Bayly was never excluded from school; he excluded himself.""Whenever somebody mentions school it sends shivers down my spine""I think I was bullied by my teacher in junior school and then, towards the end of it, by the other kids in the class," says Bayly Pike. It was a great success, but fiendishly expensive, and it broke Tom and I to send him there. But when he was 11 we had to find something equivalent in a secondary school."The Pikes then tried a weekly boarding school After just over one term, Bayly refused to go. This was followed by quite a long period of private tutoring before he went to a state school for "delicate" children:"But it was full of very tough, often quite emotionally disturbed children, very alien to anything Bayly had come across before, in huge contrast to the private school It was hard for him and he got very scared. After a year, she suggested that if Bayly was going to do GCSEs, he needed to be attached to some educational organisation and she suggested Francis Barber Bayly was appalled.
He thought some of the children who had been at the "delicate" school would be there. After a couple of terms he said he couldn't go back, he just snapped."A local private school was the next attempt but the strict discipline was too stressful for Bayly He lasted for about a term:"By now he was 14 We decided to get a private tutor. Bayly is intelligent and articulate but has a slight paralysis on the left-hand side of his body, one of the effects of which is that he has learning difficulties similar to dyslexia He is also highly anxious. Bayly coped well with school until he was about seven years old when, Jane says, he became "school phobic":"Tom and I had to carry him, literally screaming, into the school.
It was the most heartbreaking thing in my life, every day this screaming and crying."We tried a little private school with very small classes. What really breaks my heart is that, if we'd been informed, he could have gone to Francis Barber at a much earlier stage and his education might have been a very different picture.""We had to carry him screaming into the school"Jane Pike, a business development manager, and her husband Tom, an architect, have two children; 16-year-old Bayly is the younger. One major reason for children not wanting to be at school is because it's not safe for them to be there."As one parent commented: "For people like us - middle class professionals - there is a black hole that you fall into because the local authorities think your child will be all right. All is calm and welcoming, though Ratcliffe observes that there are sometimes "flare ups".There are, Ratcliffe observes, a stack of reasons why children don't want to go to school:"There is a significant group who find the whole experience of school so overwhelming, so intimidating and with pressures too difficult to deal with that the only way to escape those is to vote with their feet They just don't go. The standard offer at Francis Barber is a core curriculum of three half-day sessions; some pupils receive more, others less, with the majority staying for an average of two to three terms. One solution they may be offered is the PRU - Pupil Referral Unit.