Read this in the TES forum the other day. An article about a troubled and troublesome child – Little Tommy – who used to be a perpetual truant but is now (thanks to Ofsted targets) attending school regularly – much to the chagrin of his teachers. Basically, it’s better for everyone if difficult children truant, because they don’t then disrupt the rest of the class.

This is such a complicated and confusing argument. On the one hand there is the idea that ’inclusion’ for the most challenging minority means ‘exclusion’ for the well-behaved, less difficult kids whose education is usually sacrificed for the sake of a bit of peace and quiet. Keeping a disruptive child in check takes all of your time, and the other 19 children in your class are basically left with no teacher. It doesn’t seem ‘fair’ – but then if you bring fairness into it, you’re looking at the fact that some of these truants have such a hard home life, and deserve all our support and love.  What is fair is ensuring that their awful homelife doesn’t determine their future. But is it fair that this is at the expense of other children who don’t cause trouble?

I don’t know the exact answer; but I do know, and I don’t meant to sound overly idealistic, that opting to have children not in school because it makes our lives easier isn’t what I got into teaching for. It’s just another sticking plaster for a bigger problem.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 4:44 am and is filed under Behaviour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.