Cen Communities Empowerment Network

CEN COMMUNITIES EMPOWERMENT NETWORK

PRESS RELEASE

from the CEN Management Committee

The Glyn Technology School Exclusion Affair and CEN

Since 11 October 2002, the media has focused on the role of CEN and its Director, Gerry German, in the decision of Surrey LEA’s Independent Appeal Panel (IAP) to reinstate two permanently excluded pupils. Gerry German has been vilified, defamed and maligned for assisting the IAP in their consideration of all relevant factors in the case, including the background to the boys’ irresponsible and hurtful actions.

CEN’s involvement has been used, further, as ammunition to pillory the Community Fund and to force the Government to abolish the right of school students and their parents to have schools’ decisions on exclusions independently assessed. This is something which certain teaching unions shamefully demanded at their annual conferences in 2 consecutive years.

The Communities Empowerment Network was established 2 &1/2 years ago to provide advice, support, counselling and representation for people experiencing problems in education, principally. It also provides advocacy to people in employment, especially where adequate or any representation from trade unions is not forthcoming.

CEN is governed by a Management Committee of some 14 people, most of whom are parents with school age children and have considerable contacts with the schooling and education system. They include:

a former director of education (now Visiting Professor of Education and member of the Home Secretary’s Race Relations Forum), a former LEA councillor and Education Committee member, school governors, LEA education officers, solicitors, university lecturers, senior teachers, and a former college vice-principal.

CEN came into being in response to the over-representative number of black students being excluded from school across the country and the excessive number of those who end up in penal institutions as a consequence of school exclusion. Many members of the CEN management committee had been involved in voluntary education projects and the Supplementary Schools Movement for some considerable time, and some still are. The 5 full time members of CEN staff are able to draw heavily upon the expertise of their committee members in matters of policy, working with students and parents, assisting schools in building effective home-school partnerships, engaging with schools in implementing preventative strategies and in re-integrating excluded students.

These latter aspects of our work, on which we place no less importance than advocacy and representation, have hardly received a mention in all the reporting there has been about CEN’s involvement in school exclusions.

Members of the management committee have trained as advocates and, depending on their particular circumstances, also represent students and parents at disciplinary committees and appeal hearings.

We make no apology for the fact that our success in having exclusion decisions overturned is higher than the national average. Our record in this respect is due not exclusively to the representational skills of Gerry German but to the principles, knowledge of the Government’s own guidance, and advocacy skills applied by all CEN staff. It is precisely those principles, skills and knowledge with which we seek to empower communities of students and parents through the training we provide.

We need to emphasise, therefore, that while Gerry German does a great number of appeal cases, he is not on some ”fanatical” frolic of his own.

Advocacy Not the Preserve of CEN

Contrary to what the media would have us believe, CEN is not the only organisation that the scandalous practice of excluding thousands of students from school each year has stirred into action.

As early as 1975, the Black Parents Movement (BPM), operating in London, Manchester and Bradford, campaigned for Independent Parents Power andIndependent Students Power as the Key to Change in Education andSchooling. The BPM argued then that the quality of in-school experiences and of educational outcomes for the majority of black and white working class students was such that they needed to act in their own interest, as did their parents, in much the same way that teachers, headteachers and support staff have trade unions and professional associations acting to safeguard and advance their interests.

The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) had the best organised, most militant and most influential teaching unions in the whole of Britain and they were responsible for many advances. Yet, when Margaret Thatcher abolished ILEA and the inner London boroughs assumed responsibility for providing education, the quality of what the majority of children were receiving was inexcusable. That fact was not uppermost in the concerns of the ILEA trade unions.

Government responses to the quality of educational outcomes have been to focus on school effectiveness, to set targets for raising standards, to do something about teacher and headteacher quality and to test every child that sits still for long enough. Power has been devolved from LEAs to schools under the guise of giving power to parents as if that is an unproblematic concept.

Governance of schools at local level is assumed to have nothing to do with class, race and ethnicity, occupation, experience of managing complex institutions, experience of confronting institutional practices that are pitted against oppressed minorities, and the rest.

The checks and balances necessary to support locally managed schools needed to include a network of independent students and parents organisations.

In the absence of those and in the light of schools’ and LEAs’ practices on admissions, exclusions and special educational needs, there have emerged in practically all of the Greater London boroughs LEA-funded organisations and independent voluntary and community organisations dealing with students’ and parents’ experience of those practices. The former include: the Parent PupilAdvocacy Scheme for Reducing School Exclusions in Greenwich LEA, the Elfreda Rathbone Advocacy Service in Camden, the Exclusions Parent Support Service in Southwark, the Parents AdviceCentre in Tower Hamlets and KUFI Educational Services in Brent.

Rather than being outraged at CEN’s successes in representing parents/students, the media should be seeking to explain the fact that 1/3rd of all Independent Appeal hearings find in favour of the student. CEN, let alone Gerry German, has not been responsible for all those cases. Moreover, it would be perverse to suggest that the refusal of IAPs to uphold the schools’ decisions in those cases has been due solely to the fact that schools are overstretched and cannot familiarise themselves with DfES Circular 10/99 like the groups representing parents do.

Goodness was not made in schools

Is it not about time, therefore, that we acknowledge that goodness was not made in schools, that headteachers could be capricious and unconcerned about natural justice, that many do deny students due process and that it is not generally part of schools’ management culture to listen to the story of the child and of how they experienced the particular event and the way the person in authority dealt with it?

One crucial point that all the reporting of the Glyn Technology School affair seems to have lost sight of is the fact that Gerry German had no power to make the decision in that or any of the other hearings he attended as a CENadvocate. That power rested with the Independent Panel. Indeed, in 11 of the 40 cases Gerry German dealt with in 2001, the IAP heard his pleadings and decided to uphold the governors’ decision to exclude. In the Glyn School case, they deliberated for a day and a half, without the help of Gerry German. They included at least one person with experience of listening to evidence and adjudicating, i.e., a magistrate, and two former teachers. Is it being seriously suggested that Gerry German cast a spell over them that held them in his intellectual grasp for one and a half days?

What is frightening and should deeply concern the public in this whole affair is not Gerry German but the fact that it is widely assumed that by acting as they did those boys forfeited every right to due process and to have their situation looked at by a creation of the Government itself, an independent appeal panel. We have even heard it suggested that “after what they did, no teacher anywhere should be expected to teach them, never mind teachers at that same school”.

It is tantamount to demanding that every person accused of child abduction and murder should be handed over to an irate and vengeful public for summary execution. No trial, no jury, no specialist reports, above all, no protection of the state, not anything…., just uncontrolled and unregulated fury.

The fact that the secretary of state intervened at all and in the manner that she did, thus fuelling the bigotry that characterised so much of the reporting of the affair, should cause us all even more concern.

In CEN’s experience, it could take up to 6 weeks for a parent to be told whether an alternative school would accept a permanently excluded student. If the parent(s) are made to run the gauntlet of 6 schools, the student could be denied formally organised schooling for a whole school year, and many often are.

The Chairman of the Youth Justice Board, Lord Warner of Brockley, is on record as saying that the correlation between school exclusion and youth crime is becoming increasingly obvious and that schools might as well give such young people a ticket for future entry to a youth custody institution.

The Government’s own School Community Officers, i.e., police dealing with truancy and offending behaviour in schools, are finding that in some parts of inner London, they are picking up more excluded students on the streets or in arcades than those playing truant. Ofsted has introduced criteria schools must meet for promoting inclusion and are retraining their inspectors so that schools could be inspected with regard to their work in this area. Furthermore, Ofsted has helpfully provided schools with empirical evidence of secondary and primary schools that don’t exclude and the factors enabling them to avoid exclusions.

We believe that exclusion from school is much more than a transitory event in a student’s life. Permanent exclusion, in particular, mars their life chances and often sets them on a career path which is injurious to themselves and a threat to the community around them. As far as children, young people and their parents are concerned, these are critical matters affecting their survival as fully developed, responsible human beings entitled to consideration, respect, equality of opportunity and non-discriminatory treatment.

Children have rights. Mercifully, those rights do not automatically disappear as a consequence of those children’s failure to exercise the responsibilities that go with their rights, or else this society would descend into sheer barbarism.

In the light of the Government’s own concern about school exclusions and the disproportionate manner in which they impact upon black students and their communities, we believe that:

• It is essential that Independent Appeal Panels remain and that their independence is not compromised

• Parents should be able to avail themselves of the services of experienced independent advocates of their choosing ( including other parents trained for that purpose)

• The DfEs and LEAs should fund the provision of such services and they should be seen as a LEA responsibility similar to SEN provision

• Members of Governing Body Discipline Committees, like members of LEA Independent Appeal Panels, should be obliged to undergo full up-to-date training in both the exclusions guidelines and procedures and human rights/race relations legislation

• Governing Body clerks, like the clerks to Independent Appeal panels, should have up-to-date legal experience

• Adjudicating bodies should have at least one person from the same ethnic group as the excluded student

• It should be obligatory for LEA Exclusions Officers to be present at Governing Body Discipline Committee and Independent Appeal Panel hearings. Representatives of the Discipline committee should also be required to attend the IAP hearing

• Serious consideration needs to be given to establishing a nationwide school based Students Grievance Procedure whereby schools’ failure to deal with complaints about, for example, bullying and mistreatment by any member of the school community may be independently adjudicated

• The DfES should reinstate its exclusions reduction programme, with even more radical targets

• With the Ofsted guidelines in place, all schools should aim to practice the Nil Exclusions policy operated by 25% of primary and 5% of secondary schools nationwide.

The Community Fund

The Daily Mail appears to have a massive problem with principles of equity and justice. It appears to want to establish ‘in groups’ and ‘out groups’ as far as the recipients of lottery funding are concerned. It says nothing, however, about the fact that those relegated to the confines of the ‘out group’ are amongst the biggest spenders on lottery tickets.

As a collective group across the country, should the parents of students excluded or belonging to communities suffering disproportionate numbers of exclusion be debarred from buying lottery tickets, or should they just not be eligible to benefit from lottery handouts?

If and when punters are given the right to state what cause they would like their money to go to, would the Daily Mail and the Culture Secretary compile a list of worthy causes that omits grassroots organisations campaigning against injustice and discrimination? What incipient totalitarianism are we being asked to sign on to here?

The Community Fund set certain criteria for disbursing its funds. CEN met those criteria. The Community Fund has satisfied itself that we are who we say we are, we do what we say we do and as competently as we claim to do it. As far as our application for funding is concerned, therefore, that is what matters. If the Daily Mail, various secretaries of state or anyone else who has pronounced in this debacle succeeds in getting the community fund to reconsider its position with regard to CEN, then we clearly are not dealing with an incipient totalitarian state but a barely camouflaged one.

Professor Gus John, Chair

& Members of the CEN Management Committee

1