I have just watched something which I found utterly, utterly sickening. Last night’s Panorama program was discussed on this morning’s BBC Breakfast show, and what I saw earlier compelled me to watch it. It was an expose of a special school up in Liverpool, where pupils with autism and ADHD were shown to be regularly bullied and abused. I don’t want to say too much about it because the program speaks perfectly well for itself, other than it sickens me that things like this are still going on today. From the footage we see, it was clear that the halfwitted scumbags who were supposed to be teaching and looking after these young people had just assumed that they would be immune from any sort of repercussions, and so took perverse pleasure in bullying and belittling them. It obviously helped them to feel better about their selves, but you have to wonder how such vile, inferior cretins came to be employed in such schools in the first place.

Mind you, I think more could be said about the type of school it is. The program mentioned but did not emphasise the fact that it was a ‘free school’, part of David CaMoron’s pet project to create essentially more private schools. As such, it would have had to go through much less regulation than state schools do, which may well explain why it could employ such sickeningly unqualified and inappropriate members of staff. I seriously doubt that we would see behaviour like this in any ‘ordinary’ special school – I certainly hope not anyway – so I think this is, at least in part, a repercussion of the Tory quest to turn education over to private hands. In doing so they opened schools, especially special schools, up to abuse like this. It really worries me how much more of this disgusting behaviour could be going on; with more and more young people being diagnosed as having SEN these days, this could be just the tip of an utterly repugnant iceberg.