In this safeguarding podcast we discuss with Iain Thomas Deputy Head of The Foundry College PRU, the devastating effect smart phones can have on children, how they are ensnared into County Lines and the impact this has on the child’s education, attainment and on the College. We also discuss the impact of COVID-19 and the incredible outcomes the College and staff achieve with some of the most needful children.
There’s a lightly edited for legibility transcript below for those that can’t use podcasts, or for those that simply prefer to read.
Neil Fairbrother
Welcome to another edition of the SafeToNet Foundation safeguarding podcast hosted by me, Neil Fairbrother, where we talk about all things to do with safeguarding children in the online digital context.
Child safeguarding in the online digital context is at the intersection of technology, law and ethics and culture, and it encompasses all stakeholders between a child using a smartphone and the content or person online that they are interacting with.
The impact of online abuse on the child can be such that their mental health deteriorates, their self-confidence is undermined, their attainment at school suffers and indeed their physical attendance at school decreases to the point where it becomes concerning and their absence is even dangerous. To help us understand what happens to children for whom the regular education system has become unsuitable, I’m joined by Iain Thomas, Deputy Head of the Foundry College Pupil Referral Unit. Welcome to the podcast Iain.
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Thank you very much Neil. Good to talk to you.
Neil Fairbrother
Iain could you give us a brief resumé please of yourself so that our listeners have an understanding of your background and experience?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Yeah, of course. I’ve got a very varied background. I started off teaching in Buckinghamshire as a PE teacher and carried on with that for four or five years. Then I was lucky enough to go and open a school in the Middle East in Dubai with my wife which was an “all through” school from the ages of 5 to 18. When I returned, I then worked for a charity in London, working with the most disadvantaged children in London and Wales. My title was “Workforce Development Officer”, so I was trying to ensure the quality of practice of all of the coaches that went into school.
Then I went to quite a hard and affected school in High Wycome as their Director of Sports. Then I moved again, where I was actually very fortunate to be selected to open an elite sporting school in Bisham Abbey where we looked after the top 10 tennis players in the country for every age group. But unfortunately due to different funding streams that closed, and I found myself really thinking about what it was that I enjoyed in my professional career and I went to the Foundry College and working on which is a Pupil Referral Unit, so working with pupils that for mainstream school it’s not right for them for either medical or vulnerable reasons or because they’ve been permanent excluded.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. So a pupil referral unit then is a type of school to which people are referred, the clue’s in the name, from a regular school to receive what?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
So to receive an education package, which is right for them. So for example, if a pupil in Wokingham is permanently excluded from the age of 5 to 16, so they’re in full time, they come straight to us and we will give them an educational package, which is relevant to them. We try and obviously get it as close to their 25 hours weekly entitlement, but for some of them that’s not applicable because they’re unable to cope with a setting which is, you know, pretty much focused on education.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now I understand that you’re going through a considerable expansion project. Can you tell us about that?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Well our PRU has a placement from the DFE for 46 pupils but unfortunately we have obviously many more pupils than that that come through our doors every year. So therefore we’ve actually just gone through kind of tripling our size, our floor footprint, to try and make sure that we can meet that demand for our local environments. So we’ve actually managed to take over the building next to us that’s in a part of a neighbourhood from the Child Care Centre and expand into there and change usage into another type of school. So unfortunately we’re kind of halfway through that and due to the current outbreak of COVID-19 we’ve had to stop, but we’ve moved into the new building and our old building is part demolished and part finished.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Now you mentioned COVID-19 just then and we’re in the middle of lockdown at the moment. What impact has COVID had on your school, other than the expansion project?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
To be honest with you, for the school it’s been pretty disastrous. The majority of the students that we have, to give it more context, are Year 11 so they are in their last year of formal education, so they should be taking their GCSEs with us this summer. So for them it meant that the end of their schooling, their formal schooling and careers has ended and ended very abruptly, which has left them kind of feeling as they have done before, kind of just left in the dark and not having the support that they need for their academic as well as their mental health needs.
So we’ve had to try and tailor as much of the school to pupils as possible, but also trying to make sure that everyone is as safe as possible. So it’s meant that we’ve tried to do lots of home learning, lots of online learning, delivering packages of work to people’s houses, daily welfare calls and support calls. But unfortunately there are still many pupils and families out there that are left in the dark due to the nature of the pupil in the family.
Neil Fairbrother
And how have your pupils reacted to this, Iain?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
In a whole host of ways. When it started off, when we were given the guidance that that schools should close, I had to go around and talk to every pupil about whether they would be staying within the school or not, or whether it was actually safe for them to stay at home due to their parents’ status and their home lives.
We were given direction from the government that if the pupils are in current receipt of support from social services that we need to look into those and to risk assess every pupil to decide whether it was safer for them to be in a school environment or home environment. Look at pupils with EHCPs, which are Educational Healthcare Plans, to look if they have any special needs, which again, it’s to look at whether it would be safer for them to be in school or not.
And to also look at the mental health needs of the pupils that we, we look after. So we had to go through all of those risk assessments with all of our pupils and I had to go around and talk to them to say whether or not we would be able to offer them a place and some pupils were quite relieved that we were saying that they didn’t have to come to school again.
And then we had quite a few pupils [for whom] it was a horrible time to talk to them and to tell them that we were unable to offer them a place, and [some] broke down in tears in front of me and obviously [it was] very emotional and, as people do get when they become emotional [they] became quite abusive. It was hard because for some of them it was like us telling them that we didn’t want them anymore and that we can’t look after them and we’ve been their security blanket for possibly 18 months and now we’re going to suddenly say, we’re not going to see you again.
And you know, good luck for year 11 and well, that’s it. We know they have no proper goodbyes. It was a five minute conversation and that was how it was left. So it was hard. It was very, very hard.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes. One of the core purposes of your school is the education of pupils whose medical needs or vulnerability interrupt their access to full time education in schools. And this includes medical needs, children who are physically ill or injured, those who have mental health problems including anxiety, depression, school phobia, separation anxiety and school refusal as well, and indeed pupils who are experiencing significant bullying including cyberbullying. Do your pupils make a distinction or differentiation between bullying and cyberbullying or is it just a one continuum?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
I think it’s all just one continuum because I think nowadays, unfortunately, they merge into each other. Their so much onto their social platforms that says that the physicality of it, is very different from there and they can’t really see the difference between the two. For them it is bullying what, and for quite a few of our pupils, they don’t even understand that it is bullying if I’m honest with you. They just think that that’s normal and this is the way that you talk to people and this is the way that you interact with people.
And it takes a long time, and quite intensive time, for us to try and break that down and show them what is normal. And again, that kind of stems back into their own lifetime, you know, how adults interact with children. Sometimes they don’t get that their experiences aren’t what we would call normal. And the way that we teach them, again, is very different to the way that a mainstream school would teach them and we try and make sure that we’re supporting their needs as much as possible. And all of the pupils that we have, have very, very different needs. So it’s very difficult.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes. The Education and Inspections Act 2006 gives the Headteacher of the school powers to regulate the behaviour of pupils when they are off the College site and empowers members of staff to impose disciplinary penalties for inappropriate online behaviour, whether the pupil is at the College or at home. How do you manage to do that for your pupils who are obviously in many cases, almost by definition, they’re special needs, of one sort or another?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Looking at some of the background of the pupils that we’ve got at the moment, we’ve got pupils with us that have been permanently excluded from their schools for such actions of doing things online and their mainstream school has removed them from school due to their actions.
Whilst they’re with us, funnily enough, because there’s a lot closer guidance and support, there’s actually very little that happens once they’re with us. It seems to be when they go back into a mainstream setting that their behaviours alter again. I think it may be because of the amount of pupils that are around them, them trying to fit into another society, but we’ve not actually had to really, this year or last year, be supportive of that.
There is history of a pupil that unfortunately did expose other pupils through the use of video footage which was, you know… we had to deal with quite a quite severe manner, which actually changed us from doing the whole, you know, altering the whole of the school policies to stop pupils coming into school with any electronic devices.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. Which is a question I was going to ask you, in the UK cell phones have not been banned in schools, although other countries, France for example famously did ban cell phones from use in schools at least under very limited circumstances. The children cannot use their telephones inside school grounds or at school-based activities outside of school such as sporting events and nor can they connect any device to the internet [while on school grounds]. You’ve taken a policy for your college to ban outright smartphones. Is that correct?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Well, no, we did. So at that time when we looked at the incident that happened, it was a very severe incident and one that required police intervention as well. There was a sharing of a video through WhatsApp to the majority of pupils in Wokingham by particular student that was with us. So at that stage we felt it was the cohorts that we had, that they couldn’t be trusted with their mobile phones and that therefore we needed to take action to safeguard everybody inside of the school. So we made the policy change to ask pupils when they had mobile phones that they were to give them in at the start of the day and start of their day. And then at the end of their day they would have them returned and that anybody that would, would not do that we would unfortunately not be able to teach within the school setting.
So we would actually teach them in a different setting away from all the other pupils, on a one-to-one because of the severity of the fact that we couldn’t safeguard all the pupils that were inside of the school due to the mobile device infringement.
Since then we’ve actually gone back and altered the policy again to allow pupils to have mobile phones inside of school. And we’ve looked at the cohort that we have and we’ve tried to look at the risks of those pupils. And again, at the moment we have pupils that are able to use mobile phones inside of school and if we see any infringements of our guidelines, again, the Headteacher has discussed it and has had fixed term exclusions of pupils that have unfortunately not followed these guidelines.
So if they’ve tried to record a member of staff, tried to record another pupil, we’ve asked to see their mobile phones, we’ve asked to see that they’ve deleted the content. If they’ve not been forthcoming with handing over their phone, then parents and police have been called because again, we felt that the safety of our communities has been infringed. So we still take a very hard stance on it, but we are trying to give more support to the pupils and kind of role modelling on how they should use their mobile phones and the concerns around them.
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
And presumably you would exclude a pupil from your establishment most reluctantly because they are by definition more vulnerable than most children and if they are not attending your College, if they are spending a day at home because they’ve been excluded for a day, then they are even more vulnerable online.
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Completely. Yeah. It’s very hard because we have to try and explain to the pupils that there are going to be rules inside of society and that’s the reason the police are there to try and protect us and we all have to follow certain guidelines in the world, and that these are our guidelines within our community. And the issue that we have obviously is when pupils arrive with us, they’ve arrived from a multitude of communities and everyone has their own different expectations. So it takes us a little while to make sure that they understand our expectations and guidelines. But, again, it’s just very supportive. We try to get them on a one- to-one.
If we have to fixed term, exclude a pupil for a day or longer, it’s not within our nature, let’s just put it that way. We are there to work with the most vulnerable pupils and if we are fixed term excluding them, then they’re not getting any guidance or support from anybody. So therefore we’re kind of shooting ourselves in the foot because the pupil will return in sometimes a worse state because they’ve broken their relationship with us and it takes us time again to build that relationship and trust as well as the role modelling.
And we’ve gone through with some pupils, multiple times of right, you obviously can’t follow our guidelines, so therefore what we have to do in the end is remove them but not exclude them and that means that we will teach them in a different venue. So within Wokingham we’ve used probably 15 to 20 other venues such as libraries such as cafés. Where else have we gone? We’ve gone off to the leisure centres. We’ve gone to activity centres where there’s a public place and use those spaces to teach those pupils, but they’re not able to socially interact with other people. So it still gives us the ability to role model and support and educate, but it doesn’t give them the opportunity to socially interact with others.
Neil Fairbrother
Okay. One purpose of online predators is criminal exploitation. They seek to place the child into a position where they see no way out, but to do what the predator wants, which might include drug running and this is a practice commonly known as County Lines. Is this something that some of your pupils have experienced?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Yes, very much so. We live in, we work in, a very affluent area, Wokingham, which was positioned as one of the top places by the [Daily] Telegraph [newspaper] to live in the UK. So there are lots of younger people who come from affluent backgrounds. And then on the other side of that, you’ve got pupils who live with lots of social care support, and those are as we know, the ones that are targeted for people to run, mainly for other people through County Lines.
We are very lucky that we’ve got great support from our police network and we talk to them on definitely a weekly basis as we support them with intelligence from our pupils and know that some of our pupils may well be running for other groups and we try and pass on as much as we can. We do have pupils that have gone down that line and that have been caught.
It’s a very tricky thing because again, our main purpose is to try and educate the pupil. And yet we know all of the outside issues that they have and some of our pupils may be inside of lessons receiving multiple text messages whilst they’re sat opposite us, requesting them to go to different places to pick up different things, which obviously detracts from their learning.
And it’s very hard, but when they just kind of look at you and shrug their shoulders and say, “Look, I’ve got to go.” and that’s it… out they go over the fence and then go off to go and do what they need to do to either keep themselves with money or keep themselves in the correct position. But it’s extremely tough. We’ve got a lot of pupils that we believe have been exploited in this manner.
Neil Fairbrother
So some of your pupils have in the past receive text messages whilst they’re at school and they’ve quite literally, from what you said, walked out of the school to service their drug supplier and then what they, come back to school the next day?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Yes. Yeah. I don’t how else to put it. The great thing is that our attendance rate for pupils is exceptionally high and we’ve got lots of pupils that are renowned as “school refusers”. And then some of them have missed out two to three years of their education, yet their attendance with us is over 90%, because they know that actually once they’re inside of school, they’re safe with us and the nobody can come onto the school grounds to get to them, and that if they were able to remove themselves from society for the time they’re with us, they in fact they learn quite a lot. But then unfortunately that there are some pupils that have the overriding social powers of drugs and therefore they need to go.
There’s one people that I work with very closely; he knows that we know of his actions and what he does outside in the community and we came to a mutual respect agreement that whilst he was timetabled to be in school, then that’s what he needed to tell people; that he was in school and that he was learning. And to start off with that was quite difficult for him, be obviously “Why would I tell anyone I’m in, why would I tell anyone I’m learning?”
Well you need to get through this year, time is not going to stop and you will finish your Year 11 and after three or four weeks of us really trying to cajole them into supporting this manner, he took it. It becomes quite funny when you look from an outsider’s point of view that I could be sat there teaching him maths, his phone would go, I would ask him not to take the call and he would just smile, and he would just answer his phone and say, Look, I’m in school, I finish at whatever time he finishes at, I’ll talk to you then.
And he’d put the phone down and I’d look at him and smile and go, “Thank you for that”. [He’s say] “S’right. Let’s carry on wi’it then”, and I’d carry on teaching him again. And then you’d get another phone call. So he’d pick it up [and say] “I just told you, I finish finish at three o’clock” and then [he’d] put the phone down again and then he would then start to get annoyed by the person that was phoning him and he would just be there texting and then in the end he would turn his phone off.
We’d be thinking that’s exactly what I wanted you to do four weeks ago and you wouldn’t. But the nature of the pupils that we have is that you can’t kind of tell them what to do. They have to come to that whole understanding themselves.
And then for the last six or seven months, he’s been in for his allocated times every day and done his work for his time. And then as soon as the lesson is finished on his way out, he turns his phone back on again and receives a whole host of text messages and off he goes.
Neil Fairbrother
That must take quite some bravery, I guess, on behalf of the pupil to tell the people he’s talking to that he simply can’t do their bidding because he’s at school.
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Yes, and I think it came to the fact that it got very far down the line with this pupil and his times with us were at a minimum because he was just failing to engage, he was extremely abusive, physically and verbally abusive to lots of people. So, we’ve put in lots of steps to still try and support him and teach him and I think he finally got to the understanding that actually we’re trying to look out for him and if he doesn’t come to school and if he leaves school, the actions that would happen would actually start to impinge his family and that he would have social care knocking on his door. And if social care were knocking on his door, then the police would be quite close behind them, and that for him wouldn’t be a good idea.
He got to that understanding through us talking to him and trying to outline this to him, that if he doesn’t follow the guidance, then it’s going to go further down the line. That parents will be fined. Parents were taken to court, social services will be called in, the house will be watched, the police will go around to try and support and that therefore the police will be very close to him at all times. And that for him wouldn’t be a good idea.
And like I say, after thinking about it for a few weeks, he suddenly realized that it was better to do a little bit of the guidance and he could carry on with his normal way of life. But you know, we still have a very good relationship and he’s managed to finish his year 11 which is exactly what we wanted him to do. He’s going to come out of it with five GCSEs.
Neil Fairbrother
Which is a fantastic outcome.
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Yeah. And you know, if you knew this pupil, it’s amazing. When you start to look at the other mainstream schools who look at achievement and “progress eight” scores, for this young man, he came to us in Year Nine and he was one of the hardest pupils I’ve ever worked with, and he’s going to come out with five GCSEs, even though he didn’t want to: “I don’t care about GCSEs”.
But he still turned up and he turned up to his exams, because we luckily took them in January. And he’s gone through his other courses which don’t require any examinations. The outcomes for him are awesome, but it does take a lot of time and it’s about that trust building and really trying to support them in the right manner.
But there are lots of pupils that we have that are on that stream, if you like, of suddenly having a phone that you’ve never seen before, receiving messages, suddenly having to leave the venue. They will leave, they will go over the fence because obviously we won’t just say, yeah of course open the door off you go. But they will go and they will jump over the fence and they will go and sometimes they actually come back within the same day. And there are different reasons for that. Sometimes they come back because there’s a lesson, but the majority of time, the reason they come back is because they then try and get transportation home at the end of the day.
Neil Fairbrother
Iain, for many parents I’m sure they can’t imagine that their child would get caught up in something like County Lines. What are the offline signs, do you think, that might be visible to a parent that their child might be involved in County Lines? What should parents look for?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
There are some very big signs that we’ve noticed over the years and one of those, as a parent, it would be suddenly they went out at odd times or they didn’t come back at the right time that they were supposed to or they were deviating from their normal patterns of coming home. Obviously you can ask where they’re going and they’ll give you a whole host of answers.
But then the other things that we’ve noticed are the items that they suddenly have. There’s obviously quite a few of our people who have gone down this line and they’ll turn up with a new pair of jeans, they’ll turn up with the smallest items such as a man bag as we know it, or a belt or a hat. These items of clothing, accessories that they turn up with, that’s their payment if you like. The pupils won’t get physical cash because there’s not a lot that they really want to do with physical cash, other than sometimes pay for drugs or go off and buy clothes.
So what seems to happen is down the County Lines route is that someone will talk to them about certain items or certain clothing brands and that person will then go off and purchase something for them. One of the young men that we worked with came in one day and had a brand new pair of trainers on which were worth £150, £160 and we’re all like, “Wow, they’re really nice aren’t they are fantastic?”. I was chatting away to him and the next week he’d turned up with a different pair.
“Well, they’re awesome, aren’t they? How have you managed to get those?” “Oh, you know, money from grandparents” and we just give the parent a call and just say, “Look, your son’s turned up in two different pairs of trainers recently where’s he got those from?” and they then come back with a different answer. And we start to have that discussion of where are they getting these items from? And how are you going to try and safeguard your son when he’s not at school? And he’s coming in and now he’s got a £60 baseball cap on and right now he’s got a pair of jeans that are worth £200.
Sometimes the parents don’t want to know and sometimes the parents don’t want to ask that question because they’re afraid that the answer they’re going to get is the one they don’t want to hear.
But those particular things are quite good tell tales, that they’ve suddenly got a phone that we’ve never seen before. Like I say clothing and it seems to be accessories nowadays that they get and they’ve got no real reason behind it. There’s lots of excuses they come up with; “Oh, I swapped my jacket for a pair of jeans” and bits and pieces like that. But it always seems to be that those people at the top of the tree will go out and buy these items for them and that suddenly the pupil’s exceptionally happy with them.
Neil Fairbrother
What role does the police have in this? For most people, they probably have a view of drug running formed by mainstream TV and it’s illegal and it’s a pretty black and white issue and the police should be informed. But you’re painting a very different picture there. You’re painting a picture that seems to accept that children have maybe not made choices, but they are where they are and to make the best of where they are, there’s a need to accept where they are so that they, such as in the case of the young las you referred to, they do some schoolwork and manage to gain some exams. But for many people I’m sure they will find that a difficult concept.
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
Oh, of course. Like I said, we’re very close with our local police force and we share all of the intelligence that we have of the pupils, all of our concerns. We will write up things called MARFs and put them through to social services if we’re concerned about the pupil.
Neil Fairbrother
And what is a MARF, sorry?
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
A MARF is a Meeting Around the Family. So we will have a meeting with social services and the police and we’ll talk about the family. We’ll talk about the pupil and we’ll look at all of the triggers that are there. The police have different questionnaires that we go through in different risk assessments.
So we can start to look at those particular pupils and if we feel that the risk is high enough, social services will get involved and therefore look at the child and look at whether or not social services need to put them into a child in need or a child protection order. But also look at the police getting involved if there’s any criminal activity.
But the big differences is the police are very aware of if you like pupils or just people who are drug running, but the issues are that if they stop a particular person, that that particular person may only have a very small quantity on them. And that’s the way that it works. The people at the bottom of the tree, the bottom of the ladder, the ones that are running it, will have a very small amount on them and they will go and they will deliver it and they will get a very small amount of money for it, five pounds or ten pounds.
So the police, to stop that particular person and take that five or ten pounds worth of drugs off them, in their eyes I see it as that’s not the people they want to get to. They want to find out who are at the top of the tree and there are huge kind of background policing operations that are in force that the police really trying to get to, to find out who are the ones that are supplying and who are the people that are actually producing, because they want to take the people from the top out, rather than the smaller amount of people at the bottom. Because if they were to go and take out three or four pupils that suddenly were getting stopped every day for running a small amount of drugs, they would just go off and find another three or four pupils. It’s the amount of people that County Lines can get to is way and above what I think the normal population expect.
Neil Fairbrother
Yes. And criminalizing young children probably is not in the child’s interest of for, as you say, what is a small amount of drug.
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
That’s exactly right. You know, and you know, we sit there with the police and we’ve had pupils that have unfortunately brought cannabis on to the school sites. We’ve stopped them, we’ve brought them in to the office, we’ve asked them to open their bags, we’ve called the police. The police will come in and the police will confiscate. And that’s where it gets to. But they, instead of criminalizing the pupil, it then goes back on to social services to then say, we need to try and support the pupil rather than criminalizing them. But it’s hard. There are lots of pupils out there and lots of young people out there that are being exploited
Neil Fairbrother
And we are unfortunately, I think out of time and we’ll have to leave it there. That is an absolutely fascinating insight into what you do, the work of the Foundry College PIU and the very positive impact that you can have on some of the most disadvantaged children. Thank you so much.
Iain Thomas, Deputy Head Foundry PRU
No, it’s lovely talking to you.