Thread by @karamballes

🧵Isolation booths

The article is a bit of a mess, ban/regulate are interchanged, isolate/segregate interchanged

Its a subject where sides are firmly entrenched and its used to batter wider views on education

I don't like booths but fine with removal roomss with tables in rows

https://twitter.com/FEontap/status/1453077751590699009

Students do need to be removed from lessons at times, for a large number of students getting taken out for the rest of the lesson and getting a detentention is enough of a deterrent.

But we all know students out all the time, falling further behind, they get stuck in a cycle

We aren't going to see booths or removals banned, no matter how exercised ppl get about it, its not on policy makers radar, we can't even get protections from a virus thats killed hundreds of us.

But booths/removal arent a solution, its a short term fix to keep a lesson going

We get so much heat from this and nothing constructive, just attack attack attack, "ppl who believe x also believe y"

What do we do to help those students who its stops being a deterrent and becomes a way of life?

ATM what happens is exclusion or offrolling

This might "fix" the problem for the school, but often not for that pupil.

Exclusion for safeguarding purposes is still necessary, many offrolling examples are not safeguarding, but this also gets lost in the heat.

Its an issue schools alone can't solve

We can talk about parental responsibility, some of the most disruptive students I've encountered in my very comprehensive school come from well off stable families and know a parent will be giving them a decent paid job when they leave,in these cases we can talk about entitlement

Other students come from chaotic, unstable, traumatic homes, every family is different and we will encounter some cases where parents aren't putting their children first, this will be a minority, many unstable homes are desperately in need of help and support

Parental responsibility
Read to your kids every day
Set boundaries

All sensible points, ppl can argue that poverty doesn't matter its about hard work, but what do we say to the child that watches a parent work 2 jobs and still struggle to pay the bills, who can't be there to

Always do the 3 mentioned above, because a roof, food and clothes must take priority?

What about the children with parents who are distracted from their best interests?

This is the conversation we should be having,

I have a friend, works in education single parent, hard working, responsible for the most challenging pupils, everyone I know who has worked with them is impressed by how they are firm and fair

They did all the right things, read, boundaries, limited digital device time

But mid teens their child got swept up into county lines.

Slogans don't match the complexity of life, saw this kind of thing among my peers when I was late teens, the punk loving kids from the grammar school ended up shooting heroin in a grammar school.

And many of the rough edged working class kids that were scrapping in the street and mid level drug dealing at 17 are managers in offices, working in finance or self employed tradesmen.

You can look at stats and trends but they smooth out individuality where personal solutions

Which actually change lives will be found.

Booths don't solve the problem, removal is needed.

Schools need more support, sitting in rows might be good but it ain't going to solve this

How do we join up social services, CAHMS, counselling, youth justice, employment programmes

and all the other services which we dont have.

So ppl might say funding isn't the solution, and there comes a point where that is true, but we don't have enough to sustain basic sticking plaster services, never alone to give meaningful support

Its a 10 year plan thats needed, because first of all we need a lot more people to be skilled up to provide these services, we need a lot of specialists.

But neither this nor blaming parents helps the children who are struggling right now for no fault of their own?

For a while host of reasons many parents and children are in survival mode, and this is what often leads to difficulties.

What can we do in the next 12 months to get ppl out of survival mode?

A slogan won't solve this, we need nuance not heat

https://twitter.com/HZiauddeen/status/1448650799148515333?t=bbDqear2Y2eCGMI_kptvrA&s=19

And as we are all flawed I'm going to finish with what many may see as hypocrisy by having a dig.

The isolation booth/exclusion debate often boils down to talking about accepting abuse and harm to pupils and staff, supporting booths/exclusion is about protecting people

The fact many who think exclusions booths can be overused but state safeguarding must always come first is ignored when high profile supporters wish to lump those not on their side into a homogeneous group (like "the blob" all over again),particularly when taking a dig at NEU

The narrative is that the union doesn't care about student safety and the booth/exclusion defenders are the real defenders of education workers and students

We are in a pandemic and have been left unprotected, where are the high profile pro gov accounts on this subject?

Nearly 600 of us have died
ONS estimates 114k have long covid
Neaely 100 children are dead, this term its several a week dying, over 1000 hospitalised for successive months, and this is before we start discussing growing data on other health impacts,morbidity, and immunity damage

Decade of austerity, hungry kids, collapsed services, a rampant pandemic, antivaxxers accosting students and staff in the streets

But let's use large platforms to focus on booths that we know aren't going to be banned anytime soon

Ppl with gov links could have spoken up

They could have called for ventilation and filtration and other protective measures
Takes too long?
We've had two summer holidays
Cost?
Alcohol tax cut was £3billion

Not your job?
Protecting health is the most basic safeguarding

If they havent spoken up about pandemic protection then they arent really concerned about the safety of staff and students

They arent concerned about addressing the deeper issues, its personal promotion and beating the other side

https://twitter.com/karamballes/status/1450912255034499073?t=8ezLxUM4JKpoz5K1tAWwkw&s=19