Special needs student forced list faults in front of class

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A 10-year-old boy with special needs who complained of bullying was forced by staff to listen to classmates listing the reasons they didn’t like him – and had to write these on a hand-drawn poster that was then stuck on his classroom wall.

In a case that campaigners say highlights the need for specialist teaching resources, Damian Lightoller’s son, who has traits of autism, ADHD and oppositional defiant disorder and is on the special education needs register, was told by his peers he needed to “stop shouting”, “stop annoying us” and “be happy, not sad” if he wanted to have better relationships with them.

The incident, which occurred last year at Allenton Community Primary School in Derby but was only recently discovered by his parents, followed the boy (whom the Observer has chosen not to name) telling the school’s behaviour mentor that he was being bullied. “[My son] approached his behaviour mentor and said he was being bullied and was upset the other children didn’t like him,” Lightoller told the Observer. “So, to try to tackle this, his [behaviour mentor’s] idea was apparently to find out why the other children didn’t like him. So he sat [my son] down, asked the other children why they didn’t like him, and tried to tell [my son] to change those things.

According to Lightoller, the school’s headteacher, Jon Fordham, described the session to them as “restorative justice”. He questioned “why we’d bothered to raise it and why we even had an issue with it in the first place”

Funding for special needs education has been squeezed in recent years, with the sector engulfed in crisis. Council overspending on “high needs” education budgets trebled in the three years to 2017/18, with many cutting services or raiding other school budgets – which hits provision for children with special needs and disabilities in mainstream schools.

We had no idea that he was getting reminders every day at school about the things that children dislike about him

Despite the list having being drawn up in November, the boy’s parents knew nothing until he brought the drawing back from school towards the end of term, two weeks ago. They fear it may have increased the bullying of their son, who had an at times fractious relationship with his classmates.

As soon as they saw the picture, the parents had a meeting with the school’s behaviour mentor, who works with perpetrators and victims of bad behaviour, and with Fordham, who is credited with having turned around the school’s performance since taking over, and with whom they had had a good relationship. But the description of the session as “restorative justice” left them “furious, upset and hurt”, said Lightoller.

He added: “A friend who’s a primary school teacher at another school in Derby said she’s familiar with this activity, and you are supposed to sit the child down and you ask their peers to list positive things about the child, and you try to get the child to focus on those positive things. [Instead they] focused on the negative.”

Fordham did not respond to a request for comment. Transform Trust, which sponsors Allenton school, refused to comment.

Schools and teachers dealing with behavior issues and bullying are constantly searching for new and effective ways to handle it all. One concept that’s been making headway in recent years is restorative justice.

Restorative justice is a theory of justice that focuses on mediation and agreement rather than punishment. Offenders must accept responsibility for harm and make restitution with victims. The concept has been around for hundreds of years, with indigenous people, like the Maori, using restorative justice successfully in their communities for generations. In the late 20th century, restorative justice gained traction in the US and other countries as various groups sought to improve the effectiveness of the criminal justice system.

Within a few years, the success of these programs led to the exploration of restorative justice in schools, especially those that suffered from high rates of student misbehavior. In California, Oakland Unified School District began using the program at a failing middle school in 2006. Within three years, the pilot school saw a decrease in suspensions by a whopping 87 percent, with a corresponding decrease in violence.

The practice was so successful that by 2011 OUSD overhauled its system and made restorative justice the new model for handling disciplinary problems. “Restorative justice is a major cultural shift from a punitive model to a restorative model,” notes David Yurem, OUSD’s first program manager of restorative justice.

The program is based on respect, responsibility, relationship-building, and relationship-repairing. Schools like OUSD use a three-tiered approach. Tier I focuses on building a strong community within the school, laying the groundwork for responsibility and respect. Tier II attempts to resolve conflicts and heal the harm students cause, while Tier III supports students reentering the school community after a suspension or expulsion. It also provides individualized support.