Healing division in schools: the lessons from Ireland

As racism rears its head after the EU referendum, a chain set up to counter sectarian education is offering solutions for the UK.

In a horseshoe, sitting around teacher Laura Clarke, year 1 pupils from Redfield Educate Together academy in Bristol discuss the EU referendum. “Do you remember what happened?” asks Clarke. “There was a vote and people were unkind to people from other countries,” pipes up Ben Wycherley, aged six.

“How do you feel about that?” Clarke asks her class. “Shocked,” says Tarren Dwyer-Reid, also six. “Sad,” says classmate Angelo Marmolejo, whose parents are Spanish.

“How do you think being unkind might make other people feel?” asks Clarke. “I’d feel lonely,” says Zoe Papp.

“Not very welcoming”, written up on the whiteboard, is the phrase that seems best to sum up the children’s view.

This new school – the first established in England by the Irish Educate Together multi-academy trust – serves a diverse catchment in central Bristol: 60% of children come from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

The city, like others, is feeling anxious after incidents of racial hatred and immigrants being told to “go home” following the referendum. One local primary school posted a notice on its Twitter feed offering to help families report racism and hate crime.

The headteacher here, Ros Farrell, is keenly aware that her school’s unique “ethical education curriculum” is needed as never before, as its children grow up in a multicultural city where a higher than expected 38% of voters opted to leave the EU.

The ethos of this chain of schools was developed in the Republic of Ireland – the first was founded in 1978 to offer an alternative to faith-based education, still the only option for 97% of pupils there. Educate Together’s “ethical education” approach, Farrell says, is intended to help children understand and value belief systems other than their own, and explore concepts of equality and justice.

Why our children are so bored at school, cannot wait, get easily frustrated and have no real friends?

I am an occupational therapist with 10 years of experience working with children, parents, and teachers. I completely agree with this teacher’s message that our children getting worse and worse in many aspects. I hear the same consistent message from every teacher I meet. Clearly, throughout my ten years as an Occupational Therapist, I have seen and continue to see a decline in kids’ social, emotional, academic functioning, as well as a sharp increase in learning disabilities and other diagnoses. 

Today’s children come to school emotionally unavailable for learning and there are many factors in our modern lifestyle that contribute to this. As we know, the brain is malleable. Through environment we can make the brain “stronger” or make it “weaker”. I truly believe that with all our greatest intentions, we unfortunately remold our children’s brains in the wrong direction. Here is why…

1. Technology

“Free babysitting service… the payment is waiting for you just around the corner”. We pay with our kids’ nervous system, with their attention, and ability for delayed gratification. Compared to virtual reality, everyday life is boring. When kids come to the classroom, they are exposed to human voices and adequate visual stimulation as opposed to being bombarded with graphic explosions and special effects that they are used to seeing on the screens. After hours of virtual reality, processing information in a classroom becomes increasingly challenging for our kids because their brains are getting used to the high levels of stimulation that video games provide. The inability to process lower levels of stimulation leaves kids vulnerable to academic challenges. Technology also disconnects us emotionally from our children and our families. Parental emotional availability is the main nutrient for child’s brain. Unfortunately, we are gradually depriving our children from that nutrient.

2. Kids get everything they want the moment they want

“I am Hungry!!” “In a sec I will stop at drive thru” “I am Thirsty!” “Here is a vending machine”. “I am bored!” “Use my phone!” The ability to delay gratification is one of the key factors for future success. We have all the greatest intention in mind to make our children happy, but unfortunately, we make them happy at the moment but miserable in a long term. To be able to delay gratification means to be able to function under stress. Our children are gradually becoming less equipped to deal with even minor stressors which eventually become huge obstacles to their success in life.

No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

Pupils choose their own subjects and motivate themselves, an approach some say should be rolled out across Germany.

Anton Oberländer is a persuasive speaker. Last year, when he and a group of friends were short of cash for a camping trip to Cornwall, he managed to talk Germany’s national rail operator into handing them some free tickets. So impressed was the management with his chutzpah that they invited him back to give a motivational speech to 200 of their employees.

Anton, it should be pointed out, is 14 years old.

The Berlin teenager’s self-confidence is largely the product of a unique educational institution that has turned the conventions of traditional teaching radically upside down. At Oberländer’s school, there are no grades until students turn 15, no timetables and no lecture-style instructions. The pupils decide which subjects they want to study for each lesson and when they want to take an exam.

The school’s syllabus reads like any helicopter parent’s nightmare. Set subjects are limited to maths, German, English and social studies, supplemented by more abstract courses such as “responsibility” and “challenge”. For challenge, students aged 12 to 14 are given €150 (£115) and sent on an adventure that they have to plan entirely by themselves. Some go kayaking; others work on a farm. Anton went trekking along England’s south coast.

The philosophy behind these innovations is simple: as the requirements of the labour market are changing, and smartphones and the internet are transforming the ways in which young people process information, the school’s headteacher, Margret Rasfeld, argues, the most important skill a school can pass down to its students is the ability to motivate themselves.

“Look at three or four year olds – they are all full of self-confidence,” Rasfeld says. “Often, children can’t wait to start school. But frustratingly, most schools then somehow manage to untrain that confidence.”

The Evangelical School Berlin Centre (ESBC) is trying to do nothing less than “reinvent what a school is”, she says. “The mission of a progressive school should be to prepare young people to cope with change, or better still, to make them look forward to change. In the 21st century, schools should see it as their job to develop strong personalities.”

Could Steiner schools have a point on children, tablets and tech?

Studies have yet to show much benefit from technology in schools, leading some to wonder whether the offline life is better for children.

It’s late morning and the children in Maria Woolley’s class at the Iona school in Nottingham are busy kneading dough. The dough is made from flour they saw ground at the local windmill using grains harvested from a nearby farm they had visited. During the morning lesson the children have sung songs, recited poetry and done rhythmic clapping and stomping.

There is no uniform here, and no headteacher – the school is run by staff and friends – and, unlike the vast majority of primary schools these days, here the students don’t work on tablets or computers. At the front of the class is an old-fashioned blackboard.

The methods at the school, which are based on the controversial teachings of Austrian 19th century philosopher Rudolf Steiner, may be different from those employed in mainstream state schools, but the Iona was recently declared outstanding by the School Inspection Service – the independent equivalent of Ofsted. The report noted that “pupils do not use computers or the internet when in school but staff have ensured that they have learned about internet safety”. It went on: “Teaching is inspirational and highly effective … teachers are very well trained and highly skilled.”

Any school would be grateful to be described in such glowing terms but the staff here are particularly proud that they achieved their outstanding status without technology. In addition to the ban on computers in school, parents are discouraged from letting their children watch television, play computer games or use smartphones at home.

The Iona school was set up in 1985 by Richard Moore, who had worked for 10 years as a state primary teacher. “Mainstream education was becoming prescriptive even then,” he says, “so what appealed to me about Steiner was that it stressed that the work of children was play.” Today the school – one of 33 schools that follow the Steiner curriculum – has 87 children aged between three and 12 and costs £5,402 a year.

School libraries face a bleak future as leaders try to balance the books

Libraries are suffering at the hands of budget, curriculum and digital demands.

But we must not underestimate this vital resource.

I remember my school library: it had two floors with spiral staircases, individual study cubicles and a classroom on the upper floor. It was attached to the sixth form block, giving the students easy access to a study facility. One particular memory is of a Puffin Books sale – I could even tell you the books I bought (and still have).

This was in the days before personal computing so the only source of information – apart from other people, TV or radio – was books. There was something tactile about walking up to a shelf, looking along the spines and selecting a book which you hoped would answer the question posed in your homework or choosing a work of fiction by reading the blurb on the back.

In recent years the picture has changed; the proliferation of personal electronic devices means information is instantly available almost anywhere and the printed word is in decline. Libraries as we knew them are changing: public libraries now provide access to the internet in addition to their DVD lending sections; many school libraries have also followed the electronic route and have been re-named “learning resource centres”.

This is not just a name change. This new title has changed the focus of school libraries too. Books are no longer de rigueur; some senior leadership teams seem to feel their students are no longer interested in real books and are replacing them with electronic equivalents. Some teachers are reporting that their school libraries are closing and the remaining books, after many have been thrown away, are being transferred to classrooms or corridors, where there is no space for quiet study or reading.

A survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) suggests teachers are concerned about the future of school libraries. Almost all of the 485 school staff who responded to the survey said their school still had a library. But 22% said their library had suffered at least a 40% cut in funding since 2010 and 21% said their budget is insufficient to encourage pupils to read for pleasure. This is not helping pupils’ literacy skills: removing the very objects which children need to access regularly will lead to even less opportunity for them to engage with non-fiction and fiction, which fires the imagination far more than the pre-constructed world in a computer game.

The eco guide to packaging

Make your zero tolerance stance on unecessary packaging known: it's the best way to stop it.

In the mid-noughties my inbox was full of images of shrinkwrapped fruit and veg: readers were incensed that supermarkets wrapped coconuts (which famously provide their own husks) with layers of non-recyclable film. The debate has been repackaged for a new generation. Twitter is awash with examples of idiotic packaging from e-tailers, such as one bottle of nail varnish and a cat’s toy, each sent in a big box.

We accumulate 200kg of packaging materials a year per person, adding up to almost 13m tonnes entering the UK waste stream. Even if you drag your cardboard to the recycling plant, you’re still complicit in a system that wastes important resources on a single-use box. It’s also cheaper to have one size of box that fits neatly into a truck. Logistics companies don’t get charged for shipping air, creating more carbon emissions and traffic. The protective packaging industry that makes crumpled paper and inflatable plastic pockets is a real winner, projected to be worth $35bn by 2020.

If you want to do something practical, report outrageous over-packaging (where the product takes up less than 10% of the volume of the packaging) to your local trading standards officer. A former officer tells me that they’re particularly hot on the issue of shipping air in huge, unnecessary boxes, because part of their mandate is to keep delivery traffic to a minimum.

Amazon, though often named and shamed, seems keen to hear reports of packaging frustration and is working with German researchers to make its deliveries eco-friendly.

In the past the packaging industry avoided closer control by arguing that lavish packaging was demanded by the consumer. But it makes it harder for the industry to use this defence if we all continue to Instagram our discontent.

Who are the homeless and how do we count them?

For the thousands of people who are sleeping on the streets or are in temporary accommodation, winter is one of the hardest times of the year. Being able to provide relief during this period depends, at least in part, on understanding how many people are affected by homelessness – and who they are. Unfortunately, that’s not straightforward.

In the UK, a person is legally defined as homeless if they have accommodation but can’t reasonably be expected to occupy it, or if they don’t have any accommodation at all. This definition covers a broad range of circumstances – from those who can’t afford to pay rent, to those forced to leave home, for whatever reason. But the first thing to know is that there’s a big difference between the number of people who the state recognises as homeless and how many people actually are. This is known as the distinction between the “statutory” homeless, and the “non-statutory” or “single” homeless.

The “statutory” homeless are those who apply to local authorities as homeless, and are accepted as such. People are only accepted if the council deems that they are eligible for housing support, or can be classified as being “unintentionally homeless” or in “priority need”. Information on statutory homelessness is readily available. All local authorities are required to report on the number of statutory homelessness applications received (and “acceptances” made) to the government on a quarterly basis.

In England, between April and June 2015, 13,850 households were accepted as homeless – an increase of 5% compared with the same quarter in 2014. Few of these households will have been without a roof over their heads. Rather, their circumstances can be considered an indicator of housing stress, as a result of relationship breakdown or over-crowding, for example.

“Single” homelessness refers to individuals without dependents, who are not entitled to accommodation from local authorities. Some of these are visible on our streets – in autumn 2014, the official rough sleeping estimate was 2,744, up 14% from 2013. But most remain out of sight – “hidden” in bed and breakfasts or squats and on the floors and couches of friends and family. There is no effective or robust mechanism to monitor “single” homelessness, so these people are largely absent from government statistics. Our best estimate is that there were 2.23m single homeless people in England, in 2013.

A childhood development expert on how 'twisted' early education has become

'The most important competencies in young children can’t be tested—we all know this. Naming letters and numbers is superficial and almost irrelevant in relation to the capacities we want to help children develop'

Nancy Carlsson-Paige is an early childhood development expert who has been at the forefront of the debate on how best to educate — and not educate — the youngest students. She is a professor emerita of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusett., where she taught teachers for more than 30 years and was a founder of the university’s Center for Peaceable Schools. She is also a founding member of a nonprofit called Defending the Early Years, which commissions research about early childhood education and advocates for sane policies for young children.

Carlsson-Paige is author of “Taking Back Childhood.” The mother of two artist sons, Matt and Kyle Damon, she is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the Legacy Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps for work over several decades on behalf of children and families. She was just given the Deborah Meier award by the nonprofit National Center for Fair and Open Testing.

In her speech accepting the award (named after the renowned educator Deborah Meier), Carlsson-Paige describes what has happened in the world of early childhood education in the current era of high-stakes testing, saying, “Never in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen the situation we find ourselves in today.” Here’s the speech, which I am publishing with permission:

"Thank you FairTest for this Deborah Meier Hero in Education Award. FairTest does such great advocacy and education around fair and just testing practices. This award carries the name of one of my heroes in education, Deborah Meier—she’s a force for justice and democracy in education. I hope that every time this award is given, it will allow us to once again pay tribute to Deb. Also, I feel privileged to be accepting this honor alongside Lani Guinier.

When I was invited to be here tonight, I thought about the many people who work for justice and equity in education who could also be standing here. So I am thinking of all of them now and I accept this award on their behalf — all the educators dedicated to children and what’s fair and best for them.

It’s wonderful to see all of you here — so many family and friends, comrades in this struggle to reclaim excellent public education for all – not just some – of our children.

The schools where they never say ‘sit still’

An education initiative in South Carolina relies on exercise and movement to make students better learners.

David Spurlock is 63, a former baseball and football coach with a bum shoulder and bad back and right now he’s busy planning a jailbreak. He has spent a lifetime walking the hallways, classrooms and athletic fields all across Charleston, South Carolina, his home town. Those classic images of school-aged children sitting still in desks organised into neat rows? Spurlock calls it “educational incarceration”.

“We put kids in a two by two cell and dare them to move: ‘Keep your feet on the floor and hands up where I can see them,’” says Spurlock, the coordinator of health, wellness and physical education for the Charleston County school district. “That sounds like being incarcerated to me.”

The educational model is broken, Spurlock says, and the key to fixing it is applying some of the most basic principles of sport and exercise. Students in some Charleston area schools sit on desks that double as exercise equipment, they enrol in “advanced PE”, receive regular yoga instruction and visit specially equipped learning labs each week where the line between education and physical education disappears entirely.

“If you went to anybody who’s in education, you say PE versus instruction, they say instruction every time,” he says. “But what we’re trying to show is that more movement equals better grades, better behaviour, better bodies.”

One recent morning at Charles Pinckney elementary, 28 children, all aged nine and 10, rolled through the door in a single file, bouncing and giggling as they plopped on to the tiled floor.

Seen but not heard: the introverts in our classrooms

The extrovert ideal is perpetuated throughout education, how can teachers harness the positive features of the introvert personality at school?

Author Susan Cain has made a loud splash with her new book Quiet – The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. Introverts the world over have breathed a collective sigh of relief at Cain's reassurance that it is okay to choose a night at home with a good book over a dinner party invite, and that letting your phone go to voicemail doesn't necessarily make you a friendless misanthrope.

Quiet celebrates the positive features of the introvert personality, while examining the way in which our society is geared up to celebrate and encourage extrovert personality traits. As a result of this, introverts are placed in opposition to the extrovert ideal and risk being undervalued and overlooked. Cain argues that our celebration of the extrovert type begins in the classroom, where, from the start, young pupils are grouped facing each other in pods, and are praised by teachers for giving quick (rather than thoughtful or original) answers.

This extrovert ideal is perpetuated throughout education. As far as I know, almost every teacher in my local authority has attended an intensive three day course on co operative learning.

The course is led by a charismatic Canadian, who, within minutes, has participants designing group logos, creating group lessons (to be team taught, naturally) and generally rejoicing in the power of togetherness. Every teacher I know has left the training session with renewed enthusiasm and a determination to put their new tool kit of co operative learning ideas into immediate effect.

What’s the optimum amount of homework to set a teenager?

Coaxing teenagers to sit down and do their homework is never an easy task. But is it actually worth their while to slave away for hours on end every evening? Not according to a new study of Spanish secondary school students which has concluded that the optimum amount of homework for children is around one hour a day.

Researchers at the University of Oviedo studied the maths and science homework and test results of 7,451 adolescents with an average age of around 13. They found a relationship between the amount of homework completed and children’s attainment. But the authors acknowledge they can’t say definitively that one hour of homework a night in total actually causes better test results.

Previous research in this area is both inconsistent and inconclusive. Some has shown the positive effects of homework and some its negative effects. In 2012, The Guardian reported on Department of Education research showing that two to three hours per day produced greater effects on achieving the highest results. In 2014, research at Stanford University found that too much homework can have a negative impact on children.

Homework can help to establish a routine and to develop independent learning skills that will be useful for professional life. Conversely, it could be argued that working at home in the evenings is the beginning of an unhealthy work-life balance and that there are academic drawbacks in studying instead of sleeping.

Not all children need to study the same

It’s unclear whether the children in the Spanish study achieve more as a result of doing the “optimum” amount of homework. Children of different abilities may take different amounts of time to complete their homework. If we subscribe to the idea that there is an “optimum” time, then we are effectively saying that children who work more quickly should complete more homework than children who work more slowly, which is arguably a disincentive for the fastest – and probably the most able – children.

Do disruptive classes really get better if they include more girls?

Classrooms are highly complex environments. Maintaining a positive classroom environment, especially in classrooms that include potentially disruptive children with emotional or social problems, is very difficult, and the processes that teachers can use to achieve this are poorly understood.

But a new study has concluded that in mixed gender classrooms, the presence of more girls can apparently minimise the potentially negative effects of a difficult to manage pupil on classroom culture and attainment.

Conducted by Michael Gottfried and Aletha Harven at the University of California, this study touches on two significant and sometimes emotive topics in education: differences between boys and girls and the inclusion in schools of children with social, emotional and behaviour difficulties.

Keeping the classroom happy

Despite evidence that most behaviour in schools is good, debates around the inclusion of pupils with social and emotional needs still too often centre on the affects their inclusion has on peers and staff.

In their paper, Gottfried and Harven speculate that pupils who show aggression, immaturity, hyperactivity or more internalised behaviours such as anxiety or withdrawal absorb the teacher’s attention, leaving less time for teachers to focus on other pupils’ social, emotional and academic development.

Bedtime story is key to literacy, says children's writer Cottrell Boyce

As a new literacy drive is launched, authors including David Walliams and Michael Rosen warn of threat to storytelling from screens and busy lives.

The childhood tradition of a bedtime story is in serious peril, as experts warn that parents are not making the time to read to their children at the end of the working day and stop reading to them at too young an age.

“Parents lead very, very busy lives,” said Diana Gerald, chief executive of the Book Trust, which encourages children and families to enjoy books and develop their reading skills. “We live in a world where parents are juggling work and home life. Lots of parents are working shifts and there’s a lot of pressure on families. People are increasing their hours.”

A recent survey, by YouGov for the children’s publisher Scholastic, revealed last week that many parents stop reading to their children when they become independent readers, even if the child isn’t ready to lose their bedtime story. The study found that 83% of children enjoyed being read aloud to, with 68% describing it as a special time with their parents. (“It felt so warm, so spirit-rising,” as one 11-year-old boy put it.)

One in five of the parents surveyed stopped reading aloud to their children before the age of nine, and almost a third of children aged six to 11 whose parents had stopped reading aloud to them wanted them to carry on.

Frank Cottrell Boyce, who won the 2004 Carnegie medal for his first children’s book, Millions, was dismayed by the findings. “The joy of a bedtime story is the key to developing a love of reading in children”, he said – more so than literacy classes in school, which can be “a very negative experience”, for the many children he meets during visits to schools, whose first experience of books is in the classroom.

“They’re being taught to read before anyone has shared with them the pleasure of reading – so what motivation have they got to learn?” said Cottrell Boyce. “Even the ones that attain high levels of ‘literacy’ (whatever that is) are in danger of achieving that without ever experiencing the point of reading.” Frank Cottrell Boyce: ‘This is something people have done since the days of sitting around campfires napping flints. To stop doing now is to break the great chain of our being.’ 

Scotland's child poverty levels so severe teachers are sent advice on spotting malnourished students

Country’s largest teaching union draws up guidelines to help 'poverty-proof' classrooms.

Child poverty in Scotland is now so severe that teachers are being sent advice on how to spot if a child in their class is going hungry, amid evidence that the problem is having an increasingly serious impact on education.

The new guidance, which will be distributed to schools and colleges across Scotland next week, warns that the issue of hunger among pupils is “moving from the exceptional to the more commonplace” as families struggle to make ends meet.

The advice has been drawn up by the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), the country’s largest teaching union, after a survey of 300 schools and colleges suggested that teachers are increasingly having to help underfed pupils. It is the first time that a section on hunger has been included in the guidance.

“Pupils may appear pale, fatigued, irritable or lacking in concentration, or complain of headaches or feeling unwell,” it states. “While there can be other reasons underlying such signs, for a growing number of children and young people in our schools and colleges today, the reason will be hunger.”

Teachers who suspect that a child may be going hungry should include them in morning breakfast clubs and post the details of nearby food banks on school notice boards and websites, so their families can seek help, the guidance says.

Greek austerity may be an economic tale but children are the human cost

Many perspectives have been shared about the social and economic repercussions that the current third EU and IMF bailout proposals for Greece may have. The impact of these tough austerity measures is yet to unfold for the country, for the other southern states, or indeed Europe as a whole.

But moving beyond a purely economic lens, there is already evidence about the extent of deprivation and youth unemployment of more than 50% during the past five years of the first and second bailout programmes, meaning that the likely effects of the third are easier to predict, at least for this generation.

The links between poverty and a range of risk factors for child mental health problems and related outcomes is well established. Nevertheless, the reality hit home a few weeks ago when I joined the Children’s SOS Villages in Greece in training their prospective new carers, or “mothers” and “aunts” as they are widely called. These carers work in a similar way to foster carers and residential care staff in other welfare systems. The villages were established in Austria after World War II to care for orphan children and since then their model has successfully spread across more than 120 countries.

Their model may slightly vary, but their target groups are typically children without parents, for a range of reasons, or those who have been abused and/or neglected. Consequently, it came as a surprise to realise the extent of child abandonment (neglect, an inability to care for them or even asking social services to look after them) for predominantly financial reasons since the beginning of the Greek crisis.

The organisation has responded by diversifying its remit in Greece. In the absence of an increasingly stretched health and social care sector, they have now extended their services beyond the traditional villages to support, relieve and prevent abuse and neglect, running eight social centres in Greece’s major cities to help keep families together.

Why do heavier children do worse at school? It’s not their fault

Negative stereotypes towards heavier individuals starts to affect long-term life opportunities from a young age. A number of studies in recent years have suggested that bigger children fare less well in school than their slimmer peers.

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children followed nearly 6,000 children in the south-west of England and found that higher body weight at age 11 predicted lower scores on standardised tests at age 11, 13, and 16. This was particularly the case in girls, and a decline that was not explained by lower IQs.

Other studies, mostly conducted in the US, have reported similar findings, suggesting that students classified as “obese” tend to be awarded lower grades than their peers in both secondary and tertiary education, despite no differences in intelligence or conscientiousness, and no actual difference on standardised tests of maths or language ability.

So are fatter students really under-performing in school, or do their teachers just think they are? And why?

Anti-fat attitudes – from teachers

The answer is probably a bit of both. Researchers think low expectations and anti-fat attitudes among teachers probably play a role. Some of the existing research has been criticised for taking a cross-sectional approach, like a snapshot at a point in time. This makes it impossible to tell whether low expectations are leading to under-performance or if it’s the other way around. But a new study published by a team from the Harvard School of Public Health may help to answer this question.

The researchers followed a nationwide cohort of kindergarten children for around ten years. This particularly study looked at how weight change between the ages of ten and 14 affected teacher ratings of the children’s abilities, taking a range of other factors like socioeconomic status, family situation, exercise and television time, and so on, into account.

Students with autism need targeted attention – not a cage

A review has been announced into school policies in Canberra after it was reported that a school was restraining a child with autism in a cage-like structure. Former disability discrimination commissioner Graeme Innes said this was not an isolated incident, and my research and time spent in schools attests to this.

I worked with one child whose restraint had an innocent genesis, but over time the teacher was incapable of coping with the student with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and the innocent mechanism became harmful.

A “time-out room” was provided for the child, which is important for children with ASD because they can suffer from sensory overload and need a place to calm down.

Initially he was invited to go to the room with the door open when he was feeling overwhelmed. As his behaviour escalated over time, due to a failure to understand his needs, he began to be sent to the room. After a time the door was closed and eventually the child was locked in the room.

One day his parent came to pick him up and found him in the room bloodied from hitting his head against the wall in frustration and anger.

Why are children being confined?

Keeping a child confined is clearly not an acceptable way of coping with students with special needs, so why does it continue to happen?

When a child is restrained at school, at home, or anywhere for that matter, it’s often a cry for help. It’s a sign of desperation, of not knowing. Teachers are often unsure what to do, needing to protect themselves, their assistants and the other students and to comply with disability legislation.

They often don’t have time to carefully plan and tailor an intervention for a particular child, so they take bits and pieces of what they have heard about the need for safe boundaries, reduction of sensory overload and inclusion of the child in the classroom.

Surge in young people seeking help for exam stress

NSPCC reports 200% rise in requests for counselling, with its ChildLine service receiving more than 34,000 approaches in 2013-14.

The number of young people in Britain seeking counselling over exam stress has increased by 200% in recent years, according to the child protection campaigners NSPCC, with worry over education one of the leading causes of concern for children.

The NSPCC said last year that its ChildLine service received record numbers of approaches from students worried about exams, with a tripling in the number of those receiving counselling over exam stress specifically.

In 2013-14 ChildLine said it received more than 34,000 approaches from young people over school worries such as revision, workloads, problems with teachers and other issues, putting education into the top 10 of most frequent concerns among users for the first time.

Where school and education was given as a young person’s main concern, more than half of subsequent counselling sessions dealt with exam stress specifically, a 200% increase compared with 2012-13.

The NSPCC also said that there were also more than 87,500 visits to ChildLine’s website over the same issue.

The charity said that one teenage boy told an adviser last year: “I am about to take my GCSEs and I am under so much pressure as my parents are expecting me to do really well. I am going to revision classes and trying really hard but I feel like it is not good enough for them.

“My parents don’t allow me to do anything else apart from revision and if I try and talk to them it always ends up in an argument.”

The figures came as hundreds of thousands of pupils prepare to sit GCSE exams in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, followed by many thousands more sitting A-levels.

Even at primary school, pupils in their final year are taking key stage two tests, followed by key stage one assessments for those in year two.

Can going to the theatre boost academic achievement?

Sarah Cassidy reports on Start - an initiative to link young people from deprived backgrounds with the arts - and how it is capturing young hearts and minds.

On a cold winter's day in east London a class of eight- and nine-year-olds are wrestling with some big questions. Is it right to steal from the rich to give to the poor? Should someone's choice of job be restricted because of their gender? These are just some of the issues thrown up for the children after watching a production of Robin Hood.

The previous day the children, from Nightingale Primary School in Woolwich, south-east London, could be found laughing uproariously at the show at Greenwich and Lewisham Young Person's Theatre, which they attended for free as part of a groundbreaking programme which aims to bring the arts to children from deprived backgrounds.

Research shows that the numbers of primary school-age children visiting theatres, galleries and museums have plummeted over the past five years. But the situation is worst for children from poor backgrounds and thousands of them leave school without ever having set foot in one of these establishments.

Government statistics show that the number of children going to the theatre has fallen from just under half in 2008-09 to fewer than a third last year. Only 30 per cent of primary pupils engaged in dance activities in 2013-14 (compared to 43 per cent in 2008-09), while 37.2 per cent partook in a musical activity out of school (down from 55.3 per cent five years earlier).

The Start programme aims to counter this decline by linking participating schools with local arts venues and funding a programme of activities which take pupils to visit theatres, galleries and museums and sends artists back into the schools. The programme has linked leading venues such as the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings with schools in deprived areas.

The scheme was set up in 2006 by The Prince's Foundation for Children & the Arts – a charity founded by Prince Charles after he visited a pupil referral unit in Birmingham and found children studying Romeo and Juliet without ever having seen the play.

At Nightingale School, in one of the UK's most deprived wards, very few pupils had ever been to a theatre before their school joined the programme. Under the scheme they will watch performances at the theatre and take part in follow-up workshops.

What’s the optimum amount of homework to set a teenager?

Coaxing teenagers to sit down and do their homework is never an easy task. But is it actually worth their while to slave away for hours on end every evening? Not according to a new study of Spanish secondary school students which has concluded that the optimum amount of homework for children is around one hour a day.

Researchers at the University of Oviedo studied the maths and science homework and test results of 7,451 adolescents with an average age of around 13. They found a relationship between the amount of homework completed and children’s attainment. But the authors acknowledge they can’t say definitively that one hour of homework a night in total actually causes better test results.

Previous research in this area is both inconsistent and inconclusive. Some has shown the positive effects of homework and some its negative effects. In 2012, The Guardian reported on Department of Education research showing that two to three hours per day produced greater effects on achieving the highest results. In 2014, research at Stanford University found that too much homework can have a negative impact on children.

Homework can help to establish a routine and to develop independent learning skills that will be useful for professional life. Conversely, it could be argued that working at home in the evenings is the beginning of an unhealthy work-life balance and that there are academic drawbacks in studying instead of sleeping.

Not all children need to study the same

It’s unclear whether the children in the Spanish study achieve more as a result of doing the “optimum” amount of homework. Children of different abilities may take different amounts of time to complete their homework. If we subscribe to the idea that there is an “optimum” time, then we are effectively saying that children who work more quickly should complete more homework than children who work more slowly, which is arguably a disincentive for the fastest – and probably the most able – children.

The study also acknowledges that the nature of the homework has more influence over the outcomes than the time taken to complete it. This is an important point and is underpinned by a common sense view that an hour of inappropriate homework will be less effective than 45 minutes of appropriate homework.