In 2013, there were 3,900 permanent exclusions from secondary schools in England.
Should mainstream schools be able to permanently exclude children and young people?
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These kids are misunderstood, and then they are tarred with the 'bad' brush, and incidents keep happening which they end up being blamed for; they are continuously kicked and down-trodden by society and they need someone to build them up again and believe in them and show them how to be good human beings.
Not to say there aren't some 'evil' kids, who can't be 'saved', but these are a tiny minority.
In my years in education I have seen 000s of children, maybe 3 were just 'bad' and unsaveable.
Additionally, isn't it more economical logical to help them in their youth and help make them better people, than to pay for them to be incarcerated as adults?
Ideally it would be great to give these children support and opportunities to be reformed. I just don't see that it is all that practical.
I worry about rest of the children who aren't disruptive in class. Don't these children have the right to be in the best possible environment to learn because they are the ones putting in the effort to learn? Don't they deserve to have as much access to resources available?
There were two things I constantly thought about during the programme. ONE - ALL THE RESOURCES that were being diverted from the mainstream schools to these schools. TWO - It just looked like these school were only ENABLING these children to behave the way they do because there are no consequences for their behaviour?
My children are in school and I am hoping that they are not in a classroom with one of these children. I can't imagine how many times the class has to stop so that they teacher can deal with this one child going through one of their episodes. It could be my son or my daughter who is being assulted in one of these episodes. It puts my children in harms way and is a disruption to my child's learning. Those teachers who obviously show an interest in teaching children should be teaching children who show an interest in learning.
Where are the consequences for the choices they make? They can walk out of the classroom to take a phone call, ****** each other or the faculty, or damage school property; because the worst thing that can happen to them is a lecture. I'm sure they have had their fair share of lectures when they were in the mainstream school. We wouldn't let people who continually break the law get off with a stern talking to. There are serious consequences that they have to face for their actions.
I would like to see the proponents of maintaining these types of schools to show some statistics or research on the effectiveness of these schools. What percentage of these children finish their high school education? What percentage of these children become gainfully employed? What percentage of these children end up in prison? Only then maybe we can have a real discussion whether it is worth it to divert all that resource into these schools.