"I am going to burn you. I’m going to kill you.”

These are the threats that female teachers at one specialist school for children with special educational needs (SEN) had to endure on a daily basis.

Gabi Barham, a teacher at the school in Bromley, called it “a pure hatred of women.” 

On another occasion in a different school, a child was expelled for pushing a staple gun to her head and threatening to shoot her.  

Gabi said: “He was like, ‘I'm going to f****** do it’. And I was really petrified, because I thought, I'm going to lose an eye here. He got expelled because of that.”

She claimed that staff are expected to deal with this behaviour, and that without help from colleagues, this can be very challenging. 

“There’s never enough staff if you work with children with SEN,” Gabi explained. 

She added: “Sometimes these children can be violent. If they're really dysregulated, they can lash out. There's a lot of sexualised behaviour. Sometimes, with boys touching themselves inappropriately. They're not doing it to try and evoke something in you,

"They're doing it because it's a need of theirs. So sometimes you would have to have two members of staff there to protect both yourself and that student. If there's not two members of staff, you're putting yourself in a very difficult position.” 

Experienced colleagues like Gabi may be able to cope with the behaviour because they’ve been working with it for years, but with a teaching exodus fuelling staff shortages across the board, schools have been forced to lower their expectations for new employees.

Gabi’s school has hired teaching assistants as young as 17, with no experience of working in a school of any sort, let alone in a specialist setting.  

“You can't expect those young girls to see that or try and facilitate that behaviour” Gabi admitted. 

Despite all of the challenges, she’s proud of her role. One of her students has memorised the track lists of every Now That’s What I Call Music album, another has taught himself Japanese.

She said: “These kids are clever. They just need an outlet to go to and when you work with these kids, it makes you feel very lucky that there are schools like mine where these kids can go and thrive and be prepared for the future.” 

'Teachers feel trapped"

Nonetheless, record numbers of teachers are leaving state-funded education in England. 43,500 teachers left the profession in just one year in 2022/23, equivalent to more than 9% of the workforce. Figures also show that less than 70% of early-career teachers are still in the profession after five years. 

According to the National Education Union (NEU), this was driven by pay-cuts and "sky-high workloads". Teachers were awarded a 5.5% pay rise this year and the Department for Education has recently announced that another 2.8% rise would be appropriate for 2025-26, despite the "challenging financial backdrop".

Gill Howarth, a retired special needs coordinator (SENCO) and assistant head, said: “Teachers feel trapped because of the overwhelming-ness of the whole thing. There's so much wrong with it. The whole thing needs unpacking and starting again. The whole education system.”

She added: “I’m coming up to my 60^th birthday, there's no way I would have had the stamina to work even two days a week [in a modern classroom].  It’s exhausting – it just takes over your life. If you’ve got your own family, they really suffer. Teachers put their school first.” 

Gill felt that the curriculum is too strict to accommodate different styles and paces of learning and that this ostracises children with SEN and puts pressure on teachers to achieve results. 

She said: “The curriculum is not fit for purpose. Teachers feel as if they are straightjacketed into delivering a curriculum that isn't necessarily relevant to the children in front of them. I don't think it's tailored to the workforce we should be developing. I think we're still delivering a Victorian curriculum for the children to go into factories.”

Gill explained that the pressure on teachers to follow a strict timetable for covering the curriculum meant that some children get left behind.

She said: "The teacher doesn’t have time to revisit topics and make sure every child has understood it. Failure in those early years affects how you learn for the rest of your life. That contributes to the number of children on the special needs register because we ask them to do things far too early and far too advanced.” 

A recent study by Durham University found that ‘on average in 2018–19, students with SEND were performing almost 2 years behind in writing skills, 1.7 years behind in maths skills, and 1.5 years behind in reading skills compared to their typical peers’. Earlier research found that more integrated learning can improve both the educational quality and social inclusion of pupils with SEN.

One of the key dilemmas of the current education system is what level of integration of children with and without SEN is the right balance. 

Gill said: “I totally believe in integration of children – whatever their need. We should be able to accommodate really every learning ability and disability in the mainstream classroom. If we had small enough class sizes when the children were really young, we could overcome a lot of these problems.” 

Annabelle described how the health of a local authority’s finances can affect her job. In September last year, Birmingham City Council declared itself bankrupt and will have to make £300mn in savings.  

She said: “The Black Country, in general, is a deprived area. It’s old factory towns and there’s some major social deprivation in and around us and that isn’t being met because the council hasn’t got the money to do it,"

"I taught at another school in another local authority and the school had a quarter of a million pounds in pupil premium money because it was quite a deprived area. We don’t get anything like that here – about £40,000 a year.” 

An estimated 1.9mn children in England are believed to have SEN, and the number requiring an EHCP has increased by 140% over the last ten years. There can also be a wild variation in the number of EHCPs that are completed on time, depending on geography. For example, only 1% of children completed an EHCP assessment within the statutory period of 20 weeks in Essex this March. Overall, almost 50% of children waited longer than the expected period.  

Meanwhile, both Gill and Annabelle said that it has become standard practice for teachers to spend their own money on children’s resources because the school doesn’t provide enough funding. 

Annabelle said that the workload is pushing people away: “There’s no work-life balance. Record numbers are leaving because the life that they’re living is not sustainable. When do you get time to take a rest? Do nice things? Eat? Go on holiday? I've got staff next week that are not going on holiday so they can catch up with their marking. Which other profession does that?

“You'll find many teachers that say 'well I've never had depression. I've never had a breakdown. I've never had anxiety' because in the end all you're thinking about is ‘what’s best for the kids?’"

However, she added: "If you can't do what you really want to do with them because of your mental state, your tiredness, the lack of funding, the lack of resources, it's bound to get people down.” 

"There is no magic money tree"

The government expects the number of students with SEN to double over the next decade, but spending on special educational needs support in English schools has already reached a record £10bn high.

Furthermore, the NAO report stated that The Department for Education is uncertain about what capacity should be planned for and how spending should be allocated to meet future needs. 

The Department for Education was approached about this investigation, but declined to comment. The government has announced a £1bn budget increase for high needs support, part of a £2.3bn rise to cover teachers wage growth and other costs. Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has also asked schools to move away from the “tunnel vision” on exam results as a mark of school success – and to focus instead on mental health of students. 

But in a statement released earlier this year, Dr Patrick Roach, General Secretary of NASUWT said: “Teachers in the UK are experiencing dystopian levels of workload and work-related stress. Schools cannot function without teachers, and children cannot thrive without the care and expertise of their teachers, yet we face having too few teachers left."

The educators featured in this investigation were similarly divided on ways to improve the current system. Almost everybody had a different answer; from hiring more teaching assistants to focusing investment on new equipment to lessen the load on staff.

They were also unconvinced that there was a ‘magic money tree’ of investment ready to spend. Many local authorities are looking to cut back on expenditure – some even to avoid bankruptcy. At a time when the problems faced by teachers and the pressure to provide solutions are mounting, what is the light at the end of the tunnel that motivates them to carry on? 

For many, it’s because they need the pay cheque, and there’s no reasonable means of exiting. For others, it’s closer to a moral duty. 

Retired SENCO, Gill Howarth, explained where that drive originates: “Despite everything, at the end of the day, when it’s going well and you’ve got that class of children in front of you that want to be there, that want to learn, that are getting better at something because of something you’re doing, it’s magic. There’ll always be people who want to do it.”