For increasing numbers of young people, going through secondary school involves long spells in isolation, after-school detentions, and being treated as if you will not amount to anything.
This was certainly my experience at the first secondary school I attended. I was not going to achieve eights and nines and I didn’t want to follow their preferred pathway, so I quickly found myself on track to being excluded.
Being told I would never achieve anything left me broken and feeling lost in life. So in Year 9, I got myself out of that school and moved to UTC South Durham.
There, I thrived. I started saying yes to every opportunity and totted up 13 work experience placements, through which I developed a passion for construction.
On my 16th birthday, I travelled to Manchester to interview for a management trainee programme I was nominally too young for. A couple of months later, I was accepted as one of eight trainees – once they’d extended the programme to fit me in!
This was a mark of how confident I had become through the UTC, which I put down to the UTC’s behavioural system (which made me responsible for my decisions) and curriculum (which allowed me to explore a true breadth of options).
There are countless others like me in our school system right now. The children’s commissioner’s Big Ambition report (which I worked on) found secondary-aged children were the least likely to agree that they enjoy school. There is a direct relationship between this and growing concerns about behaviour.
A punitive approach of detentions and isolations followed by suspensions and exclusions will do nothing to engage them. But being given more responsibility for their behaviour, in tandem with a curriculum that allows them to explore different pathways, could be life-changing.
UTC Derby Pride Park, which has been commended by Ofsted for its students’ “impeccable behaviour”, has developed a behaviour system with its employer partners.
In industry, where the relationship with an employee has broken down, they do not get a detention. Instead, they and their manager have a restorative conversation and set some targets which are regularly monitored.
My time at the UTC has taken me from the isolation block to parliament
UTC Derby has a policy that balances necessary consequences for bad behaviour with restorative practices. This helps students understand what they have done wrong and how to improve.
When a UTC Derby student is sent out the classroom, they are not put back into circulation until they have reflected properly. That includes going back to their teacher for a conversation on moving forward, like a quick business meeting.
Since this approach was introduced, instances of students being removed from class at UTC Derby Pride Park have decreased by two-thirds.
But the behaviour policy alone wouldn’t achieve these results. Going back into classrooms to receive the same curriculum is unlikely to re-engage apathetic or disruptive students. For me and many others, the simulated workplace environment of the UTC, learning skills through hands-on experience and engaging with employers was transformative.
So UTCs are enthused by Labour’s curriculum and assessment review, but we should be careful that this doesn’t lead to schools offering a bland, limited technical and creative offering.
Instead, it should connect two of the new government’s key pledges: to support children to study a creative or vocational subject up to 16, and to guarantee two weeks’ work experience.
If this can be delivered in partnership with employers and allows students to take part in multiple placements in a variety of fields, it could be effect real change.
Catherine, South Durham’s deputy principal, will confirm that, for all my progress, I still was not the easiest of students to teach. But my time at the UTC has taken me from the isolation block to parliament, where I have discussed my experience with a cross-party group of MPs and peers.
I now work with the Careers and Enterprise Company and the Children’s Commissioner on careers education policies, driven to ensure that no young person will feel like I did until year 9.
It’s a feeling I’m sure no teacher wants their pupils to feel, and restorative practices can help to reveal these feelings and even improve behaviour. In isolation from curriculum reform however, it’s unlikely to deliver the deep transformation young people are clearly crying out for.
And likewise, a curriculum review that doesn’t take young people’s views into consideration won’t get to the heart of what’s driving behaviour, attendance and mental health ever downwards.
This is a great article. For too long, young people have been let down by the school system, particularly in England and been increasingly subjected to very questionable practices. More exposure of this is urgently needed. Many congratulations to you, Rylie, and thank you for your work on this.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed the article.
This is definitely the way forward. Teachers have been saying this for years. However, as always schools are not being supported financially to do this properly. Hopefully this can be changed as many young people are not suitable for academia alone. Thank you for highlighting this.
A refreshing perspective, with an excellent point about the need for the system to accomodate young people taking ownership of their behaviours and performance. In my opinion this type of culture (that used to exist) died out in many schools as a direct result of pressure from Ofsteds (detached from reality) accountability measures.
For many years lots of schools tried hard not to exclude highly disruptive youngsters and experimented with the “restorative conversation” approach as a consequence to declining classroom behaviour and im afraid it simply has not worked. Keeping youngsters in class that do not want to be there and who communicate this by throwing their weight about (literally), causing outrageous disruption cannot be accomodated with a conversation. The problem is the system, so a system wide approach is needed and recognition of a genuine curriculum offer for those young people disinterested in Gove’s 1950s grammar school style ‘sausage factory’ approach of constant assessment and false notions of “academic rigour”. It cannot be allowed to continue, and it cannot be right that so many young people (and educators) are deeply unhappy.
In reality schools are so overstreched, there is literally not the time or capacity to be accomodating the avalanche of shocking behaviours that are routinely on display in the countries schools with classrooms of over 30 (my experience is secondary and secure estate) with multiple “restorative conversations”. This may be a sad state of affairs but that is the lived truth. The sooner this government fixes the educational offering for all our young people and trusts teachers to teach again the better.
I’d love to see a modular approach to secondary education, where children pick from a variety of modules each term, and accrue points for these modules. Modules would give children a real sense of autonomy over their learning pathway and build skills for life. Examples of modules might include: mock trials, architecture and design, fashion design, debate, business management, Carpentry, graphic design, art history, engineering, the role of government, Volcanology, psychology etc etc. Some modules might be more academic some more hands-on and practical and students could pick and get a real feel for their strengths and passions. Over time they’d be able to narrow down the choices to reflect their interests. Schools could make contact with industry, business, local theatres etc to enable students to see where their futures may lie abd how their chosen modules fit in with the world outside of school. At the moment, options narrow too quickly and they’re too academic and too separate from real life. Students have very little real choice.