BLACK PARENTS say they are being hoodwinked by schools to send their boys to Pupil Referral Units.
We can reveal just one percent of children get five good GCSEs at these units.
They have been described as school-to-prison pipelines, and compared to the old Schools for the Educationally Subnormal.
Black education experts say the community needs a revival in supplementary schools to help children through the system.
Black children are over five times more likely to be sent to the institutions after being permanently excluded from mainstream schools.
The number of young people in PRUs has rocketed by 13 percent in the last year, with children often sent there after being kicked out of school for a series of minor offences while other mainstream schools refuse to take them.
Critics say Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) are reviving memories of the infamous Schools for the Educationally Subnormal, which were abolished in 1981.
The Voice spoke to Black parents who regret allowing their children to attend such institutions, saying the experience has ruined their lives.
Many Black parents are warning others not to accept PRU placements because “your child comes out worse.”
Speaking to The Voice, Cynthia Kirton, says she regrets sending her 15-year-old son, JK, to a PRU and now fears for his safety after his friend was stabbed 17 times.
Kirton claims she was forced into sending her son to the PRU and was told at a school meeting that if she does not agree to JK going to the PRU, he would be permanently excluded from school.
Kirton says many of those attending PRUs are heading towards a life of crime, unless there are urgent changes to the system.
Determined to keep her son safe, she is considering drastic action by sending him abroad for a fresh start and for his own safety.
She said: “I want him to experience a different life and be in a different environment without having to live your life looking over your shoulder.”
In September 2021, the mother-of-two says JK was permanently excluded from a north London secondary school, in what she calls the direct “targeting” of her son.
She said: “It just felt like on a weekly basis he was being targeted and being given detentions. The detentions were so silly.”
Kirton believes her son was more severely punished for things such as walking out of the classroom, because he is a young Black boy.
She said: “The school was giving him daily detentions and this is how they do it, to tell you your son is no longer welcome.”
Kirton said her son’s former school tries to convince the parents and students to find new schools, but she says when you arrive at the PRU you are in for a shock.
“They sell it to the child and the parents that it is reset, it’s a new school, you can make new friends, it’s a new building.
“But they are throwing children into the PRUs knowing that is where everybody has some sort of issue.”
Kirton said the environment at the PRU her son attended in north London, is a breeding ground for criminality.
His mother believes this is down to the toxic culture that is present in PRUs, and says it is not the right place for Black children, who already have so much stacked against them.
“Their expectations of the child are very low and I found that they don’t challenge the child enough,” she added.
When her son started the PRU they discovered his reading level was three years behind where it should be, which she says should have been picked up at his previous school.
She’s adamant his low reading levels hampered his chances of sitting all his exams. JK spent his final year at secondary school in a PRU.
According to his mother, he has only done five GCSEs instead of the standard nine.
She says this is “because he was so behind where he should be.”
She feels the school has “failed her son” as it was “not equipped to give more attention to a child that needs it”.
Kirton feels the school wrongly labelled JK as badly behaved without considering he may have additional needs which was triggering his behaviour.
JK told The Voice about an incident at his old school. “I got a detention for wearing a blue surgical face mask back when Covid started and I got a detention after that.
“Then two or three days after, when you were asked to wear a face mask and I didn’t wear one, I got detention for that also.”
Kirton, who works full-time to provide for her children as a single mother, said the teachers would use detention to get her son “out of class” rather than take time to see if he had any undiagnosed issues or offer him extra support. “It was so evident that they did not care.”
Kirton, who raised her sons with a strong church background, said she had concerns her son had undiagnosed needs.
JK was tested for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism but both tests came back negative. “He is on the SEN register for his temper,” she added.
According to the school census, there are different types of state-funded Alternative Provision (AP) schools, which include PRUs, Alternative Provision Academies and Free Schools.
Pupils can be sent to AP schools because of exclusions, illness, being bullied, or other reasons.
These schools are for pupils who would not otherwise receive suitable education, but educationalists say schools are excluding pupils to inflate their exam success in an effort to climb the performance league tables and impress Ofsted inspectors.
According to the latest national statistics, the number of pupils attending AP schools has increased by 13 percent to 13,200 in 2022/23. Over 70 percent of PRU attendees are boys.
The latest statistics exclude the specific race or ethnicity of pupils who attend PRUs, but over a quarter of students in AP schools are from an ethnic minority background.
The absence of ethnicity recording for PRU’s specifically is widely believed to disguise even worse disproportionality for Black children, with some speculating that the majority of children in PRUs are Black despite making up four percent of the overall population according to the 2021 census.
Several educational campaigners and reports suggest that Black children are disproportionately being sent to PRUs, which have been described as “a dumping ground” for excluded Black boys, some of whom are kicked out of school for “challenging authority.”
The Institute of Race Relations found the proportion of pupils in PRUs and AP schools in London is almost double the national rate, with young boys of Black Caribbean heritage significantly overrepresented in the sector.
In 2022/23, there are 7,470 pupils attending 177 PRUs in England compared to 6,774 in 2021/22.
A Department for Education (DfE) report published in June 2022, into Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) pupils in Britain found Black Caribbean pupils have the second highest percentage (5.4 percent) of pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) with only pupils of an Irish Traveller background having a higher rate.
The term school-to-prison pipeline is a popular phrase which was first used in the United States to describe the excessive number of youths in prison, where the first signs of problems occurred during their time in the education system.
For example, being sent out of class, being placed in an isolation room, suspended or permanently excluded are considered the start of the school-to-prison pipeline.
In 2016, the University of Edinburgh found that an excluded student is four times more likely to be jailed as an adult.
Lifelong educational campaigner, Professor Gus John, believes PRUs and other APs are where children are “cast off” and negatively “labelled for life.”
Speaking to The Voice, he said: “Too many of those PRUs become the antechamber for further institutions.
“The only graduation those pupils know is from the Pupil Referral Unit to the Young Offenders Institute, and that cannot be right.”
In 2017, the Institute of Public Policy’s report noted that only 1 percent of students in PRUs go on to receive five good GCSE grades.
“It’s condemning young people to a life of hopelessness,” Prof John said.
The researcher and lecturer feels PRUs are just a modern day version of special schools, where hundreds of Black Caribbean children were sent during the 1960s and 70s after being labelled “educationally subnormal.”
Prof John said the Black community needs to urgently address the fact that PRUs are made up disproportionately of young Black children, which is a “major problem.”
He added: “None of our children are safe until we collectively make sure that all of our children can be safe.”
He said sadly it is only a “miniscule number of pupils who get reintegrated into mainstream school once they get sent to a PRU.”
SELF WORTH
Prof John runs a charity called Communities Empowerment Network (CEN), which he founded with three others in 1999 and the charity deals exclusively with school exclusions.
He said: “We have dealt with sometimes between 750 and 1000 school exclusions a year and more than 90 percent have been Black boys.”
According to the lifelong educationalist, APs and PRUs have created a “two-tier schooling system” which is destroying the lives of those sent to such institutions.
He added: “The regimes that lead to school exclusions are in the main punitive, they are about getting young people to conform to particular behaviours, styles and regimes, rather than helping them to establish a personal individual moral compass.
“The balance has shifted from educating children in all aspects of their development to focusing on getting them to do academic work and pass exams.”
Prof John started the first Black Supplementary School in Birmingham with a group of colleagues in 1968, which acted as a mainstream alternative to serve the Caribbean community.
According to the professor, disruptive behaviour in the classroom is a legitimate concern but says it should be dealt with in a way that doesn’t include permanent exclusions.
He wants the money that is poured into PRUs and APs spent on keeping children in mainstream education.
He added: “The amount of money spent on these alternative provision spaces, that money might be better spent on reducing class sizes, by having more adults with different skills and competencies work with young people, like youth workers and clinical therapists as part of a schooling team.”
“One size does not fit all, children do not all perform the same,” he said.
DRASTIC ACTION
He added with extra funding, schools would be able to pick up and detect children who have neurodiverse conditions like autism and ADHD, rather than just labelling children as badly behaved.
When asked how he would describe PRUs, Prof John said: “Places that contribute to the destruction of hope and the death of aspiration.”
For other Black parents, sending their child to a PRU has been a positive experience.
Siobhan Clark (not her real name) from Lewisham, south east London, told The Voice, her 13-year-old daughter recently started a PRU, after she was continuously suspended from her secondary school.
The suspensions started to affect her daughter’s self-worth and one day she said “I don’t think I’m going to amount to much.”
With the smaller classes at the PRU, Ms Clark said it has been beneficial and her daughter is “thriving.”
The proud mother described her child as “well-mannered and well behaved” but says when she started secondary school her behaviour started to deteriorate and problems would only occur at school.
“She would get detentions because she was walking out of lessons, answering back the teachers and being disruptive,” she explained.
Instantly alarm bells started to ring Ms Clark’s mind, as the issues would only happen once her daughter walked through the school gates.
Clark, who is also a school governor, pleaded with the school that she thought there was more to her daughter’s behaviour than just being naughty. She managed to keep her daughter at the school during year 7.
But by year 8, she recalls the school regularly suspending her “every other day” which affected her “confidence and self-worth”.
Clark said she asked her daughter why she was walking out of class, to which she replied “I don’t know, it’s too noisy.”
She told the school she felt “there was something else going on” and not to brush it under the carpet as a behaviour issue – but subsequently she ended up spending more time at home than at school.
DIAGNOSIS
Clark took drastic action and paid for a private Educational Psychologist to spend time with her teenage daughter.
Following a few sessions, it quickly became clear that her daughter was struggling to understand the school work and did not like loud or chaotic environments.
She said: “She was masking the fact that she does not understand what’s happening, so she has undiagnosed Special Educational Need (SEN) needs.”
Clark said she is disappointed that her daughters’ mainstream school failed to pick up that she had signs of undiagnosed SEN needs.
The Educational Psychologist gave Ms Clark a report with recommendations about how her daughter should be supported in school, which included things like a smaller class size and a one-to-one.
Armed with the recommendations from a professional, she took them to the school’s SEN team but soon after, they told her they tried all the recommendations and said “it’s not working.”
She added: “The teachers were seeing her as the problem child.”
Just before the Easter half term this year, the teachers told Clark her daughter was at risk of exclusion and she would have to consider an alternative provision.
Ms Clark, who works full-time, said she paid almost £4,000 for her daughter to have an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) assessment as the waiting list in her borough was nearly two years.
She said: “She has had an ASD assessment and they don’t think it’s ASD, they do think she has a form of ADHD, which shows up in girls very differently to the way it shows up in boys, you don’t tend to have hyperactivity.
“Ultimately, she has ended up in a PRU because school kept excluding her for behaviours that are a result of undiagnosed SEN needs.”
NEURODIVERSE
Ms Clark said she did feel that individual teachers were quick to label her daughter and said race played a part in how her daughter and herself was treated.
Over half of pupils in state-funded AP schools are eligible for free school meals (57.8%), this compares to 23.8% for the overall school population.
Clark said too many parents do not have the finances to pay for private ASD assessments and are forced to wait months, even years, and by the time they get a formal diagnosis it could be too late.
“There are a lot of children sitting in PRUs or APs that shouldn’t be there because they have additional learning needs or they have undiagnosed SEN needs.
“Something that has got to change, it can’t be that your whole educational future is laid out for you depending on whether your parents can afford to go private or not.”
For those running alternative schools, they say they are actually making a big difference to the outcomes of pupils who would have nowhere else to go.
Lisa Miller is the founding principal of Arco Academy in Camberwell, south east London, which is not a PRU but an alternative school for pupils.
She describes her academy as an alternative option to mainstream schools and PRUs and says her academy is also a “preventative” option for pupils before they are permanently excluded and end up in PRUs.
She said: “We try to prevent exclusions from happening, however there are some students who are referred, who have been excluded up to three times from their mainstream school.”
Ms Miller said the majority of the students who are excluded “are neurodiverse, so they could have ADHD or ASD.”
She continued: “Very often, the needs of pupils who have been referred have not been identified. Some mainstream schools just simply don’t have the resources to facilitate. Sometimes it’s impossible for even skilled teachers of big classes to adapt sufficiently.”
Miller said expecting all children to fit under one framework whilst mainstream schools are better trauma informed, they simply can’t adapt the teaching to meet all the needs.
She said those students need to be supported and “they are children who need support to help regulate their emotions.”
Miller – an ex-international athlete – said schools need more funding to provide specialist teams who can support students having difficulties and it is becoming increasingly difficult to provide the right resources with funding cuts.
She warned that without the right intervention and setting, it will mean a “perpetual cycle of failure” for children in the future.
Arco Academy is an Independent Sports Specialist School that has smaller classroom sizes; no class size exceeds ten pupils.
“At Arco, we empower all our students to be the best version of themselves – it is always good enough” she said.
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3 Comments
By way of response:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britains-schools-are-facing-an-epidemic-of-bad-behaviour/
“Screen-obsessed children and tuned-out parents means behavioural boundaries are never properly established, and as children get older and harder to discipline, parents often minimise or even deny the severity of their behaviour because it is so hard not to. So many children never learn to properly respect teachers because their will always overrides the authority of the adults at home, or because their parents never instil in them the value of education.”
Whilst there is no doubt that the model of education in this country is massively flawed, there is a persistent trend towards claiming SEN needs as an excuse for poor conduct. Behaviour starts at home with boundaries and nurture; spending quality time with your kids, investing in their futures with your effort and your time.
What articles and studies like these fail to acknowledge is the demise in parenting skills coincides with increases in poor behaviour. The system is now under pressure from parents who are trying to have their children diagnosed to excuse them from their own lack of parenting. The kids with genuine SEN needs are missing out on provision because of the huge amount of parents seeking diagnosis for their children.
I agree 100% with the two previous comments. The parents that continuously make excuses for their child’s poor behaviour should go and spend a week shadowing different teachers at their child’s school. Behaviour in England is a national scandal and the main reason for it is a poor school culture. Children see other children behaving poorly and getting away with it so they follow suit. If the children mentioned in the article went to no-nonsense academies in London like the Michaela Free School and King Solomon Academy then these problems don’t exist.
Race must be offered as an excuse less often because Black African children are permanently excluded from school at lower rates than White British children. Nobody would argue that headteachers prefer Black African children to the indigenous population.
This article has baffled me as walking out of a classroom has been spoken about as though it is a minor offence. It is in fact a massive show of defiance (and safeguarding issue) and children that walk out of class at will often verbally abuse their teacher in the process. Once they have walked out of class and are truanting, what typically happens is that they wander the corridor and disturb other lessons, sometimes even walking into another teacher’s class. Unsurprising, the teacher whose lesson has just been disturbed is likely to challenge the child, who is likely to respond in a disrespectful manner. In this short period of time, the child has already done enough to be put in isolation for a couple of days.
What I struggle with is the same activists who are adamant that all of these exclusions are unfair and racist never talk about the children who are having their learning disrupted day-after-day by very poorly behaved children. Many of these children whose learning is being affected in dysfunctional schools in London are black. It is highly contradictory to say that large numbers of children are being permanently excluded for minor misdemeanours but then argue that pupil referral units are criminal incubators. Are pupil referral units criminal incubators? Some will be and others wont. Where they are, it is because you are throwing dozens of children who behave in a shocking manner together, some of whom will be in competition to see who can sink to the lowest depths.
I have worked in education for over 10 years and I can only remember one permanent exclusion where a miscarriage of justice had taken place. For all of the others, the whole teaching staff (including myself) were relieved that the child was finally gone. The ‘minor’ misbehaviour that some of these parents describe include the following: Verbal abuse of staff, violence towards other pupils, threatening members of staff with violence, walking away from teachers, persistent defianc, not bringing a school bag, excessive lateness to school, excessive lateness to lessons, truanting from lessons, using sexually explicit language in the classroom, wearing incorrect uniform, vaping on school premises, refusing to complete any work in class, vandalism, theft from other pupils/stealing school equipment). The child that is permanently excluded is doing many things on the above list on a daily basis over months and sometimes years before they are finally given their marching orders. Before parents and members of the public accuse schools of permanently excluding children too easily, they need to go and see for themselves how poor behaviour is in our secondary schools.
What makes it harder for schools to enforce discipline is that parents like the ones mentioned in the above article do not support the school. It is true that some schools do try to game the system and encourage parents of poorly behaved children to pull their children out. This is because the system disincentivises schools from permanently excluding children.
Much of the debate around exclusions is wholly inaccurate and the wrong people are being asked for their opinions. The exclusion rate in England is highest in the North-East of England and it is not black children that are being excluded there. It is also evident that exclusion rates by ethnicity show a negative correlation with academic achievement. If the black community can make learning as fashionable as being the next Raheem Sterling or Stormzy then there will hardly be any permanent exclusions. The sad reality is that too many black boys want to emulate the likes of Central Cee rather than Professor Gus John.
The black community are concerned about high rates of knife crime in certain London boroughs like Lambeth and Croydon. If there is a high level of knife crime in the streets committed by black boys, it is unsurprising that some of these children will be permanently excluded from school. From someone who has been on the inside for many years, the schools put up with the worst behaved children for far too long. Their so-called rights to misbehave are over-riding the rights of the silent majority to get an education.
I also wonder why so much air-time is given to the idea that exclusions are unfair when less than 1% of children are ever permanently excluded and a far higher proportion of black boys are failing. Our parents have stepped back and drill music has filled some of that space, a genre of music that glamourises violence and promotes rampant materialism, meaning the latest trapstar or hoodrich tracksuit is more important than getting some GCSEs.
Poor parenting is at the root of this and until that is addressed, we will continue to have these problems. In all of the case studies above, I note that the father was never mentioned, suggesting that all the mothers were raising the child without a father. That is not the fault of the school, and it is a known fact that boys without fathers are more indisciplined than boys that have their father in the home. Why is fatherlessness rarely addressed? Perhaps it is because our society has become anti-male in many different ways. I will repost later because I am sure that there are other racial facts on exclusion that are inaccurate in this article. I will go away and fact check these.
In closing for now, it is not much to ask that children can behave in a manner that will avoid them getting permanently excluded from school. Schools are disincentivised from permanently excluding children and are still accountable for their academic performance once they have left. It is therefore wholly inaccurate for people to say that schools permanently exclude children to improve their performance in league tables. How does that work if the school is still responsible for their GCSE results?
The article also mentions that only 1% of children in PRUs get 5 good GCSEs. This is not the fault of the PRUs. The PRUs are inheriting poorly performing children who do not care about their education. GCSEs are not difficult exams to pass and most children who don’t didn’t want to do the work. The proportion of children that are not capable of passing GCSEs is less than 10%. The others would simply rather spend their time on smartphones/social media.