My freelance income was floundering. Under increasing financial and romantic pressure, I applied for a job I was certain to get. When I joined a school as a teaching assistant in February last year, there were no teachers to assist. Until fairly recently, the school had been a respite service, only obtaining its school status in 2023. There was no formal curriculum. There was just a team of support staff and 17 children, ranging between the ages of eight and 18, with needs and behaviour that the other special educational needs and disability (SEND) schools in the area were unable or unwilling to cope with. Two or three of the students could sustain a short conversation between themselves, but the rest were either semi- or non-verbal, and only communicated with adults, if at all.
A headteacher arrived shortly after me, and only then came the gradual addition of five teachers, three of whom left within a month. It was known that one gave in their notice after being smacked hard in the face by a towering 16-year-old. Factors behind the other resignations were more oblique.
Of all our pupils, the most noteworthy is a teenager declared a menace to society by social services. Weighing in at more than 16 stone, he cannot be engaged in any activity other than playing with sand or sawdust – he will instantly destroy toys or games. He is liable to punch, kick or bite anyone within range as he makes his two or three daily trips to the playground or the toilet. A couple of times a week, he will emerge from his completely bare classroom holding aloft clumps of his own soft, pale shit, thumbing it through his fingers while walking down the corridor to rinse it off in the toilet sink. Flanked everywhere by two stocky support workers who sport arm-length bite-proof gloves, face masks and bored eyes, he will sometimes be let into the ball-pit room alone to masturbate.
Among the other students, spitting is a constant behaviour – on the floor, in a cup, in your face. Scratching of the hands or face has recently become a daily occurrence for the staff in my classroom. Stripping is common, for either sensory escape or self-amusement, and an absolute headache in terms of safeguarding, particularly the strip-and-run technique favoured by the nimble. Two of our students grope bottoms and bosoms often. Another large teen regularly threatens, and attempts, to stab his peers in the neck with a pencil if they linger near the door to his classroom. He has then caused immense damage to various rooms by launching chairs at the ceilings and smashing sinks, after being gently reminded that stabbing is unacceptable. Only one child is producing extreme verbal abuse, a nine-year-old whose vocabulary beggars belief. Two colleagues were sacked after failing to appropriately deal with this child’s constant use of the N-word and other sexually degrading language.
The hardest part of the job is not the students’ behaviour, which you get used to. The rare breakthroughs and achievements I’ve witnessed are intensely rewarding and more than make up for this. I’ve seen children who’ve never uttered a word start to recognise colours and count to three. I have taught a child how to use the toilet and dress independently. On a daily basis I will recite the English counties at various speeds, and in alternately low- and high-pitched voices, at the request of a 14-year-old, to our hysterical delight.
The students are, by the nature and rarity of their behaviour, amazing. And because school was still in the process of becoming a school, I could take on more responsibilities. I ran two weekly assemblies, wrote end-of-year reports, directed the school nativity play, and was soon leading a classroom of four students and their support workers (half the classrooms, including mine, are still teacher-less to this day).
The hardest part was earning £20,000 a year and living off £70 a week after rent and bills. I supplement this where I can with other work, but what’s particularly frustrating is that the head of HR told me I would be on £23,000 after passing a three-month probation period. I’ve raised this formally three times over the course of a year, but the mistake, or lie, has never been acknowledged by the school.
This is not a problem unique to me. It goes hand in hand with the insidious exploitation of my support staff colleagues, most of whom joined when the school was still offering a respite service, and are seeing significant changes to their job descriptions with little to no changes in pay. After a disappointing Ofsted inspection, the end of the working day was extended from about 3.20pm to 4.30pm for all support staff, for no extra pay. Management seemed to blame our ‘requires improvement’ grading on those with the fewest qualifications who are also doing the hardest work for the least money, rather than the qualified teachers, or their own failure to hire and retain more than two of them. In a long and unpleasant meeting, the CEO threatened to reduce support staff pay even further and make redundancies if things didn’t improve.
