Yahoo News The Excluded: One woman’s crusade to tackle school exclusions
In an unprepossessing east London classroom, 21 teachers had gathered for a ground-breaking training programme to put their various schools on a new trajectory with regard to exclusions.
Perched on a desk up front, Kiran Gill, 31, the dynamic founder of The Difference charity which had organised the programme, surveyed the first cohort of thought leaders who she hoped would spark a step change.
“What does inclusion mean to you?” she asked. “Advocacy for vulnerable children,” said one teacher. “Every child given the opportunity to succeed,” replied another.
For Kiran, the answer was all these things — and deeply personal. When she was 11, her single mother adopted two girls from social services, aged two and four, who had experienced trauma in care and who were to have a profound impact on Kiran’s worldview.
“As I progressed through high school, I was aware that my sisters were struggling,” she told the Standard. After attending Cambridge University, where she got a double-first, Kiran qualified as a secondary school English teacher.
“I suddenly had students in my class who reminded me of my sisters — pupils who felt like failures and ended up behaving badly and getting permanently excluded,” she said.
“After working in schools for five years, I felt frustrated that the most vulnerable learners arrived at high school vulnerable — and left even more so. Instead of improving, they fell further behind. Yet the schools I worked in were among the best in the country for ‘value-added’. I began to realise it was not a failure of individual schools, but a systemic failure.”
It prompted Kiran to try to reshape government policy and so she resigned to join the cross-party Social Mobility Commission, arriving full of expectation. But her hopes were soon dashed.
“There was lots of noise about university access for underprivileged high performers but little focus on children bumping along the bottom — who end up in crime and become the most challenging and expensive members of society,” she said. “Too often we spend money on children who would be alright without our help, while ignoring those at the bottom with ruined lives and who ruin other lives.”
Kiran felt impassioned to remedy this failure. She observed that teachers who work with disruptive children often have low status, despite doing a job that she felt was “the brain surgery of teaching because it’s the most challenging”.
How schools can access our £1m fund
Grants of up to £150,000 over three years are available to London secondary schools with higher exclusions than national average seeking to radically cut exclusions
We have two £500,000 funders — John Lyon’s Charity and tech philanthropist Martin Moshal — whose funds will be administered by The London Community Foundation
Schools interested in finding out more and located in the beneficial area of JLC (Barnet, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea, Harrow and Westminster) should go to www.jlc.london. Schools in other London boroughs should apply at www.londoncf.org.uk. Criteria for funding is the same in both cases.
Deadline: Expressions of interest by Feb 7.
And second, she realised that teachers in mainstream schools were not trained to support children who experienced trauma. She saw little evidence, too, of teachers being shown how to work with other services, such as the police and adolescent mental health.
So instead of settling for a comfort-
able civil service pension, Kiran quit and in 2017 raised close to £2 million to set up a teacher training organisation. She called it The Difference and her idea was to raise the status and training of teachers working with challenging students to “make a difference” in bolstering inclusion.
They provide two programmes. The Difference Leaders programme offers high-flying mainstream teachers two years’ experience in a good pupil referral unit with the idea that they then return to their mainstream school to help their school support children suffering trauma. It was hugely oversubscribed with 100 applications for 10 places.
The Inclusive Leaders programme offers six training days over the course of a year at £2,500 per place, rising to £3,000 for September 2020, for teachers who want to be trauma-informed but stay in their mainstream school.
Matt Jones, principal of Ark Globe Academy in Southwark, sent two of his staff on the Inclusive Leaders programme. He said: “Avoiding permanent exclusions is my biggest challenge. Not many of us, and I include my school, is doing particularly well in this regard.
“The year before I arrived at Ark Globe in 2012, they had nine permanent exclusions and fixed term exclusions were three times the national rate. Now we are down to five permanent exclusions in the last two years and our fixed term exclusions are just below the 10 per cent national rate, but I am sending two senior staff for training so we can learn how vulnerable children can be better supported.”
Mr Jones, 49, who grew up on a west London housing estate, said: “I am drawn to help the kind of children I grew up with and that is what The Difference offers. Too often, support for these children comes too late when the child is already permanently excluded. It could be a learning or cognitive issue or around speech and language which can spill into behaviour. We need to identify the problem and act sooner.”
Kiran hopes that schools applying for the Standard’s £1m initiative to reduce exclusions might also budget for sending a teacher on her Inclusive Leaders programme. “My colleagues and I think there are loads of headteachers out there whose mindset is to be more inclusive than they are currently permitted to be because of funding constraints and lack of support. By offering them this grant, you are supporting and challenging them, which is exactly what we need to break the mould and transform the lives of thousands of children,” she said.
