Turnaround Schools

It's been reported on BBC News that the Tories want to set up turnaround schools, schools outside the mainstream school system that will take on excluded pupils with an aim of providing a "short, sharp shock" and then returning the kids to mainstream education.

I wouldn't want to criticise a policy before careful study, and the details aren't even on the Tory website yet, but I have a couple of misgivings.

The talk of a "short, sharp shock" seems to me like they don't understand that most disruptive pupils have deep seated medical or social problems and can't been turned around quickly. By their nature turnaround schools would be staffed by specialists in teaching disruptive students and so any problems might appear to be lessened in that environment only for their behaviour to relapse back in a mainstream school, that would not help the receiving school or the pupil themselves.

The other one was a comment I heard from Tim Collins, Shadow Education Secretary while I was getting ready for work this morning, it was something like "if behaviour does not improve, the student will stay outside the mainstream education system until they turn sixteen". That might be just a throwaway comment and I might have misheard but does that assume that the disruptive student would not be premitted to take GCSEs or progress onto A-levels etc? That does not seem right to me.

UPDATE: There are vague details on the Conservative Party website now here. There's no "Short, sharp shock" there, in fact they say that pupils will be there longer term in contrast to the "sin-bin" of the current Pupil Referal Units. I'm still worried about the relapse problem, and also about the fact that pupils at Turnaround schools would be following a different curriculum, making their transition back to mainstream education more difficult than it would need to be. I'm not against the idea of separate education for excluded pupils, but I'm not sure that the Conservatives have really thought this through, as a first step though, it's a good start.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Actually, on second thoughts I am against separate education for disruptive students. Eventually, as there's no kind of separate work for disruptive adults, a student has got to learn eventually to play nice with other people. For example, all the way through my time at Bellemoor Secondary, Southampton, I had an arrangement where if I felt myself being stressy, I could walk out of a class, compose myself and either return to the class or sit out the rest of the lesson as long as I reported to the Deputy Head what was wrong, why I felt like that etc. I didn't walk out often, but the knowledge that I was allowed to acted as a safety valve and it cut instances of disruptive behaviour in class down to almost zero. That worked in the formallised setting of a school but you can't be at work and retain the right to walk out whenever you like. Kids have to learn how to overcome their problems instead of finding workarounds to them.