Hard lessons about family breakdown

When a family falls apart, how does the children's school rate on helping to pick up the pieces? Not very highly - should try harder. Diana Hinds looks at the attempts of the National Stepfamily Association to improve their performance.

Children from broken homes are nothing new for schools. Indeed, by the time they are 16, nearly one third of young people in this country will have experienced some form of family upheaval and change. But the evidence from a new project by the National Stepfamily Association is that many schools are not very good at dealing with children and families affected in this way. Many are reluctant to get involved, because of lack of time, lack of expertise. Some schools may even feel it is nothing to do with them, provided the children are getting to school on time and handing their work in.

The implications of a family break-up, however, for both the pupil and the school, are very considerable. Is the school, for instance, aware from the start of changes that are occurring, which may serve to explain a pupil's suddenly aggressive or difficult behaviour? Does the school know the composition of a new family, who is related to whom, and what surnames they are using - all issues of great delicacy for the pupil? Is the school making information and reports available to both separated parents, as well as making a new step-parent feel welcome and involved? Is the pupil able to talk to a teacher or school counsellor about difficulties they may be having?

With funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Save and Prosper Educational Trust, and advisory help from the Departments of Health, Education and Environment, the National Stepfamily Association project invited responses to these kinds of questions from a range of schools, families and educationalists. In the new year, it will publish national guidelines for all schools, to strengthen and clarify the way they deal with pupils' changing home situations. The project will continue to work with eight schools, to develop work to implement these guidelines.

John Bastiani, a specialist in home-school relations who is co-ordinating the project, argues that schools need to recognise to a far greater extent the diversity of children's backgrounds.

"For schools - of all kinds - the task of acknowledging, and being sensitive towards, these sharp differences of pupil background and the changing circumstances of their lives should now be regarded as an integral, normal part of home-school work, not an extension or special feature."

Liz Bond, a former teacher and mother and stepmother, through her second marriage, to six children, believes that schools need to be more sensitive and inclusive in the language they use about families. Too many teachers, in her experience, still talk to their classes about "Mum and Dad", completely failing to take account of families that have changed or regrouped.

This assumption has, on some occasions, been hurtful to her own daughters. Sophie, at the age of eight, was given a family tree to fill in with spaces only for mother, father and children. Sophie complained to the teacher that there was nowhere to put her own dad.

Ellie, now 12, and at a state school in Sheffield, got an unsympathetic response from her German teacher when she was asked to bring in family photographs and duly brought in pictures of her stepfamily too.

"The teacher was weird about me having two dads - she didn't understand. I asked her how to say stepdad in German, and she just told me not to write it."

In a PSE (personal and social education) lesson, Ellie found herself the only one to put her hand up when the class was asked who lived in a stepfamily - although she believes there may also be others in her situation.

"It left Ellie feeling quite exposed and different," says her mother.

Patrick Bond, Liz's husband, remembers the open disapproval meted out by the head teacher of his son's nursery school, when his own first marriage was breaking up. Years later, when his second son moved town and school, after GCSEs, to enter the new stepfamily, he had a very hard time settling into the sixth form.

"He felt very lost, and his work was affected. The school made no allowance for a child who had just suffered this kind of family disruption."

Judi Rhind's elder daughter, Amy, was also highly stressed by her parents' break-up and her mother's remarriage, but received little support from her school, an independent secondary school in Norwich.

"She just immersed herself too much in her work, because she was upset," says her mother. "There didn't seem to be any system of pastoral care at the school - which is something I'm sure all schools would benefit from."

Peter Gibley, head teacher at Nelson First School in Norwich, where more than half the children have been through changes in their family situation, has already altered his school's admissions procedure, as a result of being on the project's working party.

To ensure the school has the information it needs about each pupil, he now asks more searching questions from the start about the structure of a family, whether an absent parent is actively involved, and what the relationship is between separated parents.

"We can ask -even if we're not always told. Some parents don't realise what a help it would be for their child for us to have this sort of information. Most of the difficulties I have with children stem from difficulties in their background. The better we understand the background, the more we can help the child at school, and the better their work will be."

In this situation, schools are only as good as the information they are given, emphasises Lawrence Warburton, at the National Association of Social Workers in Education. They may feel, understandably, hesitant to intrude or pry into a home background, but for the pupils' sake, need to find a relaxed way of keeping their records up to date.

For parents, much better to let the school know early on, than wait until problems occur and be called into school by a head teacher who knows nothing of what has happened. Liz Bond says, with hindsight, she would have done better to volunteer information sooner.

"The trouble is you feel a bit stigmatised. It's hard to admit to the public world that something has failed and you are having another go."

Homework policies, John Bastiani says, need to be more sensitive to the difficulties encountered by children moving between homes, and homework clubs at school can be a good solution.

As for school reports, schools are required by law to make copies available to both parents. A report, however, will not mean a great deal outside the context of school life; ideally, schools should encourage both parents to visit on open days, or parents' evenings.

Working together, schools and families must find ways of overcoming the stigma that still attaches itself to family break-up. What we need to teach our children is not that family break-up is OK - the amount of pain it generates must surely make that impossible - but that, if it does happen, children need not, and must not, lose their chance in life as a result.

The National Stepfamily Association: 0171-209 2460, helpline 0990 168388.