I couldn’t attend the group session the other week. I had meeting with my son’s duty solicitor, the head of prison law and a senior law partner over my son’s rolling custody awaiting a sentencing hearing. 3 months today actually he’s been waiting. He’s on recall in Brixton HMP, but is also charged with the newly legislated ‘unlawfully at large’ that aims to create a more punitive charge for breaching parole (Criminal Justice and Courts Bill, ND). He had been on the run for 9 years.
If the sentences run concurrently, time spent waiting won’t count against the second charge. Limbo time. At least he got off B wing and onto enhancement after 2 months of lockdown. B wing is 23 hours lock up. He wrote to the governor and said he was an exemplary prisoner. My dyslexic child was able to put pen and paper to use at last.
My tutor Frederico helpfully suggested an individual catch up tutorial for me as I had missed the group one, and he highlighted the importance of using the learning outcomes to guide my process, the importance of being more explicit about my intervention, and the importance of writing about the ethical journey within my research process. Also, importantly, I must remember to keep stating that my intervention is the development of the time management tool to a more relevant fit for neurodiverse students that I support.
When Frederico asked me how I was doing, I said I was very engaged with my AR, it’s a nice distraction but the state of my son’s situation was a big distraction. I felt so unfocused just like the very students I support. He suggested I write about that.
I feel a bit like I’m in the students’ shoes who combat distraction all the time due to their ADHD. Ironically, I had been writing/journaling over the summer about how I needed to get into the students’ shoes and feel some empathy to their concentration and time management challenges. Shaffer et al. (2019) explored the use of journalling for health professionals to foster feelings of empathy towards patients with negative health behaviours, with positive outcomes that indicated journalling leading to health professionals’ changing attitudes towards these patients. I do not regard my students as having negative learning behaviours, but this AR research process has partly aimed at heightening my understanding and empathy towards the students I support facing time management challenges. Indeed, doing unit 3 in my present circumstances has heightened my awareness of students’ struggles to keep focused. It’s easy to keep focus in a job, but less in study as it is independent work, where we are trying to create our own structure and stay on course.
I briefly wondered the other day if I would still be able to stay focused and keep with the Pg Cert course and concluded that finishing unit 3 will be in my best interest. When my son was recovering from being stabbed in the heart 12 years ago and left to bleed out on our local estate, I still went to work. After lifesaving emergency surgery where they opened him up (clamshell style) whilst still in Emergency with his Dad watching (see technique below cited in the guardian, 2017),
he was only in hospital 6 days. As I remember doctors wouldn’t agree to discharge him as he had a partially collapsed lung as well as the recent surgery, but he walked out anyway. You can do anything when you’re 16, ADHD and on Tramadol I guess. I got my niece Janine to come to stay and try and get him to eat while I was at work. The Ritalin he’d been taking had really shot his appetite to pieces (Watson, 2023).
Off I went to work, leaving that troubled ADHD kid with his cousin. I’d cycle to Bloomsbury, across London, no helmet, racing the black cabs on the back streets for my amusement and to make time, impatient and irresponsible at 45 whilst my son was at 16, where does he get it from? For his amusement, he used to overtake the police speeding and pull his helmet off and wave it at them because he knew they couldn’t pursue a youth wearing no helmet (BBC NEWS, 2018), though laws have changed since.
In those early days, I was racing around all the time, against the clock, 2 jobs and 3 kids, Iceland pizza for dinner, poor wretches. I never had much truck with homework; their mother was a teacher who doesn’t believe in homework. Kind of odd. A bit like my son’s school headmistress that didn’t believe in dyslexia. That was actually deflating. When I used the term ‘neurodiversity’ in the nineties and noughties, schoolteachers looked back at me blankly. Now the term is in my role title.
If I could have afforded it, I would have sent them all to a Montessori school. I idealised the Montessori setting, the principles of independence and discovery being a favourite of mine, but there are criticisms of these schools. Writing for the New Yorker, Jessica Winter (2022) highlights it has become a teaching approach for a wealthier more privileged group.
(House of Montessori, 2024)
I think it’s pretty well established that the school system is crushing if you’re not neurotypical (or you’re a boy of colour). Evidently, London state schools are funded differently from private Montessori’s, underpinned by different principles and realities. A topic for another blog but my career has been driven by social justice motivations with teaching refugees, ESOL, adult literacy in Peckham and now neurodiversity in higher education. In those teaching contexts my desire to level the playing fields and contribute to equality was part of my practice/ethos. However, watching the social injustice of London schools’ campaign to exclude boys of colour (and neurodiverse white boys like mine), was breath-taking!
That spectacle was over 10 years ago for me personally, but here is some current research reported by The Voice,
‘Research by Race On The Agenda (ROTA) based on Freedom of Information requests found that informal exclusions are often not recorded by the schools who practice them as a way of off-booking exclusions without it being shown on school records’ (Malon, 2022).
This article entitled, ‘Black pupils face unrecorded informal exclusions from school: We can’t fix what we can’t see’ says Race on the Agenda’ (Malon, 2022) highlights how the school system can enforce an agenda in implicit and explicit ways. In contrast, the GOV.UK (2023) advertise the closing exclusion gap between Black pupils and white pupils over 2007-2021, which emphasises to me the importance of interpreting statistics and data more critically. Even with the ‘closing gap’, the data reflect markedly different levels of exclusion according to ethnicity (see appendix). The highest rates of exclusion is reserved for children of mixed heritage – a subject for another discussion on identity perhaps.
In unit 1 some of the feedback was that I hadn’t written about the future at all. I’m 57 and have been in education my whole life. I suppose I had a lot to say about the past, my education practice in adult ed, further ed and higher ed, my children’s and their peer groups’ school education experiences, but the future of the UK school system, is terrifying quite frankly. Though I miss my grandsons dearly, as their mother has taken them to the Moroccan Atlas Mountains somewhere to live in and practise fundamentalist Islam, at least they’re off the streets of south London and from the hostilities of the schools.
In unit 2, after the first workshop a tutor recommended a school to prison pipeline article. She enthusiastically called out at the end of a session that; it was ‘a good read’! Maybe for some. I didn’t need to read it. I’ve lived it. In searching for it now to reference I come up empty handed. I’ve put a shout out to the whassap group for help though. In the meantime, I’ve sourced something further below in the next section.
Education and Exclusion
There are many ways that schools exclude unwanted populations groups, some more explicit than others, such as ‘informal exclusions’ as noted above. Another example, my children’s secondary school was challenged for fixing the catchment area to avoid the surrounding council estates (Vasagar, 2012).
I bumped into the very same school’s SENCO one day and she said she was moving away from London. When I asked her why, she said her boys were dyslexic and she saw how the school had treated me, and decided she’d better leave. I won tribunals and panel decisions for my sons, but the schools consistently treated them as a behaviour problem rather than a special needs statemented child. When parents and their children’s disability profiles are unsupported, I can attest you begin to believe you’re the problem, so to hear the SENCO’s testimony was very affirming for me, highlighting for me that exclusion can occur in various ways.
My tutor Frederico mentioned in the November 6th group tutorial that autoethnography is when a researcher’s history or narrative demonstrates a connection to broader context of systems, such as societal class, etc, so possibly my experience of my sons’ stories elucidates social justice issues, such as education, class and disability. The UAL toolkit publication defines autoethnography as ‘a process of conducting and producing an ethnographic study through the understanding self, other and culture (Chang, 2008)[ …] describing and analysing personal experiences to understand cultural experiences’ (UAL, 2023). This blog, I believe, is somewhat making links between my experience and wider social systems.
The Vasagar (2012) article mentioned above references social capital, the social capital that is needed to challenge institutions’ systems, win admission appeals etc. Though I was able to rally for my sons and overturn negative outcomes for them, I saw one by one, their friends of colour from south London get excluded, systematically, often continuing on a trajectory from exclusion centres to the penal system. Below is a graphic (Breakthrough, 2023) showing this pipeline, courtesy of the prisoners’ apprenticeship charity Breakthrough, sponsored by City and Guilds (2023).
(Breakthrough, 2023)
Sometimes, I would help my sons’ friends fill out applications for alternative education provision, as some had parents less able to help. I seemed to feel the disparity here, the social injustice, more keenly than within my working contexts. I think this is down to Britain being a richer country than any of the other countries that the students I supported and taught at the time belonged to, so for this reason, I assumed we were more able to invest in our youth, rather than marginalise them, waste their potential, limit their destinies, and spend millions on building and funding prisons.
‘It costs £65,000 to imprison a person in this country once police, court costs and all the other steps are taken into account. After that it costs a further £40,000 for each year they spend incarcerated’ (Focus Prison Education, 2023).
All that youth, resource and potential, the money to incarcerate but not to invest and foster in their education pathways.
Self-care and the researcher
The ADHD topic is clearly triggering for me, and more so in my present circumstances of my son’s 5th adjournment (re-reading my blog now, his 6th adjournment yesterday, November 15th) of his sentencing hearing. I checked out the Julie Ellis (2018) blog on feelings matter: the emotional demands of doing sensitive research, which highlighted this affective element of doing triggering research.
I did wonder if it was a wise choice to pursue exploring and researching the subjective experiences of people with ADHD of how they sense and experience time. Living with someone with ADHD is difficult and being a parent of one is difficult in specific ways that only a parent can feel, feeling the pain of watching your child in pain.
Sometimes this personal experience colours my tutorials with students with ADHD as I nurse memories of watching my son’s inability to cope with many social situations and to cope with the anxieties that come with poor sensory integration. There are 7 senses: and when they don’t integrate smoothly there are many physical consequences, not knowing when things are about to happen is one. That’s partly why I’m motivated to raise self-awareness of their perception of time with the time management tool intervention.
References
BBC NEWS (2018) Moped crime: New rules to protect police pursuit drivers.
Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44204844 (accessed 7.11.2023)
Breakthrough (2023) Break the cycle: ending school-to-prison pipelines in the UK
Available at: https://www.wearebreakthrough.org/blog/break-the-cycle-ending-school-to-prison-pipelines-in-the-uk (accessed 09/11/2023)
Criminal Justice and Courts Bill (ND) Fact sheet: creating a new offence of remaining unlawfully at large after recall and increasing the maximum sentence for the existing offence of remaining unlawfully after temporary release Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7e3fc140f0b6230268a208/fact-sheet-ual-rotl-agreed.pdf (accessed 3.11.2023)
Gayle, D. (2017) ‘When knife victims arrive at hospital in school uniform, it brings it home to you’: Beyond the Blade. In the guardian.
Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2017/may/04/when-knife-victims-arrive-in-school-uniform-it-brings-it-home-to-you (accessed 1.11.2023)
GOV.UK (2023) Permanent Exclusions: Ethnicities, facts and figures.
Available at: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/absence-and-exclusions/permanent-exclusions/latest (accessed 7.11.2023)
Ellis, J. (2018) feelings matter: the emotional demands of doing sensitive research
Available at: https://thinkaheadsheffield.wordpress.com/2018/06/26/feelings-matter-the-emotional-demands-of-doing-sensitive-research/ (accessed 10.11.2023)
Focus Prison Education (2023) The Cost of Prisons.
Available at: https://www.fpe.org.uk/the-cost-of-prisons (accessed 3.11. 2023)
House of Montessori (2024) Image. Available at: https://houseofmontessori.com/montessori-system/ (accessed 12.01.2024)
Mahon, L. (2022) Black pupils face unrecorded informal exclusions from school
‘We can’t fix what we can’t see’ says Race on the Agenda.
Available at: https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/uk-news/2022/02/02/black-pupils-face-unrecorded-informal-exclusions-from-school/ (accessed 7.11.2023)
Seven Senses Foundation (2023) What are the seven senses?
Available at: http://www.7senses.org.au/what-are-the-7-senses/ (accessed 7.11.2023)
Shaffer, V. A., Bohanek, J., Focella, E. S., Horstman, H., & Saffran, L. (2019). Encouraging perspective taking: Using narrative writing to induce empathy for others engaging in negative health behaviors. PloS one, 14(10), e0224046. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224046
UAL (2023) Autoethnography toolkit. Available at: https://canvas.arts.ac.uk/documents/sppreview/dfb4ef1f-51a5-40a7-ba94-35a926cee9d9 (accessed 12.01.2024)
Vasagar, J. (2012) Academy school criticised for excluding council estates in admissions policy. In the guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/feb/01/academy-school-catchment-council-estates (accessed 3.11.2023)
Watson, S. (2023) Is ADHD Medication Affecting My Weight?
Available at: https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/medication-weight (accessed 3.11.2023)
Winter, J. (2022) The Miseducation of Maria Montessori: Her method was meant for the public. Then it became a privilege .In The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-miseducation-of-maria-montessori (accessed 9.11.2023)
Appendix