education is compulsory

So we had a term at home. But he was a bit bored, I had a demanding baby and yearned for paid work. So we tried another school nursery. Aged nearly four, he started in a bigger space, a warmer nursery, more smiles and greetings - surely everything would be OK now? Well, just to be on the safe side I spent the first few days with him. On his first day three boys surrounded him and threatened to beat him up, out of sight of the staff. The same thing happened two days later. I told my son to make sure he brought any incidents to the attention of the teachers. But they ignored it. He had a tendency to hide when overwhelmed. This was considered "not safe." He was not cooperative. One example: He was sitting sideways on the carpet: Teacher: "can you please sit facing forward like all the other children?" My son replied, "I’m quite comfortable thank you." This became an issue and he was evicted from the room. They had a "punishment regime" (though they called it assertive discipline) and when children in the nursery "misbehaved" they were sent to the "big school" to sit in on year six class with the meanest teacher in the school. My son was deeply distressed by this but made a number of friends in that class who felt sorry for him and gave him sweets and comics, when the teacher wasn’t looking, to stop him crying.

He was labelled "highly intelligent and poorly behaved" on his Stage One special needs papers. He was integrated early into reception class to meet his intellectual needs. This was a disaster, as the teacher from hell was in charge. She had trained as a secondary school maths teacher, couldn’t cope, moved to primary, couldn’t cope with year six so she was moved to reception (possibly in the hope that she would leave) where she had spent most of the previous year off sick. She didn’t make eye-contact with her nineteen four to five year olds and I wrote down a few disturbing incidents from the first few days. One day my son had diarrhoea in the morning at school and didn’t make it to the toilet on time. He said he’d told the teacher who said there was nothing she could do about it so he sat in pooh all day. When I went in to discuss it with her the next day she was off sick. The following week, a freezing January day, I picked him up soaked to the skin. Only his socks were dry. Again this had happened in the morning when another child had been throwing water at him and he had been left soaking wet all day. I challenged his teacher about this and she said, "Well, he was playing in water when he shouldn’t have been." I pointed out that he saw it, as I also saw it, as a punishment and I didn’t think it was appropriate to leave a four-year-old soaking wet all day.