Letter: School system fails with disturbed pupils

Sir: There is nothing new about the existence of children who are too difficult for teachers to cope with in ordinary classes ("Teachers lambasted for strike over boy", 23 April). Three years ago I retired from teaching in a school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. I was there for 21 years and still help on a voluntary basis.

In the last few years I have seen a change from an all-round therapeutic school catering for varying problems of about 60 pupils, most of whom returned to normal schooling at the age of 11 and many before, to a sin bin holding a handful of very disturbed children whose real needs cannot be met in a school and who are not provided with the psychiatric help that in the past was available in boarding establishments.

The children we would have had in the past are still there, but are now in normal schools causing disruption to others, failing to make progress and preparing to make even more disruption when they enter secondary education.

Obviously this problem is partly financial, but it also seems to be the result of a policy, at government level, to integrate special-needs children regardless of the nature of the need. It goes without saying that parents are no longer happy for their child to join our school and that few young men will wish to come back saying, "Miss, you changed my life!"

Gwen Reebie

Twickenham, Middlese