In the news: service children’s education

British service children’s education has been in the news recently. On 14 August 2010, the Times published a piece by Tom Baldwin (‘Call to cut £155m school fees bill run up by service families’) that focused on the continuity of education allowance (CEA). Once known as the boarding school allowance, the CEA is available to entitled service personnel of all ranks (not just officers) to help towards the cost of educating their children at UK boarding schools should forces families opt for this. In the article, Gloria de Piero, MP for Ashfield, was quoted, on the one hand, as saying, ‘I find it astonishing that the MoD is still spending more than £150 million to subsidise Britain’s private schools’, with the MoD countering, on the other, that the CEA is ‘a means to ensure Service children are not disadvantaged’. (Click here to read more about the CEA and the ‘boarding option’.)


A month later, on 14 September 2010, the Guardian carried a story by Jeevan Vasagar reporting on a new Ofstead review of special educational needs (SEN) provision (‘Half of special needs children misdiagnosed’) that again mentioned service children: 

In one primary school visited by inspectors, where a large number of service families had children, Ofsted said pupils were "inappropriately" identified as having special needs because their fathers had been deployed to Afghanistan.

The report said: "This group was … vulnerable to underachievement because their fathers were all serving in Afghanistan. However, although these pupils had additional needs for a period of time, this should not have required special educational needs to have been identified."

A quick, highly unscientific survey carried out by TACA on Twitter in response to the questions ‘Do you agree that service children with fathers in Afghanistan do not have special educational needs?’ and ‘Do service children have special educational needs, regardless of whether a parent has been deployed on active service?’ produced a mixed bag of answers, both positive and negative. 


How best to educate service children whose parents are frequently posted to a new location, often abroad, every two years or so has always been a complex question, to which there have never been any easy answers. And as Phil Chamberlain notes in his article on the subject for the autumn 2010 issue of the Army Families Federation’s Journal (‘Learning the lessons’), the picture is further muddied by the lack of reliable data relating to service children. It is apparently even unclear exactly how many service children there are within the education system, with Ofsted reckoning 90,000, the Children’s Education Advisory Service (CEAS) putting the figure at 186,000, and the Department of Education estimating 37,000 (in England, at least).


Tracking recent research
It is against this background that TACA has been tracking research into the current state and effectiveness of service children’s education. A study carried out by Dr Grace Clifton between 2002 and 2008 into the experience of army children attending secondary schools in the UK (‘The experience of education of the army child’), for example, found that army families’ mobile lifestyle has a negative effect on army children’s educational experiences, and that funding issues mean that secondary schools in the UK do not support mobile army children effectively. (For more on Dr Clifton’s research, findings and recommendations, click here: http://www.archhistory.co.uk/taca/C21schexp.html.)


A later report, ‘The overlooked casualties of conflict’ (2009), published by the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Children’s Fund, additionally outlined the numerous, and serious, emotional, social and educational problems experienced by the ‘mobile’ children of service personnel. Some of those listed by the Army Families Federation (AFF) include gaps in children’s learning leading to special educational needs (it is suggested that service children have typically attended at least five schools by the age of sixteen, with each move of school putting a child back by six months). 


In its report ‘Educating service children’ (2006), the House of Commons Defence Committee concluded: 

139. We consider it self-evident that the children of Service personnel should receive at least the same quality of schooling and educational opportunity as any child being educated in the UK. We demand much of our Service personnel, not least that they adopt a life style that is often turbulent and sometimes dangerous. In turn, Service personnel deserve assurance that their children’s education will not suffer because of their parent’s employment.

140. We are not convinced that the DfES and the MoD currently take the interests of Service children sufficiently into account. 

Looking at the past, as well as the present, it certainly not all doom and gloom in relation to service children’s education, though. Indeed, as many former service children can confirm, the military lifestyle can be an extraordinary education in itself. But with spending cuts looming, it is difficult to feel optimistic that school-age service children will receive the support that many will need in the future. 

For more on army/service children’s education through the centuries, visit TACA’s ‘Schooling’ page: http://www.archhistory.co.uk/taca/schooling.html.