One afternoon when I was doing a bit of research for this chapter, I came across an interview with a Cambridge professor named Diane Reay.1 The eldest of eight children, Reay grew up on a council estate and received free school meals. After a twenty-year career in teaching, she became a faculty member of one of the most elite academic institutions in the world. Reay experienced the class divide that still shapes our nation from both sides. In the interview, she says it’s a common idea that the English state school system provides roughly the same education for all. It’s an idea, she says, that is simply not true. ‘The most important thing I found out was that we are still educating different social classes for different functions in society.’
I felt that, within my own school experiences, I wasn’t encouraged to thrive. Success always had its limits and anything above this was deemed as being too overambitious or unrealistic. I always had a question on my mind. I always felt like me and my friends, all from working-class backgrounds, were trained to work for people. A much smaller proportion of the population are trained to have people work for them.
Over the last fifty years we have seen dramatic improvements in many sectors of British society. One thing has remained resolutely the same. Inequality in the education system. This chapter explores why that inequality persists and what it can lead to.
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I realise how this is going to make me sound, but I always enjoyed school, even if I struggled to concentrate sometimes. I guess it was my escape from the issues we were facing at home. It was a great way to make friends, network and (most importantly kids!) learn. I learned so much — from the curriculum, from teachers, but also from school itself. Some of my greatest life experiences happened within school. I don’t think at the time I truly understood the importance of school and the impact it would have on making me the individual I am today.
I can’t think all the way back to when I started primary school, but I do remember it being a loving and safe environment. Even though we moved house a lot, my mum always ensured me and my siblings stayed put at the same primary school. Her main reasoning behind this was to ensure we had the least disruption possible.
I attended Christ Church primary school in Streatham, south London. The uniform consisted of grey trousers, a white shirt (or collared T-shirt), a grey cardigan with the school’s logo embroidered on the right-hand side, grey trousers and a black, white and red tie. There’s a school photo of me from when I was six or seven, smiling in that awkward way you do in school photos. I look so neat. For some reason, I always made an effort to look sharp, even though we couldn’t afford to regularly buy new school uniforms every year. Maybe it was my way of establishing my identity.
Christ Church was a Church of England school, and it was a good school. I had been going to church with my mum since I was a baby, so the prayers and hymns in assembly were familiar to me, even comforting. There was only one class per year group, so everyone knew each other; the teachers were supportive and kind, and I had a strong group of friends. School was a kind of sanctuary. As I said in the previous chapter, I moved seven times before I was eight, but no matter where we moved to, my mum kept me in Christ Church. What this meant was that I sometimes had a very long journey. One house was so far away that I had to leave the house at 7.30 a.m. with my mum to make sure I arrived on time. In those first years, there was a lot of stress at home. My mum didn’t have enough time to help me with my homework or my reading, and I started to struggle. In fact, I was doing so badly that the school thought that I might have special educational needs. I started to have regular meetings with the special needs coordinator and lessons in a small group until I caught up. I remember thinking that it was unfair; that I was just falling behind, not unable to do the work. After a couple of months I was formally assessed and they realised they’d made a mistake, after which I made sure I tried a bit harder in the classroom.
The school helped out in other ways. They let my mum use the washing machine in the staff room to wash our clothes when we didn’t have a washing machine at home and, in one particularly bad house with no hot water, they let my brother take a shower before school (my mum made me take cold baths). It wasn’t easy. I was a bit of a clumsy child and used to bump my head a lot, prompting a visit to the school nurse and a call to my mum (they would always call if you banged your head). Looking back, I wonder if part of that was seeking attention — seeking the attention I maybe wasn’t getting at home.
I was from a low-income family. In theory, this should have had profound implications on my performance at school. A 2019 survey by the National Education Union (NEU) of 8,600 school leaders, teachers and support staff paints a bleak picture of the academic prospects of children living in poverty.2 Nine out of ten people who took part in the survey agreed that poverty and low income were having a negative effect on pupils’ education. Half stated the situation had worsened over the last three years. The survey also concluded that budget cuts were having a significant impact on the ability of some schools to counter the effects of poverty, with breakfast clubs being forced to close due to budget cuts and staff spending their own money on clothes for pupils. The NEU survey really made me think. It described children hiding in the toilets on packed-lunch days because they were so ashamed of their lunches, and children being brought in to school when they were ill because their parents couldn’t afford to take time off work to care for them.
I remember that my mum wasn’t always able to take us to school or collect us. There were quite a few occasions when one of her friends would appear unexpectedly at the school gates to take us home. She couldn’t afford childcare, so after school my older brother and sister used to look after me a lot of the time, even though they were only a couple of years older than me. It was the best my mum could do in the circumstances. You’ve got to remember that not only was she having to work every hour she could to support us but, as I described in Chapter 1, she was also battling for her right (and ours) to stay in the UK.
I enjoyed most subjects, but I loved PE. Loved it. Football especially, but I also was really good at rounders, hockey and patball (if you know, you know). Being outside, socialising and working with my team mates (or on my own, in the case of patball) was another important part of my early school life. Living so far from school and so far from my friends, for the first few years of my education at least, meant that I didn’t really have the opportunity to play or develop the kinds of skills and confidence that sports can encourage. I didn’t go to any sports clubs outside of school and my mum didn’t have the time or energy to play with me. PE might seem like a less-important subject to some, but it definitely helped to build up my confidence, my problem-solving skills, and taught me how to work as part of a team. It also helped to develop a strong competitive streak in me. It’s one thing playing well, but it’s another to win …
Another welcome lesson was IT, where I learned how to code. It sparked a lifelong interest in computers and technology (so much so that I took my IT GCSE early). I’m still obsessed with Python.
My favourite teacher was Ms Baker. She always had time for me. If there were any subjects or topics that I struggled to grasp, she would sit down with me and go through the work until I understood it. She had the ability to make sense of everything. I was lucky. Nearly every teacher at primary school went out of their way to help me and make me feel supported, encouraged and able. No one ever doubted my potential or put me down. I really can’t begin to explain what that meant or how important it was to my future successes. Because people believed in me from a very young age, I believed in myself. I was also lucky, because my teachers really didn’t have the time or resources to help me in the way they did. In another recent survey carried out by the NEU, 69 per cent of primary and more than half of secondary teachers described their workload as ‘unmanageable’.3 Only 67 per cent of newly qualified teachers stay in the profession for more than three years. In inner-city primary schools, with potentially higher numbers of pupils with English as an additional language, more students with additional needs and greater numbers on free school meals, it is no easy task to ensure that every child gets the attention he or she deserves. This is especially true at a moment when primary schools are seeing their budgets being cut dramatically. A Guardian investigation in March 2019 revealed ‘a system falling apart at the seams’, with teachers doing the work of canteen staff and cleaners, relying on parent donations for essential funds, and lacking the resources to properly help those pupils most in need.4 Again, it is important to say that I was lucky in attending a school that went above and beyond to make sure that my every academic need was met and more. What about the many children across the country who are not as fortunate as I was?
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Einstein once said, ‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it’s stupid.’ You may wonder what I’m talking about. Just remember that you can’t expect a fish to climb a tree. By year six, I wasn’t one of the brightest pupils necessarily, but I was definitely one of the most enthusiastic. For me, getting good grades was a priority. I was predicted reasonably good results for my SATs and did a lot better than expected.
My good results motivated me to do more. They reinforced my passion for school, they gave me additional confidence, they encouraged me to invest more time and energy in my schoolwork and my extra-curricular activities. This may sound as if I’m making a lot of a test that doesn’t really mean a great deal, on the surface at least, but it did. It was a measure of our ability. Because of my SATs results, when I started secondary school, I was put in the top set in every class. I was aiming for top marks. No one, at the start of secondary school at least, believed that I couldn’t achieve that goal. But what does it mean if you struggle with tests? What does it mean if your strengths lie in other areas? Even as a young child, I felt that it was an unfair way of measuring the ability of a child. Aged ten, I could see that it was a system that benefitted those in my class who were good at taking tests, regardless of their literacy and numeracy skills, but put my friends who weren’t as good at retaining information or focusing for long periods at a particular disadvantage. I was lucky, but who lost out? In a 2018 National Education Union survey, nine in ten teachers agreed that SATs are detrimental to children’s wellbeing.5 This is an exceptionally high number. If almost every teacher feels this way, what about their pupils? What about those children whose future academic careers are shaped at that early stage? The fish who can’t climb?
Part of the problem in having a system so focused on academic results is that there is very little room for experiences or ambitions beyond those results. Irrespective of how well they fare in tests, 49 per cent of young people feel that they are unprepared for the world of work by the time they leave school.6 Businesses also agree; they report that 90 per cent of school leavers and a staggering 50 per cent of graduates are not ready for employment.
So if everyone seems to agree that our system isn’t working, then why isn’t it being changed? If pupils in primary schools are feeling the pressure, what does it mean for children as they get older?
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Secondary school was finally a time to become more independent. Growing up in primary school, this was the pinnacle of all of our hard work and the end goal. Something that we all dreamed about. My primary school was fairly small but secondary school was an entirely new environment, with hundreds of students, different year groups and harder qualifications. Secondary was supposed to set you up for your future. My brother went to a school called Archbishop Tenison’s, located in Kennington directly across from the Oval cricket ground. He would always tell me about the cricket matches and how every single student had a free ticket — from looking out of the third-floor windows. An all-boys’ school was something new to me, as primary school had been mixed, with both girls and boys in each class. However, it was a new prospect to be around boys only for the next five years. I knew about Archbishop Tenison’s because it was seen as cool to go there. Everyone used to speak about that school. It was a goal for many students to get a place there. If you made it through the full five years, you would become something called a ‘Tenisonian’.
A Tenisonian is someone who is a member of the alumni or an ex-student. I was looking forward to entering this big environment, but I was also anxious. I had never experienced bigger facilities, bigger space and being around new people. From reception to year six, I had only known my primary school. Now many of my friends would go to other schools and only one person followed me to mine. This was a new beginning. When my mum made up her mind about something it could never be changed, so I had no choice but to attend Tenison’s, even though there were a few other options that I would have liked to explore. I remember my first open evening, going along to the school and meeting many of my brother’s teachers. I knew loads of his friends already and I was looking forward to joining the school. He was only two years above me, so we would spend three years in the same school together. My first day was exciting. I was looking forward to a new beginning, wearing my newly bought school uniform.
I couldn’t wait to have my first ever lesson. And we had a range of new subjects that we would learn. Which I was most excited about! I remember walking through the school gates on the first day and it was only us brand-new year sevens who were in the school. The school was massive. My little primary school didn’t come close. This was a new level. A multi-storey building, loads of different classrooms, a massive playground. This would be a new environment. The second day was the most challenging. Now we were joined by the rest of the school. I had never been in such a busy environment. Hundreds of people walking around. I was fortunate enough to have known a few young people who had joined me in my year group, even though they didn’t attend my primary school. Mikes, Tosin and Jesse were three people I knew through church and mutual friends. I was so happy that they were in the same school as me. I had also bumped into a few people that I’d known growing up in my area; it was good that we were now in the same place. Now students at Tenison’s. My secondary school was a Church of England school, the same as my primary school.
This meant that Christianity was at the heart of everything we did in school. The same thing happened. Singing hymns in assemblies at the beginning. Hearing a few words from Father Robert. And learning about really important life lessons alongside Christian teachings. I felt that even though our school was multicultural, with students of many different faiths, the Christian foundation of the school provided a structure and a discipline that really helped us. This was definitely something to pull all of us together with everyone participating.
Travelling was also different now. Rather than walking round the corner back to my home, which was located just behind the playground of my former school, less than a one minute walk away, now I had to commute to school. I would jump on a bus all the way towards Brixton, then down Brixton Road until I reached Kennington. This was new to me. A sense of independence, a sense of confidence now began to grow within me. I used to take different routes to school, depending on which friend I met up with in the morning. We saw so many things on our journey to school. First we saw all of the other students from the neighbouring secondary schools. We saw people rushing to get to work.
But I had to always ensure that I got to school on time, An 8.30 a.m. start to be precise, in order to have a successful school day. My head teacher was Mrs Sims, a female headmistress of an all-boys’ school. She was the greatest head teacher I have ever experienced in my whole life. Her dedication to really impact the lives of all the young boys who attended the school was paramount. I was glad she was our head teacher. I later formed a strong, close bond and very good relationship with her, as the years went by in school. However, at the beginning, when I first joined the school, I definitely feared bumping into her in the corridor and was really scared to approach her with any concerns that I had. However, as I started engaging with extra-curricular activities, it became a regular occurrence that we would have meetings and sit down to talk about all of the work I was involved with. I would say that Tenison’s was a hard-core school. If you went to Tenison’s, you had to be brave and bold, and if you managed to get through five years of that school it was an achievement. Many people were given permanent exclusions or left the school for personal reasons. You might be wondering, what do I mean by hard-core?
Well, let me paint a picture for you. My school was located in Kennington. Very close to Vauxhall, but also very close to Camberwell, Brixton, Stockwell and Wandsworth. We had students from all different parts of London who attended the school, and therefore young people from areas plagued with gang rivalry. Our school connected all of these areas together. And as you can imagine, sometimes it wasn’t the best thing for business. I would often come across young men who would fall into disagreements or who would have arguments. But the majority would leave any tensions at the school gates. One thing I noticed is that many of the young men who went to school with me had experienced some of the problems that I had to face growing up, from absent parents to being in the care system, as well as some being young carers at home. Many people were really living in poverty. For the first time, I felt like I could relate nearly to everyone around me.
As we settled into school, I started to realise that there were two things that everyone cared about: money and girls. Being in an all-boys’ school and growing up, there were many different social pressures. The older boys in our school created the framework we would follow. They would meet up with girls from Charles Edward Brooke and St Martin-in-the-Fields, which were both all-girls’ schools. We would watch as they came to school in designer outfits, wearing the newest clothes; some wore trainers and brought their own designer bags to school. This now became the thing everyone wanted; you wanted to be like the popular guys. These social pressures often led to people doing things they shouldn’t have to create this image — some guys I knew started engaging in criminality in order to fund their lifestyle.
My first two years were the most eventful. I got involved in as many extra-curricular activities as possible. The school choir, basketball team, BBC School Report, Debate Mate, anything that was thrown at me. I guess I wanted something to occupy me. I built fantastic relationships with some of my teachers. To some I can say I owe my life. Mr Wong, my performing arts teacher. Alongside teaching he was a poet, theatre practitioner and playwright. He gave me the confidence I embody today. I could tell him anything. Any situations I found myself in – a girl I had a crush on, an incident in the playground – he would always give me advice. The drama studio where he worked was my safe haven. After school or during break times I would always find myself there.
Mr Melvin, who unfortunately passed away, was a champion for young people. He introduced the BBC School Report and Debate Mate into the school, enabling me to eye a career in the media in the future. Mr Reid never actually taught me. He was the A-level psychology teacher. He had words of wisdom for me always and told me I could achieve whatever I wanted to achieve. It isn’t every day that you find teachers like these I’ve mentioned, who go above and beyond to ensure I had the best future possible.
I did have some bad experiences. There was one teacher in particular who didn’t agree with me taking part in all of my extra-curricular activities. Perhaps part of his anger was justified, that I shouldn’t have let what I did in my spare time take over my studies. One day in class we ended up having an argument. I had mixed up the dates to hand in an assignment, so I should rightly have been punished. However, he used this as an opportunity to push me two sets down.
I was so discouraged. I felt it was an unfair and unjust punishment. However, this gave me the motivation to focus on this subject. This occurred in my final year at school, I wanted to prove him wrong. Within my classes I made sure I listened to all that was said; I would do extra research and ensure all of my assignments were in on time. And on GCSE results day, I found out that I had achieved an A* for my hard work.
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Looking back, at the age of twelve or thirteen, I was at a crossroads. Most people assume that you get your education in the classroom, but actually school is only one small part of it. One key aspect of my early life was my local youth club. I used to visit the club regularly in my early years in secondary school. Me and my friends would go and play football and participate in different workshops. My youth club was really cool because a show that was recently introduced on TV had been filmed there. Meet the Adebanjos was a comedy show about a normal Nigerian-British family.
Following on from primary school, the youth club was another place where I could pursue my interests, gain encouragement from adults I trusted and, perhaps most importantly, relax and have fun. As well as having access to game consoles and play areas, the club also ran a busy programme of talks, bringing in local businessmen, artists, politicians and sports stars to talk to us about their journeys and give us advice on how to succeed. I can’t say that they were all useful. I distinctly remember an accountant who came to talk to us about money management, but ended up lecturing us about mortgages. None of it made sense. We just thought, We’re thirteen. We’re just about able to buy sweets for ourselves. Why are you talking to us about home ownership? However challenging the talks were, though, they also offered something important — visions of the future. The speakers were saying: we were in your position once and look where we are now. You are more than your environment. It started me thinking about what I really wanted to do and how I could get there.
Not long after I started at secondary school, at the age when I was gaining a bit of independence, my youth club was forced to reduce its programming. Its government funding was cut and no other financial backers could be found. It was devastating for the local community and it had a real impact on me. Beyond the activities and resources it provided, it was a space where I could just be me and sit around with my friends. School finished at 3.30 p.m. every day and, like for a lot of my friends, it wasn’t always feasible for me to go home. My mum was out working a lot of the time, I couldn’t really bring friends back, and, if I did, there wasn’t really much for us to do. All of a sudden we had nowhere to go and nothing to do. It wasn’t just our youth club that was closed, others were too, as well as libraries across the borough. The hours between school finishing and dinner time stretched on for ever. I was getting bored.
For the years to follow we found a solution. At least three times a week, me and a handful of friends would visit what we called ‘Brikky McDs’ — the McDonalds in the heart of Brixton, sipping on strawberry milkshakes. Once our youth centre closed, the lack of interactive and engaging activities quickly became a drag. When you are bored you can find yourself in meaningless movements. I was trying my best to remain occupied, but every so often, to have some fun, my friends and I would retreat to the Brixton McDonalds to chill and bond. It was one of the only venues we could all be together and feel safe. However, these were not short visits: on some days we could find ourselves there for hours upon hours. I had days when I was located in this place from the time school finished until late — 10 or 11 p.m. On some days we would spend the same amount of time in Brikky McDs as we did in school, which is crazy to think about. OK, we could be loud and boisterous. People sometimes construed us as being violent or aggressive, but we weren’t. We were not being antisocial, we were just being social.
Brixton was a place to make friends. I made so many friendships for life there. We all had nicknames or what we would call tags. I became known as JE. I would meet up with Ziggy, Tintilla, Ace, Riz and Whiltz every day after school. We all attended schools in different areas, but this didn’t stop us from being together. Tin and I called each other cousins, even though we were not blood related. He was super popular and this made me semi-popular too. We did have fun all the times we spent together, but we also experienced things that no kids should have to go through.
For those who didn’t find anything to do after school, they often found themselves going down the wrong path. I firmly believe the closing of youth services and centres have directly contributed to gang activity. Since 2010, youth services across England have been cut by 69 per cent. Is it any wonder we recently saw such a sharp spike in youth violence?7
I was lucky to find another path. Just after I started at secondary school I began to spend a lot more time on various extra-curricular activities. I signed up to anything I thought was interesting, I always liked to be busy. By year nine, I was involved in a number of entrepreneurial schemes and programmes, regularly attended networking events for young leaders, was an avid member of our school journalism club (sponsored by the BBC), was a key singer in the school choir, attended army cadets (which I loved) and I also played a lot of basketball for my local club. I was becoming more and more confident. Most kids my age got up in the morning, went to school, came home, did a bit of homework, watched a bit of television and went to bed. No bad thing at all. But I was doing a lot more and getting a lot more from it. If I wasn’t at Brikky McDs, a class or an event after school – singing Christmas carols for charity events, for example – I was at home, learning how to write PR releases with advice and guidance from some of the best publicists in the business.
More than specific skills and knowledge, these activities helped to broaden my education and my appetite for learning in ways that my school simply couldn’t. I was not only learning to do things, but I was learning to believe in myself. I was starting to see a future beyond school — a world where I was a journalist, a broadcaster, a musician, a politician, an economist, an entrepreneur. What’s more, I was starting to pursue my own projects, building up my charitable foundation, developing business ideas with my friends and mentors. These were not the idle daydreams of a school boy; these were real and achievable goals. I was taken seriously. My education was suddenly tied to something tangible. Extra-curricular activities were another vital building block of my becoming.
It was obviously a busy time for me, but I was able to balance my schoolwork and my extra-curricular activities, just about. In spite of getting my work done, I used to get a lot of frowns from some of the school staff. Just as the support of teachers in primary school encouraged me to apply myself, the negative comments of one teacher suddenly shifted my priorities, and I lost my appetite for learning for a little while. I didn’t realise it back then, but my self-esteem was not particularly robust. All it would take was a little comment to dampen my spirits, especially from a trusted figure, like a teacher. When anyone is on the move to develop, it can be especially difficult when individuals put you down, intentionally or otherwise.
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I attended Heathbrook primary school in Wandsworth, then I went to Westminster City boys’ secondary school in the Westminster/Victoria area. Looking back, I don’t think I handled the transition from primary school to secondary school very well. I didn’t understand how serious secondary school was, nor how strict it was going to be. I didn’t always listen in class, which resulted in me missing out on things that I really should have been paying attention to. I’m not sure why. I suppose at the time, I couldn’t see the point. I had no clue what I wanted to do or what I was learning for. I couldn’t see a future for myself.
I think a lot of my friends went through the same issues. That said, nearly all of my friends with older siblings settled in quickly. But it felt like I was going through it by myself. I had no one older to look up to, no one to guide me. I think that played a big part in what happened to me.
You are exposed to a lot of negative things in an inner-city comprehensive. Problems that young people from working-class backgrounds experience in their homes and communities are brought to school. Another difference is that students in private schools are exposed to many more opportunities and you get to experience and learn a lot more things that kids in state schools don’t.
Socialising is also different. For example, when my siblings go to hang out with their friends, they’re going to someone’s house because they live in homes with a lot of space. My siblings have friends who live in places like Kensington, and they can go there and just chill or swim in their garden. If they want, they can sit there and read books or they can do something really creative. It’s crazy how different it is to how we’d spend our time. Someone in a state school would probably meet at a friend’s house, but because they lived in a small flat on a council estate, you couldn’t go inside the house. So we’d chill outside. And when you’re chilling outside, you start to mix with different people and it becomes something different. Or you end up being seen as a gang, because you’re out on the street. And this is because you are less fortunate than those with big houses or money to do activities; you’ve got nowhere to go and nothing to do, so all you know is hanging outside or in a park. It’s humiliating in a way. People might see you as a threat, but really you’ve just got nowhere else to go.
We grew up in an age of austerity. When we were in year seven, something like 70 per cent of youth services in Lambeth were cut. It was harder in a way, because we were very aware of what we lost. Before secondary school, there seemed to be so many different youth clubs or centres we could go to. We would travel around and if we were going to go to Brixton, I could go to Max Roach or Tulse Hill adventure playground or I might go to Lollard. My auntie was a youth worker so we used to travel around with her during summer to the different adventure playgrounds, but I remember one summer when I was in year seven or year eight, a lot of them closed down. Only some areas still had them and, because there weren’t really any youth clubs, more of us started hanging out on the streets and this is when a lot of the gangs I know were formed. And then when a group disliked another, they would form a rival gang.
You’d always find us in McDonalds or KFC. They became our spots, the places where everyone could meet up. After school, someone would ask, ‘Where are you going?’ You’d say Brixton and everyone would get off the bus in Brixton. Everyone would be just be chilling and meeting and socialising with other kids. It was fun but when a lot of young people would meet after school, especially in their different uniforms, there were always a few that wanted to be the bad guy and show off in front of the girls. And that’s how situations would turn bad or escalate.
In secondary school I found that teachers were quick to pick me up on even the smallest transgression. The little chats that I sometimes had in class with my friends, for example. I’m a bit of a talker so when it came to lesson time, even though I’d be doing work, I was always going to socialise. At that age I was trying to fit in with everyone, so I would start up a little conversation with different people in the hope of building friendships. In primary school this was ‘talking’ and might earn me a telling-off eventually. In secondary school it was ‘persistent level 1 talking’ or ‘low-level disruption’ and would earn me a negative point.
These points were part of a behaviour system called SIMS. If you did well, you were given a point. If you misbehaved, you were deducted a point. One point was deducted for persistent level 1 talking. Seriously disruptive behaviour would lose you three points, the maximum amount you could lose in any given lesson.
If you only lost one or two points in a day, they were scrubbed off overnight. But if you lost three points or more, your parents would be notified and your points were deducted from your total tally. I’m not sure I saw many positive points handed out, to be honest. My school only really focused on the negative. Thirty positive points didn’t get you anything. But thirty negative points was isolation. Forty negative points was exclusion. Six exclusions was permanent expulsion. So I was getting a lot of minus points for low-level disruption and I just wasn’t learning. I used to talk and talk and talk and, even though I was doing all of my work (and doing it well), every lesson I would just be collecting minus points. Then all of a sudden, I was told I had reached minus thirty points — isolation or internal exclusion. I was sent to a room for a whole day to do my work with other students who were at minus thirty points. We were all in our own separate corners, so we couldn’t talk or get up and interact. We had our breaks in there. The teachers brought us in our lunch to eat at our desks. All I did in isolation was write lines. I can’t remember the lines exactly, but they were something like: ‘I will do my work and I will do what I have to do in class’. I sat and wrote lines all day long.
I felt like I was in prison. I had no agency, no control. I was given food and told to eat it. I didn’t speak to anyone all day. There was little else to it. I wasn’t told why I was in isolation. No one offered me guidance or admonishment or support. Nothing. I didn’t realise what it would lead to. I didn’t understand the severity of the situation. It all felt so minor and so unfair. So I was back in class the next day, racking up minus points again. And then I hit minus forty. I got home and my mum said she’d had a call from the school telling her that I was excluded for a day. That was it. So I came back in the day after and ended up doing the same thing again. Eventually, I was permanently excluded. I heard a little while later that the school was considering re-admitting pupils who had been expelled as part of the SIMS system, but for me it was too late.
I am not sure I would say that I was expelled, really. It felt more like I was pushed away. I believe that the SIMS system was designed to target the most troubled or struggling students and keep them away from the other pupils. There was a pressure to perform. I am sure that academic results had a lot to do with it. It also felt like once you were identified as someone who wouldn’t succeed, that was the end for you. Pupils who had been excluded or sent to isolation were marked and were more likely to get more negative points. Occasionally I would check my profile and see negative points from teachers I didn’t even know. It was as if I was blacklisted. I was ‘Damani, the disruptive one’ and so that’s how I was treated, even though I was getting on with my work. The whole thing felt like a set-up. Like I was judged to be unlikely to achieve good grades and so was set up to fail.
In my first year at secondary school, I was excluded five times; four times from the SIMS system and once for a situation that took place outside of school. Honestly speaking, on that occasion, I was with someone who had stolen something from a shop. They found out that I was there through CCTV so, even though I hadn’t stolen anything, I was excluded straight away. All the other exclusions were through the SIMS system. In year seven alone I reached 144 negative points from low-level disruption in class. They had it all logged.
I was stupid and immature, I can’t lie. Especially in my first year. But I was given no guidance. No one sat me down and tried to encourage me to think differently. I was back in class and, almost as quickly, I was out again. I did start to learn, eventually. In year seven I had 144 points and five exclusions, but in year eight I only received fifteen negative points. So I think naturally, as I was a bit older, I started to understand things a bit more and, in the end, I was expelled for a separate incident, not because I hit the maximum points allowed.
There were a couple of teachers who tried to help me. My form tutor, Mr McManus, for example. I remember him. He always tried to help me out, give me a helping hand, but he had limited time to work with me. I would see him for, I think, fifteen minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the afternoon. There was also a support teacher in my class who would always look out for me. These teachers both tried to help put me on the right path, but I spent very little time with either of them. If I’d had more time with them, it’s likely my actions would have changed or they would have been able to give me that intervention that I needed.
Eventually I was permanently excluded. The first thing I realised was that this was no small thing. I hadn’t realised how difficult it would be to get into another school. On top of the stress of getting kicked out and losing my friends, I also had very few options in terms of what to do next. I was fourteen and almost out of options. It was crazy.
The worst part of it was facing up to my parents. I felt sorry for my friends who weren’t getting the support they needed at home. Even before I got kicked out of school, my parents were on my case to fix my behaviour and they were there for me at a time when I needed them the most. I know there were others whose parents were too busy or didn’t have the time for them, which would definitely have made the whole experience harder to go through.
Mainstream schools weren’t an option, and so I was sent to a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) fairly near to me. I think it’s important to mention that there are differences between the PRUs you can go to. Where you are sent largely depends on the reason why you got kicked out of school. There was a PRU where you’d go straight into doing a trade, so mechanics, electronics or computing. You could be sent to what was just a bad PRU. God help you if you were sent to a bad PRU. There was no hope for the people there. It was basically a day-care centre, not somewhere they would ever receive an education. Then you have ones that try and help you, like the one that I went to, Park Campus (PC). At PC, depending on your behaviour, you could be selected to go into the reintegration programme. This was where they would focus on your behaviour, show you what you should be doing and put you on the right path to go back into a mainstream school. They would also start doing applications for mainstream schools for you to see who’d accept you. If you were lucky, you’d be accepted back, and if not, you stayed there.
I was in the PRU for about two years. Two very critical years, in terms of my education. Not only did PC show me what I shouldn’t do, they also showed me what I should be doing in school. They sort of trained me into being the student that I should have been in the first place. After that I went back into education and I finished secondary school in a mainstream school.
The PRU was very different to what I was used to or what I had gotten used to. The uniform at the PRU was just a school jumper. You could wear trainers and black trousers with it. Going back into mainstream education, I had to buy a school blazer, tie and a school bag. At the PRU, our homework would just be a piece of paper, so I never used to carry a bag, I would put things in my pocket. So I had to learn to remember to carry a PE kit, my books, homework, pens and pencils.
I was in the PRU when I had to pick my GCSE subjects. As you can probably guess, your GCSEs shape everything that follows after. A-levels or other college qualifications, university applications, jobs, careers, families and so on, and so on. And at the PRU, the only GCSEs I could take were maths, English, science and one other.
Even if you were doing really well in school, academically, your options would almost always be limited at the PRU. Well, actually, it depends on the PRU. At my PRU, we could only study four possible subjects. But at Park Campus, if, for example, they saw you were good at PE, they would let you join the PE club. I was lucky in that I was interested in subjects they offered as GCSE options – resistant materials and design technology, in my case – but there were plenty of my friends and peers who weren’t able to study subjects they wanted to. By the time I got back into mainstream school, there were a lot of subjects that I couldn’t pick up because I hadn’t been able to study them in the PRU. Subjects like history or religious studies, I didn’t know enough about them to take them on as GCSEs.
I was learning, but learning very slowly. What needs to be taken into consideration is that, in a PRU, there are a lot more people with behavioural needs than in a single mainstream classroom. The teachers there are trained to deal with or handle this — so the way for a good PRU to be run is for them to be suitable for and take into consideration these behavioural needs.
My friends who went to PRUs followed different paths. A couple of them were killed, God rest their souls, and quite a few of them are in prison. I think that, because they weren’t in mainstream education – and didn’t have to be as focused as students in mainstream education – they had a lot more time on their hands to get caught up in stuff that they shouldn’t really have been doing. Things like gang activity or selling drugs. Just different stuff. Some people were stealing, robbing people, involved in crazy and dangerous things.
It’s easy to see why you would get caught up in the wrong things. At a PRU, you’re at the bottom of the barrel. You’re always the last to be checked on. You’re made to feel like nobody really cares about you and there’s no hope for you. And that’s not true. There are lots of people who’ve gone to PRUs that I don’t think people would know had gone there. There’s a rapper named Frosty who went to the same PRU I did, who is now signed to one of the biggest record labels in London. He had potential and a lot of young people in PRUs have potential for lots of different things, but they’re not pushed in that direction; or they’re told that they can probably never get there, instead of being told that, despite their circumstances, anything is possible.
As bad as it was that I was left in a PRU for two years, I think Park Campus helped me in the sense that I came into contact with so many different types of people. I ended up there because I was immature and disruptive, but going there helped me to grow up and see the bigger picture. That didn’t and still doesn’t work for everyone who goes to a PRU, because everyone in there is different and not every PRU cares enough about the young people there. There were kids like me who just liked to talk, but there were also some kids in there who had done quite bad things and, by just dumping them in a PRU, the potential to do any better was written off. If as much effort was made to care about them as they care about school league tables, there wouldn’t be so many of them in prison or dead.
I think students, especially those with behavioural needs, should be shown how important it is to stay in school and to study, and be shown the opportunities that come from it. Because although we all go to school and learn, I didn’t really understand what learning meant at that age or how far it could get you in life. At the time you’re just seeing work and homework, work and homework, but you don’t understand that this is all just preparation to help you get to where you want to be in life.
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The experiences described in this chapter should make two things clear. First, people from underprivileged backgrounds can succeed in our education system, like I did. Second, many are all too often pushed out, and left to find their own way. This is what happened to Damani.
Damani’s experience is not rare. Too often teachers do not have the time or resources to adequately meet the needs of disadvantaged children, so they are forgotten. Our education system just isn’t equipped to level the playing field for everyone. Like I said before, I strongly believe that one inspiring teacher can transform your life. But I also believe that one bad teacher can destroy your education. I’ve heard teachers say to my friends that they won’t amount to anything, that they are from nothing. It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Weaknesses in our school system will inevitably disadvantage those young people who already have less in life. Young people bring their problems to school. Because of the stresses that poverty can cause, such as those I described in the previous chapter, there will be greater needs to be met in poorer schools. The consequence is that many schools, unless they are given the resources they need, will likely have to focus on discipline instead of finding what makes young people tick. My experience has shown that for young people like me to succeed, there needs to be an array of activities and pathways available for us to go down. The alternative is that young people like Damani don’t just get left behind, they get forced out of the system.
Of course, that our education system discriminates is not something you should believe from two stories I have told you, of my own and Damani’s. However, broader evidence is also clear that our school system is failing pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. A recent BBC report concluded that at our current rates of academic progress, it will take fifty years to close the gap between rich and poor pupils.8 Again, our education system just isn’t equipped to level the playing field for everyone.
As I will explain in a moment, there are some promising trends in secondary education, and ideas that should be adopted. However, there are also aspects of education which I think are getting worse. For example, the increasing focus on test results means that the creative subjects that made me who I am will fall by the wayside. This is particularly worrying in a context where the government and many schools don’t seem to value the arts. One consequence of this is that between 2010 and 2018 there was a 35 per cent decrease in arts entries at GCSE.9 None of this is to say that maths and science are not important subjects, but I do wonder what happens to pupils who are less academic and more creative. Creative subjects promote reasoning, innovation and imagination – the things that we actually need more of in the world to solve our problems, I believe.
One thing I think we should never lose sight of is that everyone is different. This goes beyond test results and subject choices, although that is large part of it. As we have seen in this chapter, poverty can be the cause of a number of associated problems in school, from lack of parental support to fatigue and malnourishment. A pupil who is not performing well and is not always behaving properly is at risk of exclusion or expulsion. Again, the statistics here are clear. The government’s own data shows that children on free school meals – a key indicator of poverty – are four times more likely to be excluded than the rest of the school population.10 Pupils of Irish Traveller, Gypsy/Roma and black Caribbean, or mixed white and black Caribbean heritage are also significantly over-represented in PRUs. Schools will justify such statistics by claiming any exclusions are to protect the learning environments of other students, but there are concerns this is done for more cynical reasons. In a recent Guardian article the poet and educator Michael Rosen questioned whether exclusions were being made ‘solely on the basis of benefiting students and teachers’ or if they were being used as ‘a way of benefiting a school’s position on the local league table?’
We shouldn’t underestimate the impact exclusions can have on a young person. This has short-term and long-term aspects. In the short-term, excluded pupils are twice as likely to be taught by an unqualified teacher or a temporary or supply teacher, and a recruitment crisis for leadership staff in these schools means that few excluded young people with have the positive experience I had with the headteacher at Tenisons.11 This is one of many reasons that less than 2 per cent of excluded pupils get a ‘good’ pass in English and Maths at GCSEs.12 In the longer term, we know that 50 per cent of PRU pupils are unemployed and out of education by the age of sixteen and that an enormous 89 per cent of prisoners at Young Offenders Institutions have been excluded at school. Beyond the cost to the individuals involved, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) calculated the lifetime cost of one year’s cohort of officially excluded young people to be nearly £2.1 billion.13
Given the information presented above, it seems like it should be a no-brainer for the government and schools to try and reduce the number of people excluded from school. However, all data shows that schools are generally moving in the opposite direction, and between 2013 and 2018, the number of permanent exclusions in England has increased by 60 per cent.14 This is particularly shocking if you are from a background like mine, where almost everyone I know who ended up permanently excluded is now dead or behind bars.
However, one school in south London is showing it doesn’t have to be like this. And that there is another way. Dunraven is a school in Streatham in south London which runs from nursery age all the way up to year thirteen. It is exceptional because, in a period when nationwide exclusions have rocketed, Dunraven has decreased their permanent exclusions to zero. In addition, they have only had 14 temporary exclusions, which pales in comparison to the national average of 174. Dunraven is an inner-city school in Lambeth, with almost half of their students coming from low socio-economic homes. So what makes them so different to the rest?
Dunraven’s headmaster David Boyle made it his mission to reduce permanent exclusions to zero and, instead of punishing children for their behaviour, in 2012 he put in place a system that works alongside and supports young people to reintegrate them back in to class. To do this, he created an on-site inclusion unit, called the Base, where young people at risk of being permanently excluded can still learn whilst working on managing their behaviour. Sixty young people used the Base last year and all were successfully reintegrated back in to the main school. In contrast to a PRU, where many young people are left to their own devices, the Base appears to take the time to understand the reason behind the disruptive behaviour. Some prefer the Base as the main classrooms are too loud, while others are there because of constantly getting into fights. Whatever the reason for being sent there, the Base is changing the way disruptive young people are treated and making sure that, despite the issues they are going through, they are given every opportunity to thrive, just like their peers. It’s an approach where they are not just seen as bad kids and punished, but just as kids and given another chance to succeed. I believe the success of this project shows that more interventions where young people aren’t criminalised for their behaviour are needed in schools around the UK, and I hope that this is a model that the education system will seriously consider taking on board.
The final aspect of our education system which I want to address is mental health, because I think it is such a core issue which is currently under-explored. In a study conducted by Big Change, half of school leaders said that teachers cannot recognise poor behaviour linked to mental health problems. There is a correlation between exclusion and poor mental health in later life, which makes more sense if you think that a lot of excluded pupils may have been suffering from undiagnosed mental health conditions in school. I cannot begin to imagine the confusion and frustration of suffering from a mental health condition that you cannot make sense of. What is even harder to contemplate is the idea of those pupils most in need of help being punished and ostracised.
We need an education system that can allow people from all backgrounds, and with all different talents and capabilities, to flourish. We need strong mental health education in our system so that young people feel listened to and supported. This means a culture change, like the one implemented in Dunraven. It also means better training for teachers to recognise and be able to act on the issues that are affecting young people from backgrounds like mine. Ultimately, this will all require more resources for teachers and support staff so that young people can benefit from an education that works for them, and empowers them, not one which punishes young people when they are unable to conform.
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I have a question for you. What is education? I don’t mean the education system, but education itself. I decided to leave school at eighteen. The reason that I chose not to go to university (straight away, at least) was because I believed that I could learn a lot more outside of the classroom. And, so far, I think I made the right decision. There are skills that we simply cannot learn in a traditional educational setting; skills that will actually help us to thrive and solve problems in today’s world. We need to shift our outlook on what education is and what it means, and change our language, actions and institutions to reflect that.
For young people reading this, I encourage you to try and answer this question, have conversations like these with your family, and explore what you really want to learn about and why. For family members, don’t stigmatise or pressure others into certain choices; instead, support and listen to them to help them to find a path that is best for them and not for anyone else.
In every organisation, in every culture, people thrive because of the people around them. It is important to create an environment in which young people from deprived backgrounds can work together and support each other. Education can’t just be left to schools. We need investment in youth and community centres and projects. We need to surround children with positive individuals and messages. We need to better support our teachers and change the image of the profession to encourage the best minds to pursue careers in education. More than anything else, we need to give more children another chance. It will be worth it. Because irrespective of background, gender or socio-economic class, any child can be a success. I am testament to this.