(Firstly, isn’t ‘lived experience’ a tautology? What does the ‘lived’ add?)

All through my career, and for longer than the above phrase has been in oh so common usage, I have told students to avoid using the first person when writing analytical essays. I circle every ‘I strongly believe’ and each ‘It seems to me’ and talk about why it’s a no-no when talking to the class next lesson. It’s not ‘wrong’ per se, as writing essays, whilst reliant on a web of principles and conventions, has very few actual rules. Whether you like the slightly stiff pragmatism of Orwell, the not so slightly smug but nevertheless illuminating waffle of Russell or the modern confections of Pinker, the essay is a glorious form and one whose decline in popularity pains me greatly – and I welcome the variety of voices that one finds when leafing suggestively through collections of essay writers at the height of their powers.

But for students, I say, avoid the first person. ‘But why, sir?!’ they naturally cry, their moist eyes turned toward me like so many shining fruit, and I tell them. No-one cares what you think, Jenkins. Or they ought not to. The fact that you believe something is by far the least persuasive, and the least important, of all the reasons you could argue a thing to be true. It’s almost the height of bad manners, to believe that your personal views, of all the methods you could choose to persuade your reader, should be so very impressive. If what you are saying is true, or at the very least, if your argument is sound, then it matters not a fig how strongly you believe it. Indeed, adding your own voice to what should be the inexorable flow of premises and evidence into conclusions could actually make it seem less credible.

If I, Jenkins, were to argue flawlessly that people not wishing to die young should not smoke tobacco, is my argument weakened if I am revealed to be a smoker? Not a jot! It makes me a hypocrite, certainly, and a fool, but the argument or statement or analysis is true within itself or faulty within itself. The identity of the author, utterer or arguer should make no difference in a world of reason and proper argument. At which point I would sit down, to their adoring indifference.

So, imagine my disquiet as the primacy of ‘lived experience’ over reason and logic has grown. Now, there are of course some debates where personal experience is of great import. If I am describing the effect that something has had on me, for example, a situation where I took offence but the offender claims none was meant, then that debate might reasonably involve explanations of why I reacted the way I did so they can be examined for reasonableness. But consider, dear reader, the debacle on Question Time just the other day, timestamp 39:00 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0blwgh7/question-time-2018-04102018.

Of course, one hesitates to wade into any debate that involves siding with a white man over two members of ethnic minority groups, but one must follow the train of reason wherever it chooses to go.

There is not, I hope, any need to explain why the gentleman on the panel and the woman wearing the hijab have made fools of themselves, and one would hope that, upon reflection and away from the emotive atmosphere of a live debate, they both feel more than a little silly. In their desire to emphasis the fact that they and those like them have been disadvantaged by something beyond their control – a fact with which I have no argument – they claim that said disadvantage allows, in the case of the gentleman on the panel, to declare as invalid the statement ‘Britain is the least racist of many European countries’ because it was made by a white speaker. Now, to evaluate that statement, what would we need? Data on millions of people over a period of, what, a year? Five years? Statistics from police on recorded instances of race-related crime, estimates of unrecorded levels of race-related crime, data on wealth distribution, access to education and services, broken down by race and, by all means, the reports of the experience of a big enough sample of people to allow us to make inferences about the countries in question. Then we can start evaluating the statement ‘Britain is the least racist of many European countries’. Being stopped and searched for nothing, prejudicial as that may have been, gives the gentleman on the panel none of those things. For the woman in the audience to imply that the original speaker’s whiteness, or the unlikelihood of him having experienced these things, invalidates his claim is similarly fallacious, a word my students always want to be rude, but, alas, isn’t. It is an argumentum ad hominem, one of the most misunderstood of the fallacious arguments. Ad hominem attacks are NOT just when someone insults you during an argument. It is when they claim the quality for which they insulted you, by its nature, invalidates your ability to argue what you are arguing. It is the first fallacious argument taught in any course on spotting fallacious arguments because it is the most common. And that was before the rise of identity politics.

Teaching students to argue is one of the hardest but most important parts of the job, and it would be pointless to comment in any depth about the disintegration of political and social discourse over the last several years; I’m sure you’ve noticed it yourself. But my great horror is not just that students and young people don’t know how to argue, but that correct argument is being replaced by this new cult of the lived experience.

As an English teacher, I’ve long had to defend my beloved subject (mainly from those blackguards in the Maths and Physics departments) from accusations that the study of literature lacks intellectual rigour, of the charge that ‘they can just write anything; no-one knows what the poet meant!’ And I say no. Good literary analysis can be as reasonable as a mathematical proof. Words have meanings. Yes, often more than one and, yes, they can change with context and, yes poetic or ‘literary’ language can be highly figured and dense… but the best literary criticism should be as well-structured as journalism or science. Read Frank Kermode for some good stuff. But, I am also well aware of the kernel of truth, that literature essays can be self-indulgent waffle if students do not learn to take themselves OUT of their analysis.

It’s up there with the most important things we can teach them. It’s not about you – start with what is known, which premises are agreed and which are disputed, what evidence is available to support your premises, are you ready to draw conclusions, if not, it’s off to the library with you. This cultish individualism offers, I believe, a greater threat to the intellectual life of this country than a potential Johnson premiership. I hope my strength of feeling is clear.

I’m teaching Year 11 English this September, for the first time in a while. This means dusting off and re-reading Lord of the Flies, and it never gets old. I actually worry about texts so perennially on school curricula – Lord of the Flies is one, Of Mice and Men another – that they get so associated with school that everyone forgets they are hugely important works of literature. There’s a reason for their ever-green status. They resonate, deeply, with people today as much as they did when they were written, but the danger when you associate something with school is, as an adult, to file it in the wrong partition of memory – ‘school stuff’, instead of ‘important stuff’.

I mention it because there are some who would benefit greatly from a quick re-read. Since I blogged on the ‘Forgotten Children’ report I’ve been heartened by how seriously people take the issue of exclusion, having followed it on the twitter. A good deal of passionate and reasoned debate, and that is as it should be. Permanent exclusions are disruptive to a child’s education and so it should always be a massive deal. I obviously didn’t think the report struck the right note, but I think it does the profession credit that this is such a discussed issue.

Of course, there are some views I disagreed with, and the most striking of these were the ones characterised by a complete absolution of the child from any responsibility for their actions. I have seen the phrase ‘most vulnerable’ used a few times (about the students being PEXed), I have seen the phrase ‘all behaviour is an attempt to communicate an unmet need’ and then a conclusion that schools shouldn’t exclude but should try to identify the unmet need and meet it. I even saw, in what appeared to be all seriousness, a comparison between exclusions and the cane, which I look forward to using as a case study in faulty logic in my next critical thinking class.

The counters to these views – that they pathologise poor behaviour, and the accusation of virtue-signalling, have been made by others. And, of course, there can be an unmet need behind poor behaviour, but people were asserting this was the case in every case of poor behaviour. And what I would say to these people is: ‘Re-read Lord of the Flies’.

The boys on the island, at the start, are of school age. It’s never made explicit how old they are, but they seem to range from early primary (the ‘little ‘uns’) to early teens. Jack, Ralph and Piggy being amongst the older group.

Golding goes to great lengths to make them typical British boys. Piggy, who speaks with a more working class accent, is a bit of an outsider, but they all start the story with various ciphers for British boyhood. Cartwheels, choir uniforms, they’ve read ‘Swallows and Amazons’ and ‘Coral Isalnd’ (Golding just couldn’t resist having one of the boys mention the very novel he was lancing), and, although they have experienced a plane crash, Golding clearly doesn’t want this to be an issue. He doesn’t describe the crash, none of them are upset by it and the novel starts after the crash happened. So – normal, British boys, no hidden trauma, nothing to explain away their actions later in the book. This is crucial if the book’s message is to land. These are your kids. This was you.

As boys of school age, their education is already underway, though incomplete. So their first impulse is to recreate the order of their home society on their new island. There is a recognition of the inherent value of, for example, having a system to ensure everyone gets a turn to speak at meetings, and the need for shelters, and a fire. However, without the wider support of social structures around them, these projects either never get started or deteriorate. The most aggressive children, particularly Jack, begin to dominate meetings, power struggles break out, and soon the micro-society is much more disorganised and basic. Two boys in particular are of great interest to me as a teacher: Roger and Simon.

Roger is one of the more minor characters in some ways – you may well have forgotten him. He has a cruel streak, and winds up with Jack and the hunters. It is he who pushes the rock that does for Piggy. That horrific moment is foreshadowed earlier in the novel, with this little passage:

Roger stooped, picked up a stone, aimed and threw it at Henry- threw it to miss. The stone, that token of preposterous time, bounced five yards to Henry’s right and fell in the water. Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.”

And while that invisible diameter exists, Henry is safe. Golding lists the guardians of the diameter, and he’s not wrong. Roger can be cruel. I don’t know why, but he can. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it’s a side of his personality that has formed through his childhood, various chance occurrences, experiences, ideas. Nothing that you could call trauma, without stretching the word well beyond what its elasticity will allow. Nothing you can cure him of, nothing you can find and cut out, like a tumour. He’s just got a cruel side. And that’s fine. Because society has developed all sorts of structures and conventions and checks to deal with Roger, and those like him. If the crash hadn’t happened, there’s no reason to think Roger would have grown up to be a serial killer, no reason, indeed, to believe he wouldn’t have gone on to be an excellent father, and friend, and boss, or whatever. It is simply a base impulse which society is generally able to help him control. The Rogers in schools today don’t throw stones when they know how seriously the school will take it, when they know it would be a huge deal involving parents and serious consequences. When they don’t believe it will be a big deal, they throw stones.

We, and the law, and the police, and parents, with our imperfect systems of sanctions and rewards, is what maintains the invisible circle – not telling Roger he must have an unmet need, that we want to understand him. Golding’s novel continues to resonate, I believe, because it is founded in a truth. There’s nothing to understand. Roger doesn’t need help. It is a base urge, and he needs society to send him clear signals not to do it.

The other boy worth talking about is Simon. Sensitive, sickly Simon, who first understands that there is no ‘beast’, it’s just them. Simon who wanders into the woods to be away from the other boys, around whom he doesn’t feel safe. Simon who talks to the lord of the flies, a grotesque, rotting pig’s head that Jack leaves to appease the beast. It speaks to him, and says:

“I’m warning you. I’m going to get angry. D’you see? You’re not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don’t try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else–”

Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread.

“–Or else,” said the Lord of the Flies, “we shall do you, see? Roger and Maurice and Robert and Bill and Piggy and Ralph. Do you. See?”

The pig’s head speaks with the voice of the bully, the voice that does so much damage in schools and streets and workplaces and families around the country, and Simon cowers like many recessive, introverted boys do. He glimpses, in the pig’s head, the same darkness that Conrad saw in ‘Heart of Darkness’, that Stevenson was describing in ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. That is the voice Roger will eventually speak with, the voice that Jack starts to find very quickly when he realises there are no consequences for his actions – that is what happens when people realise they no longer have to take responsibility for what they do, and that is where this idea that there’s no such thing as poor behaviour, just undiscovered trauma, would lead.

There’s not always anything you can do, those who want to believe every bully, every violent or aggressive child is trying to tell you to save them. Some of them are, for sure, but all of them? I’m afraid some of them are just Rogers and Jacks. People can be nasty – AND THAT’S OK – we’ve got all sorts of ways to help them control that. It’s not an illness, it’s just being human. Prison for adults and exclusions for students are deeply imperfect and have limitations, but they are vital tools in the toolbox of maintaining that invisible line in the sand that kept Henry safe. Frankly if, on an open evening, a head teacher said ‘we never permanently exclude, no matter what’, then my kids aren’t going there. I’d be too worried they’d come home one day, their head bleeding, saying they were hit by a rock thrown by this boy called Roger.

This is my first blog – I have never felt the need as there are a great many excellent voices in education blogging, and someone generally says the kind of thing I would have said, only better. But there aren’t that many headteachers blogging, that I can see, so I thought I’d wade in over the above report, particularly section 2, ‘What’s going wrong in mainstream schools?’.

For some brief context, I am head of a secondary academy in an inner-city. Pretty par for the course intake; 50% PPG, 35% EAL, sig. above national average for SEN, (both EHCPs and students at SEN support (K)). Not the most challenging intake in the country by any means, but a good many students in challenging and sometimes chaotic circumstances.

Over the last four years, I have permanently excluded four students – all boys. Lowish for where the school is. On the other hand, we are at the high end for fixed period exclusions – we use them, especially lower down the school, to try to snap students out of behaviours they’ve brought with them to secondary school which are going to make their, and others people’s, lives difficult – especially defiance and aggression. We use a wide range of other strategies too, of course.

Finally, we’re pretty strict. I don’t use the terms ‘no excuses’ or ‘zero tolerance’ as I think they’re unhelpful, but we’re a fully paid up member of the fussy-about-uniform, walk-between-lessons-quietly-and-calmly brigade. Having said that, as I know this is a divisive subject at the moment (I believe there’s been a progressive vs traditionalist debate raging in some quarters, for some time. Not sure that’s helpful, but there it is), I can assure those of you whose hackles may rise at the description that we love our kids, are oversubscribed and parents generally a happy and supportive bunch.

Anyway, we’ve been having this debate about exclusions with our local authority for a while, and the report this morning I felt stumbled in a couple of places and I wanted to give my perspective, and share a couple of examples. This is not to say, in fairness, that there are not things to be concerned about nationally, and of course AP has been decimated under this government, and, indeed, the last.

The argument I have with the local authority, who have been on a push to get exclusions down for a few years now, is that it’s the wrong part of the problem to be looking at. You wouldn’t go into a hospital and tell surgoens to lower the number of operations they perform. If someone needs an operation, they are likely to be most displeased when told the leg will just have to go gangrenous because the boss wants them to lower operations. What you do is say you want to tackle this worrying gangrene outbreak, but, of course, if Mrs Smith in ward three needs and operation, then carry on. The focus should be on continuing to improve student behaviour, not lowering exclusions.

And it leads to real problems. Last year I sat on an Independent Review Panel for a neighbouring school. An IRP is the stage of appeal if the decision to permanently exclude is upheld by the school’s governors. The IRP panel comprises a governor of a different school, a headteacher of a different school, and a lay-person. We receive a huge amount of paperwork and hear representations on behalf of the student, and then the school.

The student in question had been excluded, as most students are, for persistent disruptive behaviour. This means the school feels they have exhausted the strategies available to them to support the student in modifying their disruptive behaviour, including a very clear ‘last chance’ meeting, normally in front of governors, but the student has continued to seriously disrupt learning. It’s never an easy thing to do, but the time does sadly come with some students where the school must permanently exclude or completely undermine its own authority.

So the case for persistent disruptive behaviour seemed strong – repeated instances, over three years, of swearing at staff, truanting lessons, intimidating other students, physical aggression towards staff etc. The school also seemed to have done their bit. Referrals to external agencies to check for an undiagnosed SEN, full learning mentor support, tutor report, head of year report, SLT report, sanctions, rewards for good conduct, offered counselling, Pastoral Support Plan and all the rest. The only thing that didn’t make sense to me was that, over the course of these several years, the young man had received no fixed period exclusions. When I asked the head about this, his reply was ‘I agree with the local authority – there’s no need to exclude.’

Except there is. And was. And had this young man’s behaviour led to fixed period exclusions in Year 7, when students are often most able to change their habits, then things may have been different. And this is where the pressure that this report will invariably bring on headteachers will lead – they’ll feel they need to get exclusions down, won’t exclude even though they may feel it’s the right thing to do, and the consequences of that is far worse.

The reports authors also made a couple of silly errors – the most glaring of which was this:

‘Pupils with SEN support are almost seven times more likely to be permanently excluded than pupils with no SEN.’

Well of course they are. One of the first things a school will do when a student is persistently disruptive is to put them on the SEN register as ‘K’ (receiving support) for SEMH (Social, Emotional and Mental Health). The biggest reason for permanent exclusion is persistent disruptive behaviour – so these are the minority of students for whom, normally some years later, the school’s support was unsuccessful, and obviously means you’d expect the data to be heavily skewed towards those on SEN support.

The second one I had issue with isn’t just ignorant, but irresponsible:

‘While it would be reasonable of schools to take a zero-tolerance approach to drugs or weapons, a school culture which is intolerant of minor infractions of school policies on haircuts or uniform will create an environment where pupils are punished needlessly where there should be flexibility and a degree of discretion.’

Thanks a lot, well meaning but poorly informed members of the select committee, for undermining important  and difficult work that schools do. What you are saying, just to make it very clear, is have rules, but don’t always enforce them. Do you have any idea how damaging that is? How confusing? How patronising? Schools work incredibly hard to create consistency, to make school a predictably, safe place. The absolute foundation of that safety is getting past one of the most easy things to take root in students’ minds; that the teachers are capricious, that they play favourites, that their mood decides their actions. And that means if you turn up in the wrong uniform, there’s a consequence.

Of course, the report’s authors had rather given the game away with the title of the section: ‘What’s going wrong in mainstream schools?’. Not necessarily anything, that’s a value statement which your report does not prove – all it does is expose the problems with select committee reports.