The Hidden Garden

Working in not-so-mainstream institutions.

In its genesis this school was built around one particular child, the child that I would be responsible for. The Local Authority had been preparing for him since his early years. Non-verbal. Very well-built. Unable to be around other children without issue. Most often peaceful, placid even, but with erratic moments and powerful outbursts. One of these outbursts would leave a teacher lying with a broken pelvis and a large gash on her head. But let’s not get too far in front of the story.

There is a good deal of planning and budgeting to be considered for any ASN type school. If it’s a school for 40 young people with autism it will need planning and budgeting. For some ASN schools it would be useful to position that building beside a park. Sensory rooms need to be built. Some ASN schools can be housed within a mainstream school that may also care for wheelchair bound young people, and/or highly socialised or anti-social young people with additional needs. ENP units are also often found within a mainstream context and these, Enhanced Nurture Provision schools-within-schools, provide ways to help young people who struggle with larger class sizes, or behavioural issues. In the ENP schools pupils can be placed back into the mainstream or removed depending on their daily progress. Best of all, managers can claim they are being inclusive.

Sometimes there needs to be a school that has been “created” to house one particularly powerful young man: a young person who doesn’t know his own strength, who likes to take off all their clothes, and run around in the nip. A school like this can be sited in an out of the way place, perhaps in a disused building that should have been demolished in the eighties. It would need at least 5 managers sitting in offices most of the day and a small battalion of classroom support staff on wages below your average supermarket employee. To justify the school’s existence further it would need to take in a number of other high-tariff young people who might exhibit violent and/or unpredictable behaviours, specialised school buses and taxis - as well as the staff needed to run a small unit. And here is the dilemma of such hidden away schools. Those who work at the sharp pointy end, being spat on, bitten, slapped, kicked etc, are tragically underpaid and undervalued, which means these schools end up badly understaffed: paradoxically this also means they are usually over-burdened by a series of less than competent middle and senior managers who are generally doing no teaching whatsoever.

The 1944 Education Act categorised children with disabilities based on their medical impairments, leading to labels like “educationally sub-normal”. With guidance from 1945 children could be excluded from mainstream schools if their presence was considered “detrimental to the interests of other pupils”. The Warnock Report recommended a move away from medical categorisation, advocating for the concept of Special Educational Needs (SEN) based on a child’s educational needs, not their impairment. The 1981 Education Act also promoted an integrative, later known as inclusive, approach to education for all children. As educational discrimination is unlawful there is now a constant and critical need to provide evidence of practice in Scotland showing the ongoing development of provision for children with additional needs. They are sometimes called SEND or Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Schools but in Scotland we tend not to use the word “special” because of the negative connotations.

A manager of one of these schools had a 2ft x 6ft framed photograph of his yacht above his desk. I couldn’t give you the dimensions of the boat but his office was larger than the average classroom in his school. Beneath him he had a Head of School on a Head of School salary who drove one of the finest four door BMW saloons I have ever seen. Beneath him there were another five Deputies and two Principle Teachers with their salaries as well as a staff of around seven teachers. You can probably see that there were almost as many managers as there were teachers. Beneath them there were assorted support staff, trainers, cooks, janitorial staff and - for this school - a security contingent (mostly ex-HMP staff). The schools that house the young people with Additional Needs and Additional Demands are a paradoxical source of high income generation and serious underfunding. Paint is peeling. Asbestos is lurking. Door handles are loose. Cupboard doors are missing or hanging by their hinges. Carpets are deeply fecund with piss and spilt foodstuffs. Screens are smashed. Door glass is spidered into opaque statements. Expensive equipment is rotting away in unused rooms and shuttered lock-ups. Specialised bikes are unmaintained and rusting. Gyms and swimming pools are relatively well-maintained. There are high levels of teacher absence through sick leave and physical injury. There are high-end saloon and sedan cars lined up in the car parks.

Karate Kid and Swedish Mikę came in on the bus. They were the ones doing the hard part. You had to have eyes in the back of your head. Cups of water would be sipped then doused over you. Plates of fish and chips would be hurled across a room. Reading glasses would be snatched and snapped in two. A hand would grab at your crotch. A forearm might be scratched or bitten. If you changed a routine too quickly or if you didn’t change a routine enough there would be an outburst, a trigger, an incident. You could not, for a moment, show fear or uncertainty. Most of the time the young people played quietly, held your hand when you went for walks, drew pictures and traced their numbers and letters before shredding their work and erasing any trace of inclusive educational progress. Our young person had found a gap in the wall where they would post their clothing daily. Our work was sitting and watching, reacting calmly, being present.

Swedish Mike works two to three jobs to make enough of a salary to live on. He is good-natured, caring, efficient, tolerant, and often dead-beat tired. Karate Kid is equally patient and kind and he studied Tae Kwon Do, so he is in very good shape. Neither man ever displays any more than just enough strength to move the young person around safely. When the young person takes off all their clothes - and pisses all over the carpet - Swedish Mike goes to the station, puts on the blue gloves, gets the disinfectant spray, and the blue paper towels. Kneeling calmly and with immense dignity he cleans up the area and we start again.

Just to make their job that little bit more difficult the management had decided to drop Wei into the mix. Wei had been in a classroom with other young people but had become increasingly violent with small outbursts of spitting, slapping, banging against doors and kicking. They couldn’t allow Wei to be placed in a room with other young people, and the other teachers had refused to work with either boy. The solution was to put Wei into the hallway, the corridor outside our room: between two magnet lock doors. My classroom assistants, who I was assisting on my higher pay grade, were responsible for keeping both boys apart. When Wei spat in Mike’s eye Mike smiled the most calming and resigned of smiles in a way that signified hours, days, weeks, months of humility and experience. Mike was going to Sweden. Karate Kid was about to start a degree at university. Because I could - I left a week before Mike did.

With some kids all you can do is make them feel safe and happy. They will take your arm and trace a tattoo. They may rock backwards and forwards for comfort and distraction. They will play for hours with a basinful of bubbles. They may notice your patience. In the hidden garden there are children playing. They are not tracing out letters of the alphabet. They are not producing evidence. They are playing. Rolling car tyres. Climbing. Sitting on wooden thrones. They are taken for long walks into the nearby woods. Drinking hot chocolate. Toasting marshmallows. Joan is giving our boy a head massage. He is somehow transported into a blissful world of immense happiness. His large rough feet are pumiced and moisturised and he smiles at Joan lovingly. She is a very small woman with a big heart. She does not know how much power or value she has.

Sometimes you cannot be inclusive in big ways. Some lives can only be transformed in small ways: ways which might allow respite and play and a sense of belonging. It just seems to me that the lives and homes management wish to transform are mainly their own. These managers are often just actors: not even particularly convincing ones. In the hidden garden there is calm. There are pine saplings, oak, and common alder trees. There are bird feeders caught by a light breeze. There are stacks of rotting logs in the winter for beetles and bugs. In the summer there will be Hawk moths and Speckled Wood butterflies.