How do you teach students the state has branded un-teachable?
nick cowen, 15 April 2008
Gala Launch Night Event – ‘Lessons learnt teaching excluded youth in a boxing academy’
from 6.30pm Thursday 24th April
Williamsons Tavern, Bow Lane
Around a third of the year 11s on the London Boxing Academy Community Project (LBACP) have been in prison at some point this year. Yet all of them will be sitting their GCSE examinations, with some likely to gain good passes. With each of our students we find the common thread that mainstream education, for whatever reason, has failed them. The LBACP uses sport, positive male role models and intensive one to one teaching to provide a school environment in which we can change the lives of our students.
Tom Ogg, our resident maths teacher, will talk about the mishaps and false starts on the road to educating and socialising our students away from crime and aggression. What is it that has led to our successes? Why have some students failed? And what has boxing got to do with it exactly?
Tom will talk for twenty minutes about the extraordinary experience of teaching on the London Boxing Academy Community Project, beginning at 7pm.
Please join us for a pint at the Williamsons Tavern on Bow Lane, off Cheapside from 6.30pm. Food and drink is available at the bar and we will be happy to answer any questions about the project or the Gala dinner.
With regard to students turning to crime, in October 1999, the Sunday Telegraph carried an article based on an interview with the then Chief Inspector of Prisons, Sir David Ramsbotham. In the course of his duties, Sir David had had to visit all of the Young Offender Institutions in this country, and had been struck by the large number of “bright” teenagers he had found in them; victims, as he saw it, of an educational system which does not meet their needs – gifted children are not recognised in law as having special needs – leaving them bored and frustrated, all too apt to turn to anti-social behaviour.
As the article pointed out, here were potential scientists, inventors, designers, programmers, etc – representing a loss to this country of untold millions. It might have been this which led to the government setting up NAGTY – the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth – designed to provide special tuition for the very brightest students.
However, during NAGTY’s first year there was a certain amount of media attention over the fact there were only some 500 applications for 900 places, something which the Head of the Academy, Professor Eyre, blamed on peer pressure – the fact that is “not cool” to be bright.
At the beginning of 2007, the Daily Telegraph carried an article suggesting that the government was seriously worried over the future of NAGTY, due to the failure of so many schools to co-operate with it; many teachers regarding high intelligence as “elitist” and “divisive” (except in their own cases).
A gifted child may therefore end up ignored by the system and regarded with hostility by their “classmates”. There is also the fact that, whilst there is a certain amount of sympathy for a child who becomes anti-social due to being below the educational average, there is less so for a child suffering because they are significantly above that average – as expressions such as “nerd” and “geek” testify.
“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise” – an odd motto for an education system, and a suicidal one for a society.