smacked hard in the face by a towering 16-year-old. Factors behind the other resignations were more oblique.
Of all our pupils, the most noteworthy is a teenager declared a menace to society by social services. Weighing in at more than 16 stone, he cannot be engaged in any activity other than playing with sand or sawdust – he will instantly destroy toys or games. He is liable to punch, kick or bite anyone within range as he makes his two or three daily trips to the playground or the toilet. A couple of times a week, he will emerge from his completely bare classroom holding aloft clumps of his own soft, pale shit, thumbing it through his fingers while walking down the corridor to rinse it off in the toilet sink. Flanked everywhere by two stocky support workers who sport arm-length bite-proof gloves, face masks and bored eyes, he will sometimes be let into the ball-pit room alone to masturbate.
Among the other students, spitting is a constant behaviour – on the floor, in a cup, in your face. Scratching of the hands or face has recently become a daily occurrence for the staff in my classroom. Stripping is common, for either sensory escape or self-amusement, and an absolute headache in terms of safeguarding, particularly the strip-and-run technique favoured by the nimble. Two of our students grope bottoms and bosoms often. Another large teen regularly threatens, and attempts, to stab his peers in the neck with a pencil if they linger near the door to his classroom. He has then caused immense damage to various rooms by launching chairs at the ceilings and smashing sinks, after being gently reminded that stabbing is unacceptable. Only one child is producing extreme verbal abuse, a nine-year-old whose vocabulary beggars belief. Two colleagues were sacked after failing to appropriately deal with this child’s constant use of the N-word and other sexually degrading language.
The hardest part of the job is not the students’ behaviour, which you get used to. The rare breakthroughs and achievements I’ve witnessed are intensely rewarding and more than make up for this. I’ve seen children who’ve never uttered a word start to recognise colours and count to three. I have taught a child how to use the toilet and dress independently. On a daily basis I will recite the English counties at various speeds, and in alternately low- and high-pitched voices, at the request of a 14-year-old, to our hysterical delight.
The students are, by the nature and rarity of their behaviour, amazing. And because school was still in the process of becoming a school, I could take on more responsibilities. I ran two weekly assemblies, wrote end-of-year reports, directed the school nativity play, and was soon leading a classroom of four students and their support workers (half the classrooms, including mine, are still teacher-less to this day).
The hardest part was earning £20,000 a year and living off £70 a week after rent and bills. I supplement this where I can with other work, but what’s particularly frustrating is that the head of HR told me I would be on £23,000 after passing a three-month probation period. I’ve raised this formally three times over the course of a year, but the mistake, or lie, has never been acknowledged by the school.
This is not a problem unique to me. It goes hand in hand with the insidious exploitation of my support staff colleagues, most of whom joined when the school was still offering a respite service, and are seeing significant changes to their job descriptions with little to no changes in pay. After a disappointing Ofsted inspection, the end of the working day was extended from about 3.20pm to 4.30pm for all support staff, for no extra pay. Management seemed to blame our ‘requires improvement’ grading on those with the fewest qualifications who are also doing the hardest work for the least money, rather than the qualified teachers, or their own failure to hire and retain more than two of them. In a long and unpleasant meeting, the CEO threatened to reduce support staff pay even further and make redundancies if things didn’t improve.
The school is certainly not short of cash. As an ‘independent specialist school’ they are taking at least £50,000 a year per student from the council, if not more. This is part of the spiralling crisis in SEND education funding, which stems from mainstream schools being unable to meet the growing demand for SEND students. Schools like mine then spring up to take the excess students and make a tidy profit. Councils are left with the bill, and their SEND deficits are set to hit £5 billion next year in England alone.
Management have mentioned on numerous occasions the great expense of the behaviour analysts, language therapists and counsellors who come in once or twice a week. What makes this excuse especially grating is that these outside figures are regularly flummoxed by the extraordinarily challenging behaviour of the students in a way that the support staff – who have worked with the children for years – are not.
I looked into joining a union, and even sought the advice of a colleague on how to quietly suggest this to the rest of our team. She explained that most would simply never take that step: they are too scared of having their certificates of sponsorship (CoS) withdrawn and being forced to leave the country. Almost all of my colleagues are migrants on precarious work visas. The vast majority are Nigerian, with a smaller contingent from Albania. They need to stay on the CoS for at least five years before applying for settled status, and are at varying stages along that journey.
My colleague believes that the CEO is happy to allow the implicit threat of withdrawing their CoS in order to curb dissent. If that’s the case, it has worked.
Otherwise, the hardest thing is the boredom. There are often long breaks in the school day for the students, which they need in order to stay calm and content. A small number may want to chat or play games during this time, but most want to just sit quietly in one of the sensory rooms or walk up and down the corridor, so for their support workers it’s either thumb-twiddling or preventing violence. But again, a difficult situation is greatly exacerbated by those running the school. If it’s the former of these options, staff may be retrospectively scolded by management, who watch live CCTV from their offices, for not engaging the children in an activity.
It’s hard to find a balance between active and quiet time, for pupils and staff alike. Some of the older students flat out refuse to do any formal learning, escaping at the mere sight of pen or paper. Some days, all the most challenging children seem to do is hit you and shriek. You’re probably having a more interesting time when ducking right hooks and cups of spit than following a student up and down a corridor. Either way, you end up knackered. The balance is rarely right, and that can be tough for morale.
In how they deal with this problem, I have to give massive credit to the west African staff. The spirit and humour of that region’s diaspora is what’s keeping the care sector in this country afloat. Colleagues greet me each morning with the honorary Yoruba name I was christened with last year, after I wore the traditional African dress they gifted to me as a present. All greetings, in fact, are exclaimed bombastically and accompanied with a high-five, which keeps the atmosphere of the school upbeat. I am the only white man in the building, and it’s the most welcome I’ve ever felt in a place of work.
My time at the school is nearly over, and I’ll be starting teacher training soon. One of my responsibilities over the past year has been to work one-to-one with a particular child. When he is angry, he says he’s glad I’m leaving, and wishes that I’d kill myself. He fabricates instances in which I have shouted in his face and threatens to have me sacked or arrested. When he is happy, he says he loves me, that I’m the best teacher ever. He tries to hug me, and screams for me when I am not there. That’s life at the SEND school.
