Us teachers just love to hear from our former students. Not only is there the vicarious enjoyment of the ongoing success story, but you’re genuinely touched that they’ve remembered you at all. And the fact they might also want something, such as a reference, can be safely relegated to that part of the brain marked “incidental”.
So when I picked up the phone the other day and learned that it was Theresa on the line, I found myself smiling in anticipation. As it happened though, Theresa’s call turned out not to involve the usual bout of nostalgic backslapping. And she wasn’t looking for a reference either.
I remembered her immediately, albeit that she had left several years ago and without finishing her course.
Theresa’s mother was a paranoid schizophrenic. Her father, when around, drank himself stupid every night. Sometimes, she would tell me what growing up in such a household was like.
When she arrived in my English class, she was in the care of the local authority, and they did seem to care about her. They were strongly supporting her A-level studies, despite her poor showing in her GCSEs.
Then, shortly after the start of her second year, Theresa disappeared. Another student told me the council had moved her to a town 30 miles away and it was no longer practical for her to come to college. So maybe they didn’t care so much after all.
That at least was the conclusion I drew at the time. Theresa’s call made me realise that I had been doing her carers an injustice. The “move out of town” story had been concocted to cover up what was really going on in her life. Apparently her own mental health had suddenly deteriorated. When drug therapy had failed to make much difference, she had been admitted to a psychiatric ward.
At first it was only supposed to be for a few days, but her stay soon lengthened into weeks. The weeks became months. Eventually her doctors diagnosed that she was not only, like her mother, a schizophrenic, but that she was also suffering from manic depression.
She spent more than a year in and out of hospital. Medication helped for a time, then seemed to lose its potency. At last her condition stabilised. She moved into a hostel and began to think about her future.
That was what had prompted her call to me. In a few months she would be 21, and she had heard that I was running an access course for students wanting to go on to university.
Naturally I told her that I would welcome her back. After all, it’s students like Theresa that such courses are designed for: older adults who have missed out on their secondary education, or those in their twenties in need of a second chance.
Hearing about this, most people in education would say that I had done exactly the right thing. Despite her considerable handicaps, Theresa was bright, motivated and with an enquiring mind that would thrive on a degree course.
Most, but not all. Because there is another way of looking at Theresa and those like her - a way that has become familiar in recent years to those in the FE front line. By this analysis, Theresa was a failure. Or, more pertinently, we were a failure: myself, her other teachers and the institution we worked for.
Theresa was a non-achiever, as are 50 percent of all who enter the doors of FE colleges, according to education minister Margaret Hodge. In taking her back weren’t we simply risking further failure? Her condition might have stabilised for now, but who could be sure that Theresa wouldn’t be taking another trip “out of town” before her course was over?
In considering Theresa’s case it is important to realise that she is both untypical and typical of students in FE. Untypical, because few can have been dealt quite such a wretched hand in life as hers. But typical too, because large numbers (some would argue most) of our students don’t come in “standard sizes”.
Like Theresa, they often come from broken homes. Their educational pasts are littered with under-achievement. Many are single parents, having had children when they were still hardly more than children themselves. If they are bright - and many of them are - their brightness manifests itself in unconventional ways. They are wary of - sometimes hostile towards - authority.
In pursuit of a better statistic, the Government now seems bent on the slow strangulation of the general FE college. As is the case in schools, this represents a turning away from the comprehensive ideal and towards what they call specialisation.
Quite where all this fits with that other governmental aim of “inclusive learning” is problematical. Because in Margaret Hodge’s brave new world of glittering pass rates it’s hard to see just who is going to specialise in Theresas.
