The taming of the PRU

In January of 2014, I took a job as head teacher of Mendip Partnership School. I had previously been a deputy head of a large school in an urban area. I was disaffected with mainstream education and wanted to do something different.

This was a school in name only. It was an amalgam of four different pieces. Piece one was a Key Stage 4 Pupil Referral Unit, based in a run down building in an industrial estate. Piece two was a Medical Tuition Unit and team working from a one classroom unit at the back of one of our local secondary schools. Piece 3 was a Primary Outreach Team working out of a spare classroom in a primary school 15 miles away from the other sites. Piece 4 was a central team of admin and support staff who operated from an open- plan office above a library. From this office also worked a team of teachers who worked with young people who were permanently excluded from schools; most of this work was done in homes or cafés or through a very amateur Virtual Classroom set up. Each of these pieces had their own history, culture and ethos as separate centres; their own way of doing things and very, very, different approaches to working with learners. There were no unified values, policies or any form of cooperation. Each one was encamped and stuck in a way of working, reinforced by Henri Tajfel’s ideas of social identity theory - Us and Them In and Out Groups.

“We didn’t want pupils to be defined by the route they got to us but by their need. We developed an idea of Curriculum Pathways: Blue for those who would benefit from more choice, Green for those who would need tight structure. We talked about pupils being on a continuum, with two ends of a spectrum of anxiety acting in and acting out. “

The attraction of taking on such a mess was the promise of a new build, a new school, which I would help design and build from scratch. Who gets the chance to do that? I took the job in January and got to work observing and building relationships with each of the pieces. Then in May I took the phone call that the money had run out and the new build would not happen. Initially devastated and wondering why I had left a relatively stable job in a school I had invested a huge amount into, to come to a set of falling down buildings, a staff who were in completely separate camps surrounded by a big metaphysical fence. I pulled myself together and fought with Local Authority Officers to secure the funding. The design process started in 2016, a tremendously exciting thing to do. The physical design of the building was the easy bit. The hard bit was uniting a group of staff who had completely different ideas about what alternative provision should look like. There were two pieces of the pie which were at bipolar opposite ends of a spectrum.

The Key Stage 4 PRU was staffed by a mass of mavericks. An amazing group of people totally dedicated to changing lives and building relationships. There was no timetable, pupils did what they wanted on the day. They went off for a fag when they felt like it and there was a completely laissez faire approach to behaviour management. There was huge warmth in the run-down building with lead paint peeling off the walls. Do you fancy doing some maths today? F**ck off. Would be the stock answer. Laughter filled the rooms and pupils from 30 years ago came back just to say hello. The problem was that the pupils left with terrible attendance, no qualifications and an assumption that the big wide world would let them behave the way the PRU did. It didn’t!

The Medical Tuition unit was quiet. So quiet that when I went in there I felt like I had to take my shoes off and whisper. In fact there were times when I went in there that I was actually shushed! The pupils got great GCSE results but were totally unprepared for the big wide world. They were wrapped up in a cocoon. The staff again were totally dedicated, fantastic people, but too supportive of the pupils, in that they could not fail and could not be exposed to anything which might frighten them. These young people were in no way prepared for the scary crappy world they would be dropped into at 16.

In February of 2018 we walked into our new building - four separate teams united under one roof. I’d like to tell you it was text book. I set up a change team of people a year before we moved in looking at values, we wrestled with ideas for how we were going to move down a road gradually and phase people in. I got the movers and shakers, the influencers to be part of the group. They were also part of the design team. I did the bus speech – You know the “If you don’t like where we are going you can get off at the next stop etc.” (Lead balloon by the way. Don’t do it!)

We thought about principles, ways of working, routines. We didn’t want pupils to be defined by the route they got to us but by their need. We developed an idea of Curriculum Pathways Blue for those who would benefit from more choice, Green for those who would need tight structure. We talked about pupils being on a continuum with two ends of a spectrum of anxiety acting in and acting out. I wrote a comprehensive staff handbook full of value laden language. It was going to be great. It wasn’t! And then OFSTED rocked up 3 weeks after we moved in.

We scraped through OFSTED (just, they came back in 2020 and gace us a glowing report) and took stock of where we needed to be and how we were going to get there. The Local Authority then reduced our budget by £255,000 and we went through a painful restructure. A lot of people got off the bus. It was one of the old Routemaster ones that you can jump off quickly. A number of blockers left and this was an opportunity to really change things.

We have come such a long was as a school and still have a huge amount to do. Breaking down those prejudices and in/out groups has been the real challenge. Not only did the staff define themselves in this way but also the pupils did too. “Why do we have to share a school with them? “, was heard quite often. We had a prom last year. The first time we have ever done so. During the leaving speeches there was a huge amount of love and mutual affection in the room. Pupils who 12 months previously would never be seen dead with each other were laughing and joking. There was a tremendous sense of belonging. When we watched them all going off to their “after party” we felt a tremendous sense of pride in our pupils and ourselves.

First Published in PIXL magazine September 2018