It was way back in the 1980s. The National Curriculum (government imposed) was in full swing and they’d started to send out OFSTED inspectors to check that we teachers were dumbing the kids down to a suitable degree — teaching them the sort of maths that, even in those days, their pocket calculators could perform instantly and, well, don’t get me started on the materialist reductionist science syllabus…

The thing is, I had a get-out clause. I was working with a class of just ten little children, each with a statement of special educational needs and all with profound difficulties speaking, understanding speech or both. Our tiny class was attached to a mainstream primary school, which meant that it would be inspected by people whose knowledge of special education would be fairly hazy. To put it crudely, they wouldn’t be expecting too much in the way of academic ability.

I’d been doing this job for many years, though, and I’d quickly learned never to underestimate these little people. Neurodivergent they might be, and unable to engage in conversation without signing and support, but they covered the entire ability range as surely as any other bunch of children in the land. In fact, I’d discovered, a sizeable proportion of them had thinking skills well beyond those of their mainstream peers; 6 or 7 years of virtual silence allowed for huge amounts of thinking time.

Let me give you a couple of examples, taken from my memoir A Mind Beyond Words:

… a small girl who answered questions clearly and fluently, but rather strangely at times. She had, it turned out, more-or-less memorised her entire collection of Disney films and used roughly relevant extracts from them as ‘scripts’ for her spoken language, covering almost perfectly for her own massive difficulties in putting words together.

…One obviously intelligent little boy was capable only of making vowel sounds. I’ll never forget the shock of hearing him read aloud with such perfect intonation, enjoyment and delight that it was clear he understood every word and even the subtlest of jokes, despite only being able to vocalise something like, ‘Ee e i-oo uh e-ee oo.’

Young children in a classroom.
It just so happened that on the day the inspectors called, I had several of the very brightest, most creative children I’d ever taught in that class of 5-7-year-olds. I decided to plan a lesson on aerodynamics.Two inspectors sat down to watch. I asked the class to say, “Good afternoon visitors,” just to give them a taste of our verbal challenges.

Next, I reminded the class of the time we’d seen Concorde fly over our classroom the previous week. There was a great deal of excited nodding and exclamation.

Signing and speaking, I asked each of them to take a piece of scrap paper from the piles on their tables and see how far they could make it fly across the room.

Some tried floating a sheet as it was. One enterprising child screwed hers up and chucked it at the opposite wall. There were shouts of indignation. ‘That’s throwing, not flying!’ one child signed. I translated, for the inspectors’ benefit. A couple of kids began folding rudimentary paper darts. Their attempts met with surprise and approval from the rest.

Eagerly, others crowded round to see how they were folding the paper and tried to imitate. I placed a few simple diagrammatic instructions for making model aircraft on the tables, but stressed that they were only there for ideas and encouraged everyone to create their own designs if they wished. I explained that when everyone had their best model, we’d see whose could fly the furthest.

Everyone was excited and involved. One of the inspectors left the room and returned shortly afterwards with the third member of their team. One cheery little lad collected up three sheets of paper and went across to hand them to the visitors. “Ood oo lit a may wuh?” he asked solicitously.

I seriously could have hugged him!

Soon paper aircraft were whizzing around the room, followed hotly by diminutive aeronautical engineers.

“Dan we Doe out-dide?” one asked me.

The sun was shining and there was little wind, so I agreed to 5 minutes of outdoor testing.

Paper glider in the sky.Back inside, I showed the class the pieces of string I had ready to stretch across the room, each with a section of drinking straw threaded on to it. I demonstrated how we would tape each child’s best prototype to the straw, hold the string taught and the inventor would blow it through another straw. We could then test accurately the length of each flight.

As they experimented with this new refinement, one of the inspectors approached me. “You could have used a hairdryer to propel the planes,” she suggested.

I smiled and thanked her, but explained that most of these children had to do regular speech therapy exercises to use the muscles in their mouths in as many ways as possible and that blowing through a straw was one of those drills. This would be an enjoyable and productive way to give them extra practice. Her eyes widened and she hurried away to write in her notebook.

The lesson reached its conclusion. Each test flight was sportingly cheered by the rest. Each distance was recorded to the nearest centimetre. The winner was congratulated and the inspectors were waved off cheerily as they left.

My little pupils headed home, clutching their creations and I headed for my debriefing session with the OFSTED team, which went rather well. They spoke in glowing terms of the progress that had been made by every child during the lesson, of the high levels of engagement they’d seen from each of them throughout the whole afternoon, of the culture of co-operation and friendly competition and of the fact that my expectations had been high, despite their challenges.

I dared to suggest that’s what tends to happen when children – any children – are given an open-ended task and encouragement to innovate. I hoped they would recognise that branding non-speakers/semi-speakers as cognitively impaired was a huge mistake.

If you think my opening remarks about the current education system were rather harsh, I’d encourage you to watch this Ted Talk, by the amazing George Land.

Did you notice the bit about ‘divergent’ thinking being the creative kind?

One of George’s best quotes was:

“Uncreative behaviour is learned.”

I took voluntary redundancy from teaching in 2008, because by then the National Curriculum in my country had been dumbed down to the point where there was virtually no opportunity to allow children open-ended and creative learning. I went off and worked in a learning hub for home-educated kids, mostly autistic/neurodivergent who hadn’t been able to cope in school. The number of such children has grown exponentially since then.

Just saying.

2 Comments

  1. What an amazing story. When you quoted the young child (children) talking to the inspectors, you didn’t translate for the reader. BRAVO! The context was there for the understanding.
    I just recently read about an animated series called Pingu where the “language” spoken was quite unconventional by society’s normal standards for language. Of course, children everywhere were quite enraptured watching the series, to the chagrin of adults around them. The children were immersed in the context! The adults, who were otherwise preoccupied with their myriad multitasking ways, only heard gibberish and scratched their heads in bewilderment at what made the series so attractive to the youngsters. Quite amazing, and revealing!

    Also, thank you for sharing that Ted Talk! I hadn’t had the pleasure of “knowing” George Land (R.I.P.) prior but his ideas are much needed (dare I say imperative) in our time!

    • Thanks Runa. I love the Pingu animations, although I’d never thought about them in those terms before. I remember my own kids adoring them, and we often watched them together.
      I agree, George Land was not widely known, like so many who are ahead of their time. Brilliant man.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *