Writers have to be able to take risks, even if that means angering or upsetting people
In 2019, the iPaper published an extract from Kate Clanchy’s then-celebrated Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Though it prompted little criticism at the time, it’s hard to imagine it getting a pass today. Even the title — “what I learned from teaching in a unit landing troubled children too disruptive for school classrooms” — would, I suspect, provoke outrage. Imagine saying that about kids!
The title is not misleading in the sense that the descriptions of children are not flattering. “They don’t look well,” writes Clanchy. “Often, they don’t even look young”:
Simon has premature wrinkles on his forehead, Dave a middle-aged belly. The girls could be middle-aged too, mothers queuing defeated and harmless in the Co-op.
Having set up this image of abject passivity, she then delivers the next blow — that these children, excluded from mainstream classes, “are not harmless” after all: “Each one of these kids has the power to end learning in any mainstream classroom at any time, and each of their powers, as always in a gathering of superheroes, is different”. The piece goes on to detail the ways in which these children — fictional composites based on pupils Clanchy has taught — misbehave, often resorting to violence.
How one reads a text like this can depend on whom one identifies with at the time. It’s possible to have multiple responses at once. As someone who spent most of my twelfth year in an adolescent psychiatric unit, I bristle at terms such as “troubled” and “disruptive”, recalling the power held by those who would ascribe them. At the same time, I remember children who would behave exactly as Clanchy describes and the distress they would cause to others.
As someone who has family members with very different manifestations of autism — in one case, very high functioning, in another, extremely debilitating — I’m conscious that one person’s othering is another person’s basic reality, and that the privileging of one narrative over another can silence both sufferers and carers. And as the partner of someone who works in school inclusion, I’m also conscious that those who take on these teaching roles really do face incredible challenges — even if there are some who might even find the term “challenging” offensive.
So which “me” ought to be reading and responding to Clanchy’s text? Whom is it really for? The truth is I liked it, despite my discomfort. I liked it because it was saying things that those adults I knew who branded angry, frightened children “damaged” and “troubled” never got round to saying themselves. Clanchy situates the reactions of those she teaches within their social and political context, and in doing so offers hope: “no one is bad, though many are sad, and a few are mad […] Certainly, nothing the Excluded have done, no bit of ‘damage’ to desk, carpet, or person, is anything compared to the damage done to them”. This call for compassion would not work without the fairly brutal descriptions that preceded it. Clanchy is honest about what she sees and in doing so captures how others — many of whom would claim, in the abstract, never to judge — respond to children in these scenarios.
Of course, there’s a part of me that worries about this defence. Like Clanchy, I am middle class, and the way in which she writes about difficult backgrounds can at times seem to echo the way in which certain sectors of the press write about “troubled” families while ignoring abuses that take place in “more respectable” settings. And how does one distinguish between writing about one’s own prejudices without indulging or defending them? Having listened to the BBC podcast Anatomy of a Cancellation — which details Clanchy’s hounding when, in 2021, Some Kids was deemed by some to be racist, classist and ableist — I’m not convinced there is a way. Or rather, I think a kind of blurriness is central to what makes Clanchy’s writing on inclusion so effective and important. She is willing to get her hands dirty.
Episodes 2, 4 and 5 of the podcast offer a particularly effective illustration of the contrast between keeping your hands clean (and boosting little beyond your own self-image), and messily getting stuck in, even if it comes at the expense of your own status. In Episode 2 we hear from Clanchy’s critics who, while they may be correct about the uncomfortable phrasing of some sections, appear to read only as “myself as a child being othered”. There’s little awareness of the broader class context, or the relational nature of exclusion and care — that telling people, especially teachers and carers, what not to think, say or feel doesn’t necessarily make them more empathetic, or capable of getting to the root of individual crises. In Episode 5 we hear from one of the sensitivity readers who sought to “fix” Clanchy’s book following the uproar. The reviewer lists all the descriptions Clanchy apparently didn’t “need” to make (as if, for instance, it is more important not to be unflattering than it is to recognise the toll socio-economic disadvantage can take on young bodies).
Between these episodes we hear from one of the pupils whom Clancy actually helped. While he does not idealise Clanchy’s text, he defends her from the charges of white saviourism, emphasising how he felt supported and guided to reach his own potential. Obviously a much easier way not to be accused of white saviourism would be to just not get involved in other lives. Or, if one does get involved, to only speak or write about such things in the most sanitised terms. But who, then, would Clanchy have been protecting — the most vulnerable or a saintly image of herself?
A willingness to take risks is why Clanchy’s writing matters
Most people in caring or teaching don’t write the way Clanchy does. It’s easier to be thought of as good and compassionate if you never describe vulnerable people as difficult or challenging. Easier to reassure people that the only problem facing anyone who’s ever been excluded is stigma, and that even if Kate Clanchy is the one in a classroom having chairs thrown at her, you’d be much better at dealing with it thanks to your nice, pure thoughts. It’s something parents of severely autistic children deal with all the time — the moral superiority of those who consider themselves above recognising complex, ongoing suffering, and wouldn’t dream of committing the sin of trying to make other people’s lives better in any meaningful way.
A willingness to take risks is why Clanchy’s writing matters, and why it’s incredibly good news that Pan MacMillan’s CEO Joanna Prior has offered an apology to the writer four three years after she split from them. Some Kids was never about what a great person Kate Clanchy thought herself to be; that was part of the point. If her critics could finally learn that lesson, that would be progress indeed.
