This is a longer form version of a conversation I was involved in on BlueSky, shortly after BBC publicity about children being abused at a special school.
If you are looking for a school for your child, these are some of the things to be considering. Very few of them are in and of themselves deal breakers, you need to be looking for patterns rather than individual red flags, which often have innocent explanations.
– Don’t over rely on Ofsted reports. They are snapshots. We’ve all been made aware of schools sending particular children on school trips during an inspection or temporarily excluding them in an effort to restrict what the inspection team see. The Ofsted report may be correct on the basis of what the team saw at the time and the school still have problems. Also note that sometimes Ofsted go the other way and raise concerns about perfectly proper practices in special schools (like locking doors so children can’t escape or having restraint as an ongoing part of a specific child’s behaviour management plan).
– Do look at other inspection reports where they’re available. Residential schools usually have a separate inspection of their accommodation. Where the accommodation is a children’s home (usually because it offers 52 week accommodation) the inspection report can be more difficult to find because addresses aren’t usually published for children’s homes on their Ofsted reports. Look for CReSTeD reports and any separate inspection report if you’re looking at an independent school.
– Does the school know who it caters for? If the school doesn’t have a clear understanding of which children it should be taking, it will end up with a mix that probably won’t work well. A mixed intake with separate classes / streams may work – one Autism stream, one a primary SEMH stream. Be wary if the school is vague or desperate to take your child (independent schools, including specialist SEN schools will want to keep their numbers up to make their budgets balance and some may be tempted to take children who don’t fit what the school does best).
– What’s the staff turnover like? High levels of staff turnover are invariably a sign of something being wrong with a school. This is unlikely to be mistreatment or abuse of children, but often a problem with the senior leadership team or owners of a school meaning that the teaching and organisation will be less good. Schools that are losing lots of experienced staff lose their institutional memory and skills in working with their pupil cohort.
-If it’s a residential school, find out what the arrangements are for visiting. Can parents come and take their child out for dinner or for a walk around the park? Even if these aren’t feasible activities for you or things your child would enjoy, you want to understand the school’s attitude to families visiting. If you have a child with PMLD or significant behavioural issues, SLD and Autism it would be reasonable to expect the school to facilitate you visiting on site, with respect for the privacy of other children. It’s reasonable to expect a school to generally discourage visiting during teaching hours and to want to maintain the children’s usual routines, particularly for cohorts of Autistic children, so a school saying ‘if you go out for dinner, please be back by 8.30 / 9pm, so we can start the bedtime routine’ isn’t being unreasonable.
-Where you are in a Tribunal case, the preparation of a transition plan is likely to be important as part of the case, particularly where your child has been out of school for a period of time. Once you have confirmation the placement will be happening, it’s worth arranging to talk to the school to go over the details of the plan (of the sort that are too mundane / trivial to have been decided earlier). You ideally want a shared understanding of what you’re expecting to happen as your child goes through the transition plan and starts at the school. In some instances it makes most sense for the child to start going to school, full time immediately, but knowing that this is a big change that will take some adjustment. In other cases a gradual transition plan will work better. Sometimes you can predict a honeymoon of compliance / ‘good’ behaviour that will end in a month or two once the child feels comfortable enough. You want to have an understanding before you start of the range of expected reactions.
-If you are tired / busy / worn out – either after a Tribunal case or because a placement has been arranged quickly in an emergency, arrange for a meeting with the school after you child has been there for a couple of weeks – by this point you ought to have caught up a bit on sleep so that you’re able to engage with the school in planning and in asking them more questions.
-Keep a diary as your child starts at the school, noting their behaviour when they come home and what they say. Lots of things make children more vulnerable to abuse and some of those reasons will be the very reasons they’re in particular schools in the first place. If your child is currently a poor communicator, think about how you might tell if someone is treating them badly. For some young children or older children with physical care needs it may be appropriate for you to see them undressed, giving you an opportunity to spot bruises or other marks the school haven’t told you about.
-If it’s a residential placement, work out your pattern of contact with your child. This may be different to your contact with school staff. It may suit your child to speak to you Tues / Thurs evenings or similar rather than every night. But you may initially need daily or more frequent contact with staff until you’re confident they know your child well enough.
-A good school should be teaching children about their rights in ways matched to the children’s level of understanding. ‘No hitting’ is something many children can understand as is ‘tell somebody if someone hurts you’. Find out about the school’s plan for teaching this bit of PSHE.
-Don’t conceal a camera or microphone in your child’s bag. If you’re worried enough about what’s happening at school to be thinking about this, the time for evidence gathering has passed. Arrange to go and observe your child’s class from a place where your child can’t see you. This may give you some insight as to the interaction between the teaching staff and the children – it may be clear there is a problem with the teacher or that there’s miscommunication and your child hasn’t understood something. If you’re still worried arrange a meeting with the school. If it’s more serious than that arrange for an Emergency Annual Review of the EHCP.
-Where you have serious concerns that your child is being mistreated at a school, you can expect your LA to be more of an ally than an opponent. No LA wants to spend money on schools that are ineffective or be party to a situation where children are being abused by teaching or care staff. You can report the mistreatment as a safeguarding concern to children’s social care, as well as getting the education department to sort out an Emergency Annual Review. You may still end up with an argument with the LA over the next placement, but it is likely to be an easier argument – your child had the needs they had requiring the initial placement and now they may have additional needs arising from their mistreatment, so they need the same sort of placement but in a functional school.
