Inequality

Inequality was something that I noticed first as a student on placement, but has been a persistent theme throughout my work to date.

As the human race is made up of individuals, it makes sense that there are differences between everybody. People have different abilities and strengths, and this is what makes life exciting. It’s one of the reasons I love my job – adapting constantly to best support different clients rather than trying to foist a ready made program onto all. That's not satisfying for anyone.

Demographic difference

One of the things I’ve found hardest to experience is the inequality between the children on my caseload. I work in two London boroughs that have areas of extreme wealth and areas of extreme deprivation: Lambeth and Southwark have some of the highest rates of poverty and domestic violence in the country. I deal with clients from a huge range of backgrounds – from children in huge comfortable homes with many luxuries, to those living in very unpleasant and frightening settings. Some have stable, supportive families, while many have suffered loss, neglect or trauma from a very young age. I want to take the latter children home with me when they are tiny, as the impact of deprivation during the formative years has become so apparent.

I find it hardest working in my mainstream schools, with the year 4-6 children. By this age, the difference between them and their peers is so pronounced.

Different abilities.

At age 2-3 we see children with a language delay. We run parent-child interaction groups, and this can remediate these effects. For many children, this input is enough, their parents learn to facilitate and support their language development, so they catch up with their peers. But for others,  by age 6, children are struggling to learn to read and write at the same rate as their peers; their attention and listening skills are often delayed and academically they are already falling behind. We are training staff to run language enrichment groups, offering blocks of therapy to target specific skills such as understanding concepts and key word instructions; narrative input to develop receptive and expressive language; attention and listening groups to help them develop self-help skills in class. Again, this supports some more children and allows them to achieve their potential. 

But for some children, this isn't enough. By 8 or 9, the gap between them and their peers is huge. These children are academically unable to access the curriculum without a lot of differentiation and adult input. Socially, their language is immature and they find it hard to mix with their peers and make friends. They might not be very good at turn-taking, and find it very hard to problem-solve issues in the playground  and resolve conflict independently. Personally, their self-esteem is rock bottom. They have little to no confidence in their abilities. They are give up trying because every day in class builds on assumed knowledge they didn’t acquire in previous years. They miss out on the lessons that they may excel in that could build their confidence - PE, music, drama and art - because they are constantly in interventions for maths and literacy to catch them up.  I’ve noticed children regressing in daily living skills such as getting dressed for PE because they have become so accustomed to having 1:1 with them all the time.

In a lot of these situations, what makes me so heartbroken is that with a different experience at home these children wouldn’t be in the situation they are in now. And I have felt lost trying to work out what my role is in supporting them. I don’t want to take them out of class as they are already out all the time. I try and train their TAs and increase expectation to develop their independence, and offer pre-teaching vocab programs that can be done before lessons to help them access more of it. I model strategies in class that can help them continue to follow the lessons – using visuals and teaching the children to identify their own needs and plan their time. 

A lot of my motivation is that I want to show these children that I care and I will keep coming to support them and trying new things until I find something that works because many of them haven’t had that consistent cheer-leading from an adult in their lives. My mum constantly reminds me that I am making a difference by being a role model who is nice to them, who smiles at them and listens to them. And I know that IS important in their lives, and that I remember so clearly adults from my childhood who did that for me, and the little things they said that gave me the resolve and confidence to believe in myself and achieve as much as I have today. But I want to be MORE than that too. I want to fix these children. 

Inequality of professional experience

This is where my anxiety about the final area of inequality seeps in – the inequality of the professionals these children interact with. These unlucky lot are lumbered with me, an NQP,9 months out of uni. They could have had someone with years of experience and specialism in the field. That person could have made better choices than me, chosen better targets, known of better interventions.

I was struggling on this topic in supervision, not knowing where to start in terms of targets for these children, worrying I was letting them down. My supervisor pointed out that yes, there are many potential target areas. And in a way, it doesn’t matter which I work on. They have a range of needs, and targeting anything and helping in that area will make a difference. I can’t fix everything, but I can focus on the little things where I can effect change. 

Since this revelation, I have had more confidence to know that I am supporting in the right way, that I am not letting anybody down. I continue to turn to my team for advice and support, and love to hear about what others are doing so that I can incorporate new interventions into my own practice. This is how I even out that inequality of experience.

And on days when it does all feel too much and I’m just trying to keep my head above water, I just focus interacting positively with my young caseload, modelling good communication and listening to them, because if that’s all I do some days, that’s OK, because that’s what they need – and because on other days I do a lot, lot more.