The school in a class of its own

IN the end Susan Raine started to anticipate the Monday afternoon calls. Almost without fail, as soon as her daughter Emma was home from school, the phone would ring. "She used to go to school on a Monday and at four or five o'clock I would get a phone call from the school asking me not to send her in for the rest of the week," Susan says. "She was bad, but even when she was not there she was still getting the blame. In the end I would just keep her off."

For her part, Emma knows she was a headache for the teachers. Her first year in secondary school was relatively incident free, but after that it all seemed to go horribly wrong.

"I was kicking off at everything. I was not doing my work and I was walking out of the classroom," says Emma, now 15. "I used to put the blinds-string around my neck and jump off the table. I didn't fit in. I don't like being in big classes."

Even though Susan believed at least part of the problem was that Emma was being victimised by the teachers - when her hair was set on fire it was Emma who got the blame - she knew if she allowed it to continue there was only one outcome, so she took pre-emptive action.

"I took her out of school before she got permanently excluded. If she had a permanent exclusion on her record that would have been it," says Susan, from Boldon in South Tyneside.

The solution was a project run by Barnardos in South Tyneside. Simonside Lodge was originally set up in 1985 to offer an alternative to custody for children who were going through the courts, but has since evolved into dealing with youngsters who are at risk of being expelled from school or thrown out of the family home.

Simonside does not aim to provide a complete education, but instead takes children for two or three days a week, while trying to keep them in mainstream schools for the remainder of the week. Attendance at Simonside is optional, and only comes after an agreement with both the child and their parents.

At first, perhaps not surprisingly given her experiences, Emma was reluctant to go. "It was World War Three. She said 'I'm not going'" recalls Susan. But it did not take long for her daughter to be won round.

"I wanted to come back after my first day. It was different, and it was nowt like a mainstream school," Emma says. "In mainstream school they give you the work and you get on with it. Here they explain it and you can talk to them.

"It was calmer and more friendly and, if you are stuck, you can get help straight away, you don't have to wait for hours. They give you lots of attention. I love attention, I do."

Project leader Colin Watson says the bulk of the young people who go to Simonside - about 90-100 in a year, mostly aged 13-15 - have behavioural issues. But the project aims to focus on the positives instead of the problems.

"We try and identify a strength, because the majority of these kids have not succeeded in anything at all. If you identify where they can achieve something you can begin to increase their self-esteem," he says.

"If they feel better about themselves they start to feel better about other people, and one effect is that their behaviour improves. It is a slow process but it is quicker than going into the ins and outs of what went wrong in the past."

Children at Simonside are taught in groups of no more than five, ensuring they get the attention many of them crave. And, as well as regular school subjects, staff also work on behavioural issues, looking at how to deal with difficult situations and how to respond appropriately to the teachers.

Simonside also works closely with the schools, to help keep the children in mainstream education and with the eventual aim of getting them to return to school full-time.

"There is always something blocking their return. Usually they say they don't like school but there is always a reason why they don't like something," Colin says. "If you can get them to agree that if that thing they didn't like about school could be changed they would go back, usually they say yes.

"They may not feel education is relevant to them but it is important, so the initial objective is to convince them that it would be in their interests to return to school." He acknowledges that the philosophy behind Simonside is completely different to that behind schools, in being more open and friendly. If a child misbehaves, the worst sanction is to ask them to go home and come back the next day.

"The over-riding message is to try and treat other people the way you would like other people to treat you, and it works," Colin says. "We're working with kids with some of the most challenging behaviour, who are at risk of being excluded or thrown out of homes, but if you look at the state of this building, where is the graffiti? Where are the broken windows? They look after it because of the way they're treated."

While he accepts that you can't always remove what the children don't like about school, particularly if it is the attitude of some staff, he says you can help them learn how to cope with it without becoming disruptive.

Although he says the project has no way of measuring how effective it is in the long-term, in the short-term it is successful in keeping children in school. Youngsters attend Simonside for an average of ten months, although the longest has been three years, and the shortest just one month.

But if it sounds like a miracle solution to the problem of disruptive children it is not quite as straightforward as that. Schools don't have the resources to devote the amount of time to each child that Simonside can manage, and it takes about two months to get a place at Simonside. But out of 100 children last year, only six refused to take part, and very few come back after their problems resurfaced.

Colin says: "We have the greatest difficulty in getting people to stop coming here. The usual response from the children is that they feel more confident and more able to cope."

While Emma was taken out of her original secondary school, she has remained in full-time education and is aiming to go to college next year, having taken her GCSE exams this summer. It hasn't all been plain sailing. She has been sent home from Simonside several times - for jumping out of a bus, for swearing and for "being stupid" - but it has not changed her view of the project.

"I used to hate it when I got sent home from here," she says. "It has calmed me down a lot. I had loads to get off my chest and I got it all off my chest by talking to people. I think it is excellent here, it is wicked."

For mum Susan, Simonside has made a difference not just to her daughter's behaviour, but to her future.

She says: "She has calmed down an awful lot. She was getting the one-to-one that she needed, the help that she needed and she was getting an education. She used to look forward to going and used to be up at the crack of dawn to get ready.

"If she hadn't come here she would have been permanently excluded, definitely, it was on the cards, but this has started the ball rolling for better things. She has got more confidence and she is more enthusiastic. She is happy and she was not before. She would not have achieved anything if she had not received help from Barnardos."