Teachers and staff at an overcrowded SEND school in Oldbury have walked out over ‘serious’ safety concerns. More than 90 teachers, teaching assistants and catering staff at The Orchard in Oldbury went on strike for four days from Tuesday (June 2) having been ‘pushed to the edge’ by overcrowded classrooms, mounting vacancies and a lack of support.
The special school, which opened in 2000, is already over-subscribed and staff say the council is planning to increase numbers by as much as 50 above its maximum capacity. Concerned staff were joined by parents, guardians and their children as they raised their concerns at a protest outside Sandwell Council House in Oldbury.
Emma Bowers, who teaches at the school attended by her daughter Maeve, said the proposed rise in pupil numbers at the school was “alarming.” “It’s a school with children with profound needs,” she said. “They need that supervision so if class sizes are increasing without staffing matching then that’s really troubling for me and the other parents.”
Staff and parents described the worrying state of the school’s facilities with rooms out-of-use due to flooding and offices converted into makeshift dining rooms. The school also lacks even the most basic of resources and the money is not made available to buy fundamental specialist equipment demonstrators said.
Sandwell Council said it was investigating the issues raised by teachers and staff and the safety and wellbeing of children “remained its top priority.” Janine Evans, learning support practitioner at The Orchard, said increasing numbers at the school would make it “dangerous and unsafe” and warned it would lead to a rise in incidents.
“It is going to be overcrowded, we are already sharing facilities in the school where there’s not enough room for the children so the dining room, the changing facilities, the toilets, there’s not enough room for them now so with the additional children coming in, it’s going to be unsafe and there’s going to be incident after incident,” she said. “There’s no learning because it’s crowd control at the minute which isn’t what we are here for. We want our children to have the best experiences that they can have. Some of the children have limited lives, they are not here for a long time so we want to make sure that they are safe, they are nurtured and that they have fun. At the moment that’s not happening because of the sizes of the classes, and with an increase as well, it’s just going to get worse. We haven’t even got resources to teach our children, the teachers are having to buy their own resources because there’s no money in SEN schools. It’s just not fair, it shouldn’t be happening.”
GMB union regional organiser Rachel Fagan said the school was already “over-stretched and under-staffed” and bringing in more children would lead to more incidents and accidents – saying that staff were “paying the price for really poor management decisions.” “They just can’t cope any more, that’s the reality,” she said. “The staff that work there are absolutely amazing, they go above and beyond for the kids they look after but there’s only so much you can take. These are low-paid workers. I’ve had people say, ‘well I can go and work in Aldi for more money and I’m not, essentially, going to be hurt’ … they know the environment and the decisions that are made are increasing the likelihood of them being injured as members of staff. They really want to make sure that this school is run correctly so that it’s safe for them as well as the children there.”
The union organiser said teachers had been forced to spend hundreds to buy their own equipment and supplies otherwise children would go without. “They care about their kids, they want to make sure they can access education and they’re even doing it out of their own pockets.” Ms Fagan said the council needed to stop sending more children to the school until it had been properly assessed and the money needed to be made available to extend the school or build extra provision. “The reality is that just keeping on bringing more kids into school is not going to solve it, it’s just going to make things worse,” she said.
