Travelling on
Category:
14 / 05 / 2009 | Author: dnorris
Travelling on
“The main pressure is for the girls to get married.”
That is not the average response you get from parents when explaining why their children don’t attend secondary school – but then Gypsy pupils are different.
Thirty years ago I taught a class of ten travellers in Leeds. They were all called Murphy, and they kept wandering about the school peering into every other classroom. Their own classroom was a tiny makeshift box of a place in the middle of the school complex. There were no windows out onto the playgrounds and as a result they felt trapped.
The children didn’t have any difficulties getting to school. The family caravans were parked just across the road from the school....but after four weeks they were gone.
Things have improved since then but you can’t help wondering by how much. Back then the parents thought of school as some sort of academic parlour game. Today attitudes are changing but only very slowly.
One Hounslow Community College in West London has been providing education for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children for some years. Cranford Community College engages the borough traveller education service to address the issue as it is expected to do because Gypsy, Roma and Travellers are covered by the Race Relations Act (2000). Educational arrangements have to be made for them and these include having a teaching assistant work with them for half an hour a week.
Underlying the provision is the usual jargon. Data bases are set up and targets are set. Attendance, exclusions, and achievements in core subjects are monitored.
However, all of this is carried out under the strangest of terms because although the new law expects these children to attend school, their culture has managed on a self help basis in the past. Indeed past experience of schooling is universally derided.
Fairground culture has it that girls need some form of education because they often manage the rides. They need some business sense and mathematical expertise. Boys on the other hand are the engineers. They mend the machinery and set up the ‘tober’ or fairground.
A similar mentality exists with travellers, so it comes as no surprise to hear that some girls do reach year 11. The miracle is that for the first time last year two boys reached the same stage. Personal interviews and questionnaires about what they enjoy has helped to open up greater awareness of where interests lie. Some have even taken to joining school clubs and making friends with the regular school attendees.
It is a long road. None reach the level of achieving 5 A-C grades. But then you have to question what they would do with such qualifications. Few travellers will be sitting civil service entrance exams. Few will go on to university although two were reported as having been taken on as apprentices. The idea of a traveller being anything other than a self employed traveller must seem quaint to the parents.
What seems to be lacking is any form of bespoke planning. There has not been a tailored course to fit the life style of the travellers for what they want. What about a bit of training in Local Authority By-Laws, what about market study and small business management, what about diversification of cottage industries or even the fluctuations in scrap metal markets. Education from the perspective of the traveller pupils is never part of the curriculum.
If it were it might result in a higher level of attendance.
But it was ever thus....even 30 years ago.
