Episode 49
Have you ever wondered why school detentions and exclusions are escalating in England while Scotland has managed to revamp its policies, significantly reducing such incidents? In this insightful conversation with Dr. Chris Bagley, an experienced psychologist in the education and youth justice sectors, we peel back the layers of the harmful ideologies shaping the uniquely punitive English education system.
Tune in as we decode the convoluted dynamics at play, discussing how an overemphasis on authority, data generation, and metrics are contributing to a rising trend of disciplinary school environments. We also look at the affects of these oppressive behavior policies on students’ mental well-being and how our neurodiverse children are often particularly victimised. Through a comparison with the Scottish education system, we expose the need for England to change its values. Be prepared for an enlightening exploration of the English education system, its impact on the students it serves, and possible solutions for change. You don't want to miss this episode!
Click here for link to Dr Chris Bagley's website
www.sendparenting.com
Episode 49
Have you ever wondered why school detentions and exclusions are escalating in England while Scotland has managed to revamp its policies, significantly reducing such incidents? In this insightful conversation with Dr. Chris Bagley, an experienced psychologist in the education and youth justice sectors, we peel back the layers of the harmful ideologies shaping the uniquely punitive English education system.
Tune in as we decode the convoluted dynamics at play, discussing how an overemphasis on authority, data generation, and metrics are contributing to a rising trend of disciplinary school environments. We also look at the affects of these oppressive behavior policies on students’ mental well-being and how our neurodiverse children are often particularly victimised. Through a comparison with the Scottish education system, we expose the need for England to change its values. Be prepared for an enlightening exploration of the English education system, its impact on the students it serves, and possible solutions for change. You don't want to miss this episode!
Click here for link to Dr Chris Bagley's website
www.sendparenting.com
Welcome to the Send Parenting Podcast. I'm your neurodiverse host, dr Olivia Kessel, and, more importantly, I'm mother to my wonderfully neurodivergent daughter, alexandra, who really inspired this podcast. As a veteran in navigating the world of neurodiversity in a UK education system, I've uncovered a wealth of misinformation, alongside many answers and solutions that were never taught to me in medical school or in any of the parenting handbooks. Each week on this podcast, I will be bringing the experts to your ears to empower you on your parenting crusade. In this episode we will welcome back Dr Chris Bagley. He started in education as a secondary school teacher and later trained as an educational psychologist. He has developed a specialism in relation to youth justice, school exclusion and managed moves and practices a specialist in a youth offending team for a number of years.
Dr OIivia Kessel:We'll be discussing why detentions and exclusions are on the rise in England and why they lead to what is known in his circles as the prison pipeline. Contrasted with this, we'll discuss how Scotland has changed its policies on behavior, resulting in a drop of detentions and exclusions. In an environment where the news is questioning absenteeism from school and blaming COVID, we're only looking at really part of the answer. Why aren't we also looking closer into those children who have been either detained from school or excluded from school. This episode is a must listen, so welcome back, chris. It is such a pleasure to have you back on the Send Parenting podcast. We had such a good discussion last time that we ran out of time actually to discuss some of your experience working in youth justice and really that kind of trajectory from detention to school exclusion and onwards to incarceration. I think it's really fitting right now because it's all over the news really worried about kids not attending school. They're saying that it's doubled since the COVID pandemic, so we've gone from one in 10 children to one in five children.
Dr OIivia Kessel:I think the numbers that they're playing around with. In England is around 1.8 million kids are off school. 100,000 of those they say are truant and interestingly I think, what did they say? Like 37.9% of those children are on free school meals and 33.4% have educational health care plans. But super interestingly to me was they didn't mention any kids that weren't in school due to detention or due to exclusion. So I thought to myself when I read the article actually on the BBC website, I looked up what are the numbers with detention and exclusion and I went to the Govcouk site and they only have data from when we still were in the pandemic. So I would say these numbers are definitely lower than what they will be with the new data that's coming out in November.
Dr OIivia Kessel:But they said around 6,500 had been permanently excluded and, shockingly, 20% of those were under 12, which kind of surprised me, and that in terms of suspensions that was around 600,000, a little bit under 600,000. And the commonest cause was due to disruptive behavior. And I mean it blows my mind that's a large percentage of the 1.8 million that they're talking about, but they're not mentioning it. So I'm so excited. Sorry for that long intro, but I wanted to kind of set the scene because you know this, this has been, you know, you have been immersed in the youth justice system and I would love to get your input and insight on it. So I will hand it over to you now, chris.
Dr Chris Bagley:Thanks, olivia, pleasure to be back. I guess I wonder what you'd like to focus on first, because there's a lot in that intro and lots of different elements to it. So which bit do you want to think about first?
Dr OIivia Kessel:Well, I guess maybe let's highlight from your perspective in terms of why are so many detentions and exclusions happening and why don't we? You know, I wasn't. You know, I knew they were happening, but I didn't realize the kind of the magnitude of it. So let's start there and then take it wherever you want to go from there.
Dr Chris Bagley:Oh yeah, I mean, england's a very unique and odd outlier in many ways, as you'll be aware, and one of the things that is extremely high in England is the amount of kids who are kicked out of school, either permanently or suspended for shorter periods, and the number of young people who are detained in what we would call the Secure Estate or Child Prisons, and my experience with that has been over the last four years I've been an identified psychologist in a child prison and people are a farewell unit, and my research was on exclusions and managed moves and also in the youth justice sector in London for five years. So I guess I'm drawing on that, alongside the research I've looked at and my own research experience as a practitioner. And what seems to be happening in England uniquely is a few things coming together at once in terms of educational ideologies, and they're obviously informed by the ideologies that society holds about various different things which I'll touch on in a second, and you might define England as living in a neoliberal framework, which is really important, can you?
Dr OIivia Kessel:define what neoliberal is, because it's a term actually I've just only recently learned myself for our listeners.
Dr Chris Bagley:OK, so the way I would describe neoliberalism is a ostensible focus on free markets and an ideology that indicates that everything should be placed within a market framework, and that includes schooling. And a second element of that which is very prominent in England is data generation and using data to coordinate next steps or ideally and in theory, but it doesn't work in practice individualize things for people using data. And the third thing that comes in with that free market ideology and the data ideology for one of a better phrase is metrics. So you'll notice the school system is full of metrics, league tables, accountability, judgments, fire offstead, and that's the third thing that you have with neoliberalism a very specific form of scrutinization. I would describe it as surveillance, the government would describe it as accountability. So those things are sort of underpinning the neoliberal philosophy that shapes everything. So if you apply that to schooling, this is what we've got. So we've got a system whereby there's so much data being captured on people which I would argue in many cases is even illegal, and some of the most extreme examples of that are the gang's matrix in London, whereby you have young people who are generally from certain communities black, mixed white, caribbean communities in particular and sometimes Asian young people put onto this database simply because they know someone who's committed a crime, for example. So you're almost being indicted as a criminal simply by being related to or friends with somebody. So that's one awful example that's been pushed back against recently, and the police generate data of that kind, and it's what schools do and sometimes show off about quite openly is all the data they are holding on young people. Now that data is held without anyone's consent. Parents don't know that data exists. So I could give you three examples of that sort of data. One of them might be a log of behavior inverted commas that young people are exhibiting in class. You might have seen some of these on social media, and what schools tend to do is often have things like traffic light systems to figure out where a young person sits on a behavior hierarchy, and then they might use that data then, consciously or not, to label young people in a certain way. Now, obviously, what that does is dehumanizes that young person and it doesn't take into account anything that's happening to or around that young person in the family context or the impact of the school system on them emotionally.
Dr Chris Bagley:So those are the kind of data that are generated within this sort of neoliberal economy and alongside that, there's also an ideology of competition, which is unbelievably prominent in the US, equally so, as you'll know and that's very problematic. So we've got this idea that you compare people competitively to one another that's, schools versus schools, child versus child using this data that no one's consented to, that no one knows what it is half the time, and obviously GCSEs and SAT scores are another element of this data spread. And then schools are measuring themselves internally. They've literally imbibed this ideology and are using these sort of metrics to support themselves, to compete in what I would describe as a fake market. It's not a real market, it's a sort of contrived market. And the reason it's not a market and it's logically bizarre and incoherent is because you can't have a market when the state is telling you exactly what to do. That's contradiction. So you can't have a school system that says this is how you measure success, but you're free to do so any way you like. That's a paradox. So that's one of the big problems. And there are other, more totalitarian regime, exactly.
Dr Chris Bagley:So we've got this very specific, narrow framework around what schooling and education is and how it's measured, but within that we've got this idea that we're competing in a free market. So young people are competing against each other in a free market, which is obviously insane, because if it's in a free market and you're not an academic learner, you will opt to choose a different way to learn. If there's any sense of freedom, if you're someone who's really interested in art, for example, you might pursue things that allow you to learn and flourish using those skills, which might be visual or other forms of creative art, like music or spoken word or anything. And if you're someone who's very good with their hands, you know, really enjoys learning kinesthetically and using tactile forms, like you know, building or design, you can't opt into any of those things. So there isn't any freedom, there isn't a free market, there's a completely contrived, invented, fake marketplace. So, as you can see, because of that paradox, it's a very problematic, profound contradiction in terms. What that does and this links back to exclusions, for example in England is it incentivizes schools to consider young people as products, because if you're trying to compete with other people in the marketplace, what you have to do is you have to have products that are going to succeed, and the success criteria in England is exam results. So if a young person is not going to succeed based on that very specific metric, the school loses potentially its space in the competition.
Dr Chris Bagley:Now the problem with this livery is that I did my doctorate thesis on managed moves, which some of your listeners might be aware of, and that's a way of moving young people between schools, in theory with their consent, but often it's done somewhat coercively. Sometimes schools manage it really beautifully and there's child moves between schools and it's done in a very child-centered, family-centered way and it works. But often there's an unconscious and sometimes conscious thing going on here where schools are so incentivized to compete that what they will do is they'll tend to remove students who one academic called human unsalable goods, if that makes sense. So it's quite complex, that's shocking, and schools don't do that deliberately, right? So when I interviewed a lot of head teachers about this for my doctorate thesis and follow-up research, and you have this situation where everyone's excluding, apart from a few amazing schools who are incredibly inclusive and really work against this system of neoliberalism, to think of other metrics, to avoid the competition narrative, to use different forms of accountability. So some schools do that and it's incredible when they do, and some amazing people out there in the education space doing this.
Dr Chris Bagley:But often what will happen is schools will get desperate because a kid isn't learning well. They might start kicking off, they might start becoming very distressed, they might start presenting with behaviors that are very difficult for teachers to manage. But because there's no space in the system to consider that young person's needs or to actually work with them to flexibly co-construct a curriculum that's going to work for them, what will tend to happen is that child will become progressively more marginalized, and most of the young people I work with have gone through this on some level or another, and I'll link it back to prisons in a minute as well. What happens is they start to get removed from class, or they'll start to remove themselves from class by walking out, or they will start acting out in ways that mean that they're excluded. Now, if you're a young person who's sitting in that classroom and one young person said it to me like this he said I sit there for five hours a day. I don't know what's going on. Imagine what that's like, bruv. That's what he said to me. And then I said well, I don't know, can you explain what that's like? And he said I'm just literally he demonstrated what his body feels like inside, like tense, rigidly tense, really scared, because the worst thing for a human being to experience is a lack of belonging. And if you think you're lesser than other people in your class because you're deemed stupid by yourself and your peers, you can visibly see that you're not coping academically.
Dr Chris Bagley:There are different ways of managing that. Some young people girls more than boys, in my experience, and the evidence would suggest this Some girls will go very quiet and they will internalize their distress, and girls are much more likely to self-harm, for example, in ways that we would classically deem self-harm. Boys will tend to self-harm differently. They'll go into fights, they will swear, they will get very angry at teachers, they might start causing damage around the school. And some schools, again, are really great at managing this, and I write about this in the Square Pegs book in the chapter there.
Dr Chris Bagley:They will move towards the young person and they'll say how are you doing? I really noticed something's going on here. You're and this is the phrase in the literature you pointed out, olivia you're persistently not coping, and it's called persistent disruptive behavior, right, the exclusion data. So when a kid starts persistently not coping, that's a different way of framing it, isn't it? Rather than saying you're being persistently disruptive. You're saying you're persistently not coping. You don't have to use those words. But then when schools move closer to that young person, they bring in the family and go look, I don't think you know Daniel's coping here. What's going on? How is he? How are you? How can we flex around this? Then those are the schools where young people are less likely to be excluded.
Dr Chris Bagley:But the vast majority of schools, particularly some of the more oppressive ones who are using slant, some of these other behavior policies that make you sit, still, sit straight, pen on the table, stand up when the teacher comes in, silent corridors. A lot of young people they can't. They literally physically and psychologically cannot cope with that. And then things start to escalate. So they start to get marginalized, they start to go to isolation rooms, they start to be gradually removed from the normal society. And we've got some really clear scientific evidence on ostracization that demonstrates very clearly that the worst thing that can happen to a human being is to be isolated or ostracized. It's worse than anything. It's worse than a physical injury. So this progressively gets worse and worse and over time the young person gets more and more ostracized. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this hundreds, maybe more. And schools then begin to get very angry with that young person because things start to get worse and the behavior becomes more aggressive or becomes more distressed and that tends to end then in exclusion, with, of course, the child often not always being blamed for that. So hopefully I've tried to explain that sort of foundational principles within a sort of neoliberal economy philosophy that then leads to these things actually that are visible to people. But if you don't look underneath the behavior and try and find out what the behavior is telling you, then that young person is just going to keep getting more and more and more distressed, more and more isolated. Then they would tend to do something outrageous and get kicked out.
Dr Chris Bagley:Now the reason there's a phrase in social science called the school to prison pipeline is because when academics speak to young people who are in prison and they ask them about school and prison, what they'll tend to notice is that often the experiences of schooling reflect the prison experience.
Dr Chris Bagley:So they'll be isolated, they'll be in detention. That is literally a word that emanated from prison language detention. So they've already been, to a far lesser extent, of course, in an environment that is much more prison-like than 99% of their peers who are in classrooms being educated alongside each other. So essentially, what happens is they become to internalize that this is normal. They begin to experience themselves as being someone who, for whom schooling can't work, for whom the education system loads, and that's kind of how it begins and it you know, pretty much all the young people I've worked with in the prison over the last few years, and nearly all of them in the youth justice sector, have been excluded from school at some point and that is reflected in the data. I think you were right to say, livia, earlier that what you what? The most recent data is an understatement, like normally. It's more than 80% of kids who are in the prison sector have been excluded from school at some point. A lot of them have permanently excluded.
Dr OIivia Kessel:The data I could find was like in 2017, which, like, showed what was the numbers I got? It was like 85,000 people in prison, 54,000 of those have been excluded from school, and that was from 2017, so very outdated, absolutely. Yeah, so that makes sense. So I mean, and you're saying that everyone that you've worked with has been excluded?
Dr Chris Bagley:Almost everyone. You know and I think, yeah, pretty much based around the figures, two or three in 10 maybe haven't been excluded, which reflects directly the figures that the government released from the Ministry of Justice and the Youth Justice Board. So it's really complicated, this, and it's tends to start small and escalate when young people go down a trajectory to use the word you used earlier to exclusion.
Dr OIivia Kessel:So it's a really depressing statistics.
Dr Chris Bagley:Absolutely. Yeah, it's not great, is it? And I suppose the thing that's intriguing is that when you look at a nation's who don't share those philosophies, and they are moving into a different headspace in terms of how they define what education is for and the purpose of it you don't see these figures. You know, exclusion isn't really a political issue in some countries, whereas in England it's a very prominent political issue. And I guess there's another thing I didn't mention a minute ago and that's around a very entrenched idea around what constitutes a response to behaviour in England, and I think one of the things that we've got here that goes back hundreds, maybe thousands of years even, is this idea that having authority is more important than the response to that authority. Just having authority in itself and controlling people in itself is an absolutely crucial element of managing children, to use a phrase that's often used in schools today, and you can see that in the way that school norms sort of spew themselves out all around the country. So you've got an enormous amount of data and certain academy trusts who are doing things like flattening the grass, which is essentially bullying children, and very specific rigid behaviour policies that aren't able to do any of that flexing that I described a minute ago, and the idea is that you punish behaviours in a tick-chart sort of format. So if a behaviour is observed by a teacher within a zero-tolerance approach, for example, there's a rigid, standardised, inflexible response to that, which is of course absurd because all human behaviour exists in a context.
Dr Chris Bagley:So if you're in a classroom environment and you're a young person, or if you're a teacher in a classroom environment with your class, every interaction in that room has a meaning in the context of broader interactions within that classroom. So you have interactions between peers. You have interactions between teacher and peers. You have interactions between one-to-one peers, groups of peers. You know it's incredibly complicated. You're talking about hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of interactions going on there.
Dr Chris Bagley:And if you reduce human behaviour to a response to something a teacher has observed on a checklist, what you're basically doing is you're removing all of the beautiful complexity and mystery of human behaviour, which is essentially one of the most complicated and nuanced things that exist in the universe, and you're making it into like a tick list that you would take to go shopping. And the other bit to add to that is you know, teacher observations of what happens are very much emit from the teacher. So something that one teacher observes is not something another teacher is going to observe. So there's absolutely no way to standardise that anyway. And you know there are many other issues, olivia, with the way that some of the more rigid behaviour policies are enforced, but the main thing for me is that they're scientifically illiterate.
Dr OIivia Kessel:They don't work, you know, other than to be a pipeline for prison, as you put, and maybe a training for what it's going to be like in prison. You know, once they've, you know, failed out of school. So it is very sad and you know it's a problem, though that, as you say, it is kind of endemic to England. There have been changes in terms of how education is looked at in Scotland, and I'm not sure about Wales, but I know Scotland has Wales too I think you wrote about it in SquarePix is where I've read that.
Dr OIivia Kessel:Yeah, sorry, wales as well.
Dr Chris Bagley:Yeah, wales as well. Yeah, they're moving in a different direction and you know it's an interesting one. In Scotland, for example, they have the curriculum for excellence and they've enshrined within their legislation that we should look at behaviour as a form of communication, and that is coming from psychological research, you know, and they have psychologists in their government planning office, which makes sense, right? Psychology is the study of human behaviour and in England we have people like Tom Bennett and others who essentially say that all psychologists and all academics are biased and you know they are all ideologues, when we've got an entire profession here of psychologists, which is the study of human behaviour, who are being completely ignored when it comes to thinking about behaviour in schools.
Dr Chris Bagley:There are no psychologists at the DFE working on that, as far as I'm aware, and if people who do try and challenge that, it's met with some quite at times voracious critique which essentially labels all academics as the blob, which is a Michael Gove phrase, and that's the literal equivalent of saying that you go to, if you have a broken arm, the one person you shouldn't listen to as a paramedic. I mean it's completely insane. Or if you've got a problem with your teeth, you should ask the plumber to deal with it, not the dentist. It just doesn't make any sense. And I'm not saying that just because I'm an angry psychologist. Surely that's just logical right.
Dr OIivia Kessel:No, no, dare I say it's common sense, it makes logical sense, but I guess, when you want to defend your, dare I say, idiotic policies and don't want to look outside of strict behaviour policies that you've implemented and put into schools, that you don't want to have a specialist come in or someone who knows what they're talking about because you jolly well know that they will pull it apart.
Dr Chris Bagley:Yeah, it's a good point. And if you look at the fact that the person who's been was paid £10 million, which is Tom Bennett, to deliver a behaviour mass policy project across the UK, you know there was no government tenuring process for that. So we don't really know sorry tendering process for that. So we don't really know why that person was given the money. Other than that, we know that he is ideologically wedded to people like policy exchange and those people who have the ear of government, and Nick Gibb and Michael Gove previously, and etc. Etc. So it's an entirely and purely ideological battle ground which really doesn't need to be, and you will not find a single psychologist on earth who thinks that slant is a good idea or zero tolerance is a good idea or essentially any of the behaviour policies that government are pertaining to have supported by evidence inverted commas. There's no evidence there and it's based purely in core beliefs about what's required and conditioning by one's own life. Sorry, gone a little bit, I'm tripping there.
Dr OIivia Kessel:Yeah, I know they had a documentary on just a couple of weeks ago that had this poor young girl of ADHD in a very strict school policy school and you could just see I mean they were trying to break her down to fit their behaviour strict behaviour model and it was just destroying her. It made me cry actually watching it. It's just like this is so wrong. We should be molding to the child's needs, not trying to break them into this strict kind of yes or no. Sir, as you say, quiet in the hallways, sitting still for hours when you're not understanding what's going on, which I would equate to torture.
Dr OIivia Kessel:It's just, it's very difficult, it's criminal and especially if even if you don't, let's say we don't care about children at all, let's just say you know what? We don't care about children, which is what it sounds like right. But even economically, if we're looking at it from an England's economic position, we are streamlining children into prison. That's going to cost a lot of money. It doesn't make financial sense either to have these policies, other than the fact it was good enough for me. It should be good enough for them. I got spanked, so they should be spanked kind of mentality.
Dr Chris Bagley:Yeah, I think it's a bit of a you can hear from my I mean loud voice.
Dr Chris Bagley:I can feel that you know and I guess, having spent the last 10, 12 years working with pretty much all always the young people who have been at the sharp end of this it's very difficult to not get angry about it, and it is easy to begin thinking, for example, that some of the teachers who implement these policies don't care about children or they're evil.
Dr Chris Bagley:And I don't think that's the case. Actually, I think most of them and I've worked with many schools who use these approaches they do care about young people. They care deeply and they just believe that this is the best way to do it. And I think the best way to think about it is equating schooling with religious belief. You know so schooling is a gigantic, very ancient edifice and there are certain practices and ways of thinking about schooling, in particular behavior policies for example that are very deeply embedded in our culture and they're not subject to rational challenge in many cases. So that's very difficult it was a psychologist when you go into a school and you can see that there's some very problematic narratives around how you manage behavior inverted commas I'm doing lots of that today, useless on a podcast, isn't it doing finger actions? But it's.
Dr Chris Bagley:That's a really difficult one, because they're usually very caring people, you know. So I certainly won't want people to think that I'm suggesting that those who use these approaches are unpleasant, evil or otherwise uncaring. I think it's even more complicated than that. You know, this is something that people really genuinely believe in and they think if you don't do that, you're harm children. That's the tricky part.
Dr OIivia Kessel:And for me, actually, where I've taken it also is and I've read books as well you know, like Canary in the Mind, it's kind of the neurodiverse children who just cannot comply with this who are the ones that are really bashing against it, and they are the Canaries in the Mind who are saying this is just not right, this is just not working, because they just cannot cope in that kind of an environment. The other kids, they're not coping either, but they're able to go through the motions and, will you know, be an adult. That's a survivor and saying you know what was good enough for me at the end of the day? So, and with their diversity being diagnosed more, it's pushing the system, it's challenging it.
Dr Chris Bagley:It certainly is, and if you look at the data on the very rapidly increasing, exponentially so, home education and the amount of young people are out of school, as you pointed out earlier, is rapidly increasing and we're still in this phase, at the moment, where people are blaming covid for that. I mean, that's a red herring. This isn't going to stop when this cohort of young people who experienced covid are left. It's going to keep going Because the system has no logical coherency. It doesn't make sense. Teachers don't want to join the profession. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves and there's a whole movement of teachers now who describe themselves and this is very telling phrase as a recovering teachers, because teachers are idealistic. You know, I was a teacher for five years. You go into it and you go. I want to help young people. You know I'm going into this Because I really would like to position myself as a human being, add something to these young people's lives. You promote them to flourish and to thrive. And then what happens? You get there and then you go into this neoliberal nightmare and over time you got a few options here and I think often for teachers these options come to them unconsciously or they're held unconsciously. So one of them might be. I have to strongly identify with this system because if I don't I can't get through the day because there's too much cognitive dissonance. So I have to buy into this behavior approach. I have to buy into league tables and exams and I have to unconsciously, I would suggest, in some cases hide myself emotionally from the distress I see in front of me. And to paraphrase cold younger bit here, you know, people don't have ideology. Ideology has them is another, is one way of thinking about it. So to look at that and really feel it, it's very difficult to do that for year after year after year after year after year, particularly when you see some of the distress that the young people are going through.
Dr Chris Bagley:The second cohort of teachers who figure out that that's going on and they stay within the system for an extended period and they really try and change it from within and they'll try and do, you know, alternative projects with young people. They'll try and introduce different curricular approaches and content to add flexibility for the young people. They'll really try to get to know the kids and they'll try to, you know, move closer to the ones who are really distressed and suffering. But I've really noticed that those teachers. They tend to burn out because you can't do all of the other things that are required in terms of accountability and the metrics that you have to hold yourself accountable to and offers that hold you accountable to, and the school holds you accountable to, and be that empath, that emotional person who is going to have a different world view. So, essentially, then, you're sitting in a myriad of cognitive dissonance. Where you're going, I'm forcing this content to be learned. I can see the amount of distress it's causing. I can see the psychological harm it's causing. All I can do, though, is try and work around the edges of that and help young people.
Dr Chris Bagley:And then there's the third group of teachers and this is growing number who leave really quick or don't even finish their PGCE or teacher first. They'll go in, and they'll be like what is this? I'm not for me, and you know and this isn't my opinion right, look at the data on teacher recruitment. It's very sorry viewing, and that's because it doesn't make sense, and people don't want to work in a system where it doesn't make sense, and I think we're in an interesting phase now where, in the 1950s, there was general agreement for the first time, consensus in England, more than 100 years, by the way, after pretty much everywhere in Europe. That education for all is a good thing. It took till the 50s, olivia, post World War two it's incredible before, and it wasn't full education primary or elementary, as it was called then. In secondary that didn't even happen for all children until the mid 50s. So we got this through as a society and that was because of parents and teachers fighting for it, desperately fighting in the trenches for decade after decade after decade after decade, saying why is my child deemed a lower class of human that doesn't even belong in the secondary schooling system? And that is basically World War two. If it wasn't for World War two, I don't know how long it would have taken. Maybe we still wouldn't have that, we probably would.
Dr Chris Bagley:But World War two brought people together and it was impossible philosophically and also politically post World War two to say you still don't deserve secondary schooling, working class people. So it was just it wasn't unfeasible and it had to shift forward. But of course what happened then was the tripartite system. So what the conservatives did, it wasn't just conservatives. Some people in the Labour side were, you know, privately educated, for example, and had these views as well.
Dr Chris Bagley:But the Labour movement tended to force and push the comprehensive schooling idea right. Everyone educated together, but what we ended up with was grammar schools, a few technical schools and, for the rest, secondary moderns. So even when it was education for all agreed, it was still within this framework of some children are clever and they're born that way. Some children are not clever and they're born that way, and we can decide that based on an entirely and utterly ludicrous IQ test, age 11. It's completely insane. It's psychologically. Bonkers is the word I described. And we still have grammar schools now, olivia. So if you put that in context, that is some serious low hanging fruit grammar schools. It's been scientifically literate, scientifically literate since its inception. We still have them.
Dr OIivia Kessel:So that's how deep things go and you even have parents who, who, who like send their kids to tutors and, of course, such pressure on them to try and to get into those grammar schools.
Dr Chris Bagley:There's a really great, simple way of unraveling the nonsense of grammar schools with any parent and you can just say do you support grammar schools? And they might say yes. And then you can say well, what if your child goes to the exam, flunks it and then goes to a secondary modern, do you still support grammar schools? And I've spoke to parents about that before. And then they just don't answer that. And one of my friends, who's a mum, was like do you want another cup of tea? It was so English. She was like I'm not going to respond to that, I'm just going to make you a cup of tea.
Dr Chris Bagley:So grammar schools are incredibly divisive. You know they there's a huge evidence of that. They divide communities, they segregate schooling off and they don't do any of the things they pertain to do. But these are things that we're still living with in England and that's why these podcasts live are really important. So I'm really grateful to you for talking about this stuff in different contexts, because people need to know that this is what it comes from.
Dr Chris Bagley:But my last point on that quickly, was it's so recent that we even got agreement that education for all is a good thing. I think we need to remember that human societies and cultures they don't change fast. So it's going to take time for people to realise en masse, to the point where it's politically viable to shift things on a great scale, that the way schooling currently is formulated is nonsense. It's not going to happen quickly and people are going to come to that at their own pace and some not at all, and with some people you can't force that. If someone's got a core belief that you need to put kids in detention, exclude them and punish them to make them into a good person, you're not going to convince them otherwise by talking to them and you're not going to convince them otherwise by showing them data, even though the exclusion data demonstrates, after all these years of zero tolerance and slant etc, exclusions are going up and not down.
Dr OIivia Kessel:It doesn't work is the other funny thing. It just doesn't work. Yeah, exactly, you know what's interesting to me, though? So Scotland has changed the way it does. It sounds like they've put the right people in the right places. Has there been enough data to show what happens when you start to do things differently, like that?
Dr Chris Bagley:Absolutely. Yeah, there's strong data from Scotland that, on the back of their shift they call it a paradigm shift some educators in Scotland and it's been very challenging because they had a very similar not the same, by the way educational paradigm to what we have. It was different in Scotland. There was a much more communal sense of the purpose of learning in Scotland compared to England, which is hyper individualised, but the exclusions decrease phenomenally.
Dr Chris Bagley:Now, that's not to suggest, by the way, there's no marginalisation in Scotland, because I know for a fact I haven't spoke to Scottish educators that there are other, same as we have in England, other pernicious, quiet, subtle ways of excluding. So there is still going to be exclusion. If you have an exam system and you have rigidly defined top down metrics, there's always going to be exclusion because it's not possible to have it otherwise. But there was this very, very significant decrease over time, like massively so, and there are hundreds and hundreds of times more children excluded in England than there are in Scotland per school and per area. It's a uniquely English horror show, is the way I describe it, and yeah, that was really interesting to me. Yeah, so it's really visible and you know there's some research out there If people look into it and I can maybe send you a link to something from pre pre pandemic.
Dr OIivia Kessel:But yeah, that would be brilliant and I can include it in the notes.
Dr Chris Bagley:Yeah, there's a really good study that demonstrated that very cleanly, and also in Ireland as well, much lower in Ireland, even in Northern Ireland, that is, in England. There's something uniquely punitive about English society and I think I've hopefully explained why. I would argue are the main strands of that, you know so accountability through metrics, rigid behavior policies and an atmosphere of fake competition and an invented market that isn't even a market. So there's no logical coherency to any of that. There's no scientific evidence to promote or back it up. It's entirely based in ancient ideas around what constitutes schooling and learning that are actually based more in early Protestantism and even before that. Then they are in anything that you might call scientific evidence.
Dr OIivia Kessel:Wow, thank you, chris. As usual, you have completely clarified a very complex topic and just open my eyes and I'm sure my listeners eyes, eyes and ears I suppose more ears to this topic. And you know it's. You know, with the trend for people to go in homeschool and do things differently, it's going to be an interesting thing to watch and to see what happens and I'm hoping that we can push that change more and more because, you know it's, it equates to parenting.
Dr OIivia Kessel:You know, if you have an authoritarian, controlling parenting method, it's not going to work and it doesn't work in schools either. And I think that you know, for all those people who it's part of their core belief, I think what they need is to be sent a neurodiverse child into their midst, because they will, they will realize that none of those punitive, rigid, strict behavior policies are going to work with a neurodiverse child. You know they do not beat to that drum, they beat to their own drum and hopefully they will be the ones that actually push this change in schools and and yeah, and change the way it is, because it's just shocking, depressing and, you know, fills me with anger. Basically.
Dr Chris Bagley:It is very upsetting and I'm they come into you before we came online that I'm moving out of the prison and pre-work shortly, and I've been really listening to my body lately and recognizing the amount of stress that you're containing when you're listening to these people who are going through this, and they're going through it often whilst being told there's no problem, and that's really difficult. So you've got young people who are severely distressed by, for example, the difficulty of the GCSE curriculum. It tends to get extra bad in year nine and ten, as you would expect, and they're not coping with it. They feel very stupid, they feel very unworthy and they start to internalize a sense of themselves as being a loser, being someone who is not an intelligent and everyone is intelligent. It just might not be in the way that you're told you need to be and but you. It gets to the point sometimes where I've worked with some young people where they're 14, 15 and they have such a strong belief that they are lacking in worth, that they are missing something, that they're an incomplete person because they can't access this form of schooling, that it's very difficult for them to think about it otherwise. And, of course, if you sat in a room. And again, I really want to emphasize this because just people need to imagine what this like to sit in a classroom every single day, four to five hours a day, not understanding what's going on, failing, feeling very small in comparison to peers who are coping well. And I defy any human being, regardless of one's beliefs, to sit there and go through that for one day and not feel damaged by it.
Dr Chris Bagley:And the kids I've been working with in the pre and prison context, they've been, they've gone through that for years. And that's also in a context of truth we haven't mentioned, of course, which is that intersectionality whereby usually these are the young people who also have lots of other risk factors. So they're living in unsafe neighborhoods. For example, they might have very unstable parents in terms of their own mental health, they might be living in poverty and for no thought of the parents really struggling to cope financially and hence their, you know, emotionally, and they might have had, in extreme cases, parents who've been involved in criminality. They might be living in a context whereby there's not even food on the table. So I've been working with a lot more young people recently who are not even eating very much because their parents are so poor and then they go into school and that's the context. It's heartbreaking.
Dr Chris Bagley:But again, I want to just good, good like think to finish on Olivia, that there are some schools who are doing amazing stuff and I've been in one school this this last year where they have been incredibly flexible with some of the young people. They've been given them breakfast in the morning out of their own school funds, which they can't afford, and you know it's, and they've been putting things on for that young person at lunchtime. They've changed the child's curriculum so that at least an hour a day they can do something where they're self directed, so they can begin to rebuild their sense of self and their sense of worth and their sense of belonging to the school. And essentially it can be done.
Dr Chris Bagley:But you have to and this is the sad part you have to push against the system as it incentivises you to be. You have to do it in spite of the school system, not not because of it, and that's the thing that's kind of mind bending and, to me, destabilising for professionals, on myself as well. We're trying to navigate it, but yeah, it's a it's a really tricky area this, and you know it's like I said, it's long term work. These aren't. There's no overnight fixes to this, because people have to change their beliefs, and you can't force people to change their beliefs.
Dr OIivia Kessel:Well, that's hopefully what I'm trying to do and thank you for being a guest on this show is to educate people, because knowledge is power and you can't stick with faulty core beliefs. When you get educated and you learn, I find anyway you have to be open to it. That's the tricky bit. But being able to listen and hear and see this irrefutable evidence that it's not working, that we're really destroying our children and putting them in prison, is a really good wake up call to everyone to look and see. And you know I just have to, you know, applaud the schools that are making those extra efforts to feed students, to make sure that they have what they need, to encourage they're really, their mental wellbeing and health, and to give them stuff to feel that they have worth, because everyone has worth. There's no one that doesn't have worth on this planet.
Dr Chris Bagley:I completely agree. I mean, I really strongly believe that everybody is intelligent and everyone has equal worth, and what we need to try and think about is a system whereby we nurture people as the person they are, rather than try to force them into being something they're not, and when that goes wrong, blame them, which is what we have at the moment. And, yeah, I think I think you're doing great work, olivia, talking to interesting people about all these different subjects, so keep up the good work, I say.
Dr OIivia Kessel:Thank you very much and thank you for coming on the show again, Chris. It's been a pleasure having you.
Dr Chris Bagley:Thanks for the video.
Dr OIivia Kessel:Thanks very much. Thank you for listening. Send Parenting Tribe Please. If you have the time, could you rate the show? For example, if you're listening to Spotify, all you need to do is click the star rating after the description and this will help the algorithm share this podcast with more parents. Wishing you and your family a peaceful week ahead.