Footsteps Vocational Academy
Laura Freeman, 19 May 2015
It is the morning of the General Election and in Tottenham, a classroom of pupils not yet old enough to vote are taking the political future of this country seriously. Their teacher, seizing the opportunity to give her Citizenship class a sense of urgency, has turned the classroom into a polling station.
There is a large cardboard ballot box on her desk, A4 posters carry the names of the local Labour and Conservative candidates (for simplicity’s sake this is two-party, rather than seven-party politics), and the pupils’ heads are bowed over their polling cards.
Their teacher has brought in her own card – she intends to vote at the end of the school day – as a model. One girl, looking at the card, shouts triumphantly: ‘I know where you live, Miss.’
Their teacher smiles and calmly replies: ‘You know I have a dog? Well, it’s a big one.’ That stops any giggling about turning up on Miss’s doorstep.
You have to be quick-witted to teach here. The girls at Footsteps Vocational Academy have been excluded from mainstream state schools. They have fallen behind academically, disrupted lessons and, in some cases, been violent to teachers or other pupils.
Yet a dozen of them are working quietly and asking sensible questions – ‘Why do you have to register to vote?’, ‘Where’s our nearest polling station?’ – and the occasional not-so-sensible one – ‘Why isn’t “election” in the dictionary?’ On closer inspection it turns out to be on the next page.
The lesson is overseen not just by a teacher but also by two women in their early twenties. They are ‘Pod Leaders’: classroom assistants, surrogate big sisters and occasional crowd-control officers.
The Footsteps Vocational Academy is one of three academies in Tottenham giving an education to some of the most difficult children in this part of north London. The Vocational Academy offers girls from local secondary schools 6 GCSEs in English, Maths, Science, Citizenship, PE and Art and vocational qualifications in Hair, Beauty and Childcare.
The nearby Football Academy also offers six GCSEs, as well as Sports Leaders Awards and sports coaching qualifications. Pupils play football and table tennis and take part in non-contact boxing training.
The Sports Academy offers the same academic curriculum, but the school days are weighted towards football, boxing, table tennis, weight training and athletics.
In Haringey, the local council, there are around 30 permanent exclusions from secondary schools each year and 1,250 fixed-term exclusions. Someone has to pick these children up and dust them off.
Chris Hall is used to getting people back on their feet when they’ve been knocked down. A plain-speaking, bear-like man, Chris is a former boxing coach with forty years’ experience in and out of the ring. He competed for England in his teens and has trained Olympians.
Chris is a man of extraordinary energy. He not only knows all the children by name, he knows what they like for lunch (‘chicken and chips,’ he says wearily), whether they get on better with their mum or dad, who has had their mobile phone confiscated that morning and which colleges and apprenticeships they have applied for. It is his ambition that every Footsteps pupil should go to college or into training.
In 2006, Chris, who was then running a boxing gym in Tottenham, set up the London Boxing Academy Community Project (LBACP) to offer ‘alternative provision’ to pupils – boys and girls – who had been excluded from mainstream education. Many had been excluded for aggressive behaviour and Chris believed that the discipline of boxing married with teaching in small groups could turn these teenagers around. It is testament to his success that many of the Pod Leaders are former pupils of the LBACP.
Chris set up the Sports Academy in 2010. The Football Academy followed in 2011.At first The Football Academy took only boys, but such was its success that local Pupil Referral Units started sending girls there, promising: ‘Yes, she loves football.’ Chris soon discovered that in many cases the girls had no interest in the sport. He made plans for a girls’ Vocational Academy in a couple of rooms above a community arts centre on Tottenham High Road. Today, a great hoop of keys for every door, cupboard and filing cabinet across the three academies, hangs from his pocket.
In the nearly ten years since he first started providing an education to teenagers, Chris has noticed a significant change. Once the biggest problem was pupils who were aggressive. Boxing Clever, a book by Tom Ogg, now a barrister, about his experience as a teacher at the LBACP, describes daily classroom confrontations as pupils swore, squared up to one another and goaded staff.
Today, the challenge is not anger, but apathy. Sashalie, a Pod Leader and former pupil of the LBACP, regrets that the pupils’ response to any task is: ‘That’s looooong’ – teen slang for boring and not worth my while. Poised and articulate, Sashalie is a shining example of why it is absolutely worth these students’ while to leave the academies with qualifications.
When one of the girls at the Sports Academy tells Chris at lunchtime ‘I can’t do another lesson. I’m going to be sick’, she gets short shrift. So too does the boy at the Football Academy who announces halfway through an English lesson: ‘I’m distracted by this bit of fluff.’ His teacher steers him back to similes and metaphors.
On the classroom wall are posters setting out the rules: ‘no swearing, no hats, no hoodies, no mobile phones.’ Chris is vigilant about the last one and is dismayed when a contraband phone is seen in a lesson.
Back in his office in a corner of the Sports Academy, his own phone doesn’t stop ringing. A pupil hasn’t turned up for a GCSE exam, another has mislaid her science folder, a mini-cab to ferry the boys to football hasn’t turned up.
‘I got into education because I wanted to work with kids, but I spend too much time now answering this,’ he nods to the open email inbox on his computer, ‘and this,’ his buzzing mobile phone.
The lunch break (Chris has a cup of hot, strong tea) is devoted to calls, emails and admin. Then it is back to what matters: the kids. The boys are rounded up for football, reports are exchanged with the Pod Leaders and the office – and all its administration – are locked up for the afternoon.