If Only You Would Exclude Ben We Would Be Able to Work with the Others Just Fine

Abstract

In my experience over twelve years working at the Mulberry Bush School, (a Non-Maintained Residential Special School for children with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties) the organisation has had almost constantly a demand for pre-occupation with one child who it deems is the most difficult. In the staff group, this manifests itself as a child seen as the one who needs really to be excluded, for the safety and benefit of everyone else. As a manger I experienced a time when there was no such child. This intrigued and interested me.

This is a case study of the School, and explores the dynamic surrounding such children. It looks at those matters that create the dynamic and explores those things that the school has found effective in working with these situations. In doing so I explore some of the main theoretical concepts that relate to the work and look at relevant literature.

I gathered information from a variety of sources within the school and identified how the school tries to avoid creating such children. In doing this I have explained the information gathered alongside the detail of a hypothetical child I called Ben. I use all this information to develop a guide for ‘practice we need to remember when working with such children’.

I conclude by summarising the broader context for organisations working with such children with these findings mainly focusing on the support and management of the staff groups working with such children.

If Only You Would Exclude ‘Ben’ We Would Be Able To Work With The Others Just Fine!

A Case Study of the ‘Excludable Child’ in a Residential Special School

John W Turberville

The University of Reading

School of Health and Social Care

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MA in Therapeutic Child Care

September 2006

Contents

Introduction 6

·  The Personal Journey

·  The Task

·  Working with Strong Feelings

·  Oedipal Struggles

·  The Significance of the Study

Chapter One: Methods 13

·  The Form of the Dissertation

·  Research Questions

·  Discussion of the Method

·  Strengths and Weaknesses of the Case Study Approach

·  Ethical Issues

·  Indication of the Likely Outcome or Significance of the Study

Chapter Two: Literature Review 18

·  Exclusion

·  Wider Societal Exclusion

·  What is Exclusion all about?

·  Emotional Impact and Management

·  So – What Goes on in Groups?

·  The Role of the Organisation in this Constellation

Chapter Three: The Task, Structure and Organisation of the Mulberry Bush School 29

·  The Aim and Task of ‘The Bush’ – The Emotional and Physical Container

·  The Emotionally Bruised Staff Group

Chapter Four: The Information Gathered 33

·  The Management of Feelings Aroused

·  Relationships and Splitting

·  Consistency and Continuity

·  Perspective, Enmeshment, Observation and Meaning

·  The Wider Network/Family

·  Personal Authority

·  Fear

·  Child Profile and Self-esteem

·  Needs v. Responding to Presenting Behaviour

·  Planning/Transitions

Chapter Five: What has been learned in the process 59

·  The Management of Feelings Aroused

·  Relationships and Splitting

·  Consistency and Continuity

·  Perspective, Enmeshment, Observation and Meaning

·  The Wider Network/Family

·  Personal Authority

·  Fear

·  Child Profile and Self-esteem

·  Needs v. Responding to Presenting Behaviour

·  Planning/Transitions

Chapter Six: Conclusions 65

·  What does it mean for an organisation to have or not have an ‘excludable child’?

·  Did the use of the paper ‘Organic Growth and the Collective Enterprise’ (Diamond 2003) help to contain the organisation and enable it not to have an excludable child?

·  What factors help to avoid this phenomenon in an organisation?

·  Are there lessons that can be learnt from this that can enable organisations avoid having excludable children in the future?

Acknowledgements

The achievement of completing this dissertation after such a long time, has only been possible with the help and patience of a number of people.

I would firstly like to thank the staff and children of the Mulberry Bush for the experiences, conversations and learning without which this would not have been written.

I would also like to thank those staff members who supported me by giving their time and allowed me to take my time.

Linnet McMahon has been invaluable in her support and advice over the many years it took me to decide to complete the dissertation. Thank you for not giving up on me!

Finally I would like to thank my family, especially my wife, Nicky.

Introduction

The Personal Journey

…………………………………………………………

It’s 11.30pm on Friday night (July 2002) and I have just fallen asleep, winding down from the pressures of a difficult week.

One household at work (a residential special school) has been struggling to contain their child group and one child, Ben, has been pushing them to their limits.

Some think this child is workable with, others are saying he should be excluded temporarily or permanently, to give everyone a break. There isn’t an allocated social worker and his family are despairing.

The week was spent trying to enable the team to share the thinking, understand the meaning and work with the difficulties.

I am not on call, but as always, on call to the on call.

The phone ringing jars me awake.

Ben is on the pitch of the top roof of the house; ‘on call’ is on site, it is raining.

Ben is saying he will only come down if I come in. The roof is slippery and staff are worried that he will fall and kill himself.

“Bloody hell, what do I do?”

I say I will think and phone back in five minutes.

……………………………………………………….

The title of this dissertation: ‘If Only You Would Exclude ‘Ben’ We Would Be Able To Work With The Others Just Fine!’ summarises something I have felt, said, heard, had to hear and had to manage in my many different roles at the Mulberry Bush School, a non-maintained residential special school for primary aged children with severe emotional and behavioural difficulties. What has been common on each occasion is that it has been a very difficult and painful experience.

Recalling my experience working as a care worker – I remember the unimaginably difficult feelings aroused from working with a child who was so challenging and abusive, so offensive and anti-social, that I could not stand him or her any longer. I had got to the stage that I wanted the child out.

At the other end of the staff team I am now a manager on the receiving end of this pain from the staff team, trying to discover whether we, the school, are really at the point of exclusion. This is a similarly painful experience but in different ways.

These painful experiences have created an interest in me to look further at what creates these situations. Are they necessary and can they be avoided? If they can’t be avoided, how best should they be managed?

In this sense, the backbone to the dissertation is a personal journey through the different staffing groups of the school, from being an inexperienced volunteer who, because of the role, was somewhat shielded from the practical engagement of the work, although not from the emotional impact, to appointment as Therapeutic Care Worker, with responsibility for key working. I was then appointed as Team Leader of a household with responsibility for oversight of the care and treatment of nine children and a staff team of nine, and finally appointed as Deputy Director and Head of Residential Therapy, with responsibility for the day-to-day management of the school.

One of the central challenges of writing this dissertation reflects the challenge of my post which is to stay in touch with the pain of the children and the realities of their histories whilst managing, in the main, these issues related to me through the staff context, i.e. through the pain of the staff.

The Task

This dissertation will provide an exploratory study into the issues around organisations such as the Mulberry Bush School regularly having a child ‘without whom life would be so much easier’. This child is often the one suggested for exclusion and so for the purposes of this dissertation I will call them the ‘excludable child’.

I believe it is common for many different types of organisations to have a ‘problem individual’ whom they could do without; certainly for care settings and schools it is common to have such a child. The Mulberry Bush during my twelve years’ employment has almost always had at least one. However over a recent eighteen-month period this was not the case. In the last few months we now have one. This interests me and I hope to explore some ideas about why this may be the case.

The Mulberry Bush School is a Therapeutic Community for primary aged boys and girls, located in rural Oxfordshire. The school cares for up to thirty-six primary aged children with severe emotional and behavioural difficulties. They are placed at the school by their local authorities for thirty-eight weeks a year. The average stay of a child at the school is three years. The school was established in 1948 on its current site and its work was widely written about by its founders, Steven and Barbara Dockar-Drysdale.

The basic treatment philosophy has not changed over the years but in 2003 the Director, in conjunction with the senior managers, documented in a paper ‘Organic Growth and the Collective Enterprise’ (Diamond 2003: 169) a review of the current way in which the work is thought about. This was written just before the period of time during which the school did not have an, ‘excludable child’. This paper was the subject of a staff team training day during which everyone was able to comment on its content. These thoughts were then used in regular training sessions, team meetings and throughout the school in other spaces where the ideas and developing thinking were used to assist in the development of practice.

To many inside the school this paper brought a sense of relief as it described what they thought they were doing. To others it was received as a threat to the ‘care’ of the children and to others perhaps a snub to the history of the school. This dissertation will look at some of the issues it raised, as I believe they directly relate to the internal dynamic in the population of the school, and consequently the containment provided.

Steven and Barbara Dockar-Drysdale began their work at the school with evacuees of the Second World War. The population of the school changed over time with the recognition by them that there was a need for the care and treatment of children who found living alongside their communities intolerable.

The child population today consists of a similar profile of children and the common theme for them all seems to be a displacement from their homes and losses associated with this, linked with confusions between love and violence.

The roles played within groups or families are widely documented and often the child that we receive at the Mulberry Bush is felt to be acting something out on behalf of others within their family. It is therefore no surprise that the children placed at the school are pre-disposed to take up this role in other groups or organisations.

It is our challenge therefore to dispossess them of this role and help them re-define their role in groups.

At the time of writing this, I find myself in the middle of managing demands around ‘excludable children’ and staff members whom their colleagues feel they could well do without! – Excludable adults?

Working with Strong Feelings

Working with strong (sometimes unbearably so) feelings is at the heart of the task for many whose client group are severely traumatised young children. The management of anxiety behind these feelings is a challenge for all. At times it is exacerbated by the fact that one thing we all have in common in the work is that we were all children once. This itself can raise powerful emotions when working with children in distress.

Before admission others have found living with the children placed with the school intolerable. It is therefore expected that we also will find them so. Part of our job is to find ways of tolerating them and perhaps helping them tolerate themselves.

One of the concerns that I have always had about places like the Bush is that by accepting the children as referrals and individual members of families, it reinforces the idea that they are ‘the problem’. They are identified as ‘the problem’, needing to go away and ‘do the work’ to get better. What we know however is that often they are an expression of a more systemic difficulty within the family, sometimes over generations.

In looking at the ‘excludable child’ and working as we do in groups we must expect that those family dynamics will to some extent be re-created in the school in the different groups and groupings.

Part of my role now is to keep an eye on all these different possibilities.

In the provision of Primary Experience, Barbara Dockar-Drysdale talks about the role of Jane who ‘acted out’ her parents’ violence.

‘Nobody except Jane seemed to be violent in her family constellation. Actually, there was plenty of hidden violence, especially between her parents, who, although they never had ‘rows’, used Jane as a vehicle for their secret rages with each other - Jane acted out their fury. When ultimately, she made a recovery, the hidden violence in both her parents and her siblings could suddenly be seen more clearly in their relationships with each other, because Jane no longer accepted a safety valve/scapegoat role for her family.’ (Dockar-Drysdale 1990: 128/129)