In order to determine the quality of a college, there is one question more valuable than any other: would you like your kid to go there?
I’ve worked in loads of places now, most of which I would merrily march my own lad towards, some I would tackle him to the ground to prevent him from going within 100 yards of.
The crucial factor isn’t quality of teaching, availability of resources or jazziness of the new-build. My priority is safety. Would my lad be safe in that environment? Does the organisation (to be fair, it’s more about the culture of particular sites than the whole college) protect students with the same measures that would be expected in the rest of society?
A place I worked for early on seemed to have looked to the Wild West for its behaviour policy; serious incidents were commonplace. A boy was battered with a cue ball in a sock, Scum-style, by a group of students, all caught on CCTV, but none were excluded and police weren’t called.
A badly beaten student was sent to hospital in a taxi with what turned out to be a fractured skull; again, no police, no ambulance. One enterprising soul was intercepted recruiting and running a prostitution ring from the library. And I was repeatedly threatened with rape by a student - an ordeal that, when reported to the site’s dodgy sheriff, I was told was due to my failings in behaviour management.
That no-consequences state-funded fight club was all about bums on seats and funding in the bank. I later learned that what went on at that site was shrouded from senior management throughout the rest of what was actually a pretty good college. Although I’ve never experienced such a grotesquely warped sense of managerial priority in the years since, the culture of wedge over welfare still exists.
A mate of mine teaches in a college where the relationship between two of his students, both vying for alpha status through bullying and numerous behavioural incidents, recently came to a violent denouement in a corridor. The incident required a number of staff to break it up; students who intervened were injured; and many of the kids who witnessed it were left traumatised.
Were this to happen outside of perceived college jurisdiction, police would be involved. My friend told me that the incident resulted in student disciplinary meetings, a period of suspension, then back to business as usual for the students involved. His college is well thought of and usually has a robust behavioural response, but after this, he isn’t just disappointed by the management, he’s disgusted.
A lack of appropriate sanction should not be prettied up as “inclusion”. We know that it’s about putting the funding of the few above the safety of the many, a rationale that doesn’t just reflect badly on the college involved, but on FE as a whole.
So if you are one of the people who have to mitigate such disciplinary issues, ask yourself this question: would you want your own child at that site?
Sarah Simons works in colleges in the East Midlands and is the director of UKFEchat. She tweets @MrsSarahSimons
