In a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU), language often arrives like an object. Thrown like the paper aeroplanes that regularly grace the skies of their classrooms.
Sir, your clothes are shit.
Your jumper is old.
Your shoes are ugly.
The words themselves are not especially unusual in a PRU. However, I feel suddenly visible and on show. I wonder to myself whether my clothes are shit? Have my shoes seen one too many pub floors during half terms? Has my jumper seen better days? Both are fairly new, so surely not. The small class looks, and now the private has become public. There are only five students in the room. One pretends not to listen. Another is waiting to see if I will bite. Two have gone roaming around the corridors. And the young person who made the comment leans back slightly, waiting to see if the words have landed. They have. Loud and clear. The pause for thought is an embarrassment. The pupils are just being rude, you say. They are avoiding work. Maybe testing a boundary. Seeking a laugh. Perhaps all these things can be true at the same time. The quantum possibilities of the PRU. But another question matters too: why this insult, at this moment, in this room?
I’m a teacher in a secondary PRU. I previously trained in adult psychodynamic psychotherapy and have worked in safeguarding throughout my career. Also, I’m dyslexic, and mentioning that isn’t only to give me an opportunity to have a go at the guy who made the word so hard to spell; it later becomes relevant to the story.
The mythology of the PRU
A PRU is where young people often end up after mainstream schools decide they can no longer manage their behaviour. There is a sense among my teaching friends that PRUs have a strange mythology. Places of rampant behaviour and violence. However, this doesn’t paint a full picture and fails to convey what lies beneath the behaviour of young people who struggled to be educated in mainstream settings. These are the young people that many schools wanted to move on from. Many caused extreme disruption. Many would likely have been better served in smaller internal provisions adjacent to mainstream schools.
For the most part, behaviour in schools is seen as an incident. Logged. Discussed and given a consequence. It’s neat and serves a purpose. But rarely does it capture the psychological complexity attached to behaviour. Now, the number of times I have heard people say the phrase ‘behaviour is communication’ warrants psychoanalysis in itself. However, while the phrase is true, it does not always capture how practitioners in PRUs experience communication from young people, which can often be immensely psychologically cutting.
Clothes as a second skin
The insults described above are not random. Clothes are how we meet the world. They represent so much; they are our surface and, potentially, our protection. Not that I wear a suit, but suits are often referred to as modern-day armour. As such, clothes carry class, gender, and taste. They can signal poverty and neglect. When they are seen, and I mean really seen by a class in a PRU rather than on the runway in Milan, they can be judged, laughed at, or rejected.
Clothes are our second skin. They cover the body, but simultaneously reveal so much. In adolescence, particularly, clothes become the site of status, shame, and identity. The insult about my barely new Nikes reversed the gaze. It made me visible first. Before I could see them, they made sure the room was looking at me. The spotlight turns outward. I realised that as I held the line and saw the holes in the jumper of the young person who had critiqued mine. What the young person said to me could be perceived as both a defensive attack and an echo. In that moment, I feel the young person talking to themselves through me.
It’s only words, you say. Don’t overthink it with psychoanalysis, James. Even so, you will know – if you have stepped into the amphitheatre of a classroom – that words do things. They can create an audience and puncture authority. They have the power to make an adult powerless and ashamed, potentially bringing up their personal history. Quickly, the teacher can become the victim, the enemy, the punisher, or the clown. The insult not only describes the adult, but it can also organise them.
Psychodynamically, one way to think of this is that the shame is relocated as the feeling that is too internally painful for the young person to bear is pushed outward. The adult is then made to feel exposed or inadequate. The young person who fears humiliation acts first. The adult is made to carry the meaning of the jumper with holes. The adult is dressed in the young person’s shame.
When words find the bruise
I have a passing interest in clothes, but this doesn’t hit as hard as other topics. The process I am describing happens in the PRU every day across many different contexts. With clothes, I can regulate. My chest does not tighten in the same way. I can hold the line. I can hold the boundary. Another example is around a young person calling me stupid. That’s the politically correct version, of course. But it cuts deep to the heart of how I experience learning with my struggles around dyslexia. A comment on my trainers can irritate me, but it does not undo me. Being called stupid is different. That word finds an older bruise.
Working in a PRU, the adult often feels the communication before they can think about it. The bruise of academic shame is one that I’ve had the privilege to work through with a fancy psychotherapist. But dyslexia means I understand feeling slow in rooms built for speed; the feeling of scanning a page and the body tightening before the mind has caught up is a familiar one. The young person has no such privilege to reflect on this.
Later, I blankly stare at their work after the lesson. They are much further behind than the insult allowed me to feel. Their written words claw and fight to finish the sentence in the right order. What do you do with all this as a teacher? Your feeling of humiliation is just as real as the reason the student acts out defensively, passing you their shame like a rocket volley to the chest. We all have history, and we can’t deny this. The professional task is not to pretend that the feeling is not there. It is to avoid volleying it back.
The urge to return shame
The honest part is that I want to retaliate. I might not admit it to myself, but sitting with shame is uncomfortable. I do want to return it. Not dramatically like a comedy roast, but more subtly, through a slightly sharper tone, a sarcastic line the following day, or a consequence delivered with a few more degrees of heat. This makes sense. These verbal attacks are designed for a response. To elicit something from me. Returning the humiliation completes the circuit, as the shame moves from the young person to the teacher and then right back again.
As adults, it is our responsibility to interrupt the circle of shame. A more effective response might be something like, “That comment is not okay. I’m not going to argue with you in front of everyone. We’ll come back to it.” The first sentence sets the boundary. The second refuses the performance. The third keeps repair possible. Waves of verbal abuse will come, and you must resist and set a boundary.
Holding the line
We have a psychodynamic empathy here that is different from softness. It is the discipline of staying emotionally available when under siege, whether it be about your trainers or your intelligence. Empathy is the easy part. The difficult part is to keep thinking when a young person, through the attempted transfer of their shame, is trying to stop you from doing so.
The trick here is not to become immune to young people’s words. Rather, it is noticing what has been placed on us without dressing the young person back in it. The boundary still matters, as does the consequence. But if the adult can survive this insult without turning it into a site of further humiliation, then something different becomes possible. The shame has somewhere to go without creating another wound.
Four pauses after the insult
I will leave you with a tool to help you think before you react: The Four Pauses. What felt attacked, what emotions were stirred, what may have been transferred, and, importantly, how to respond without humiliating the young person.
Pause 1: The surface
What was attacked: clothes, body, voice, authority, intelligence, gender, class, competence?
Pause 2: The feeling
What did the attack make me feel: exposed, stupid, ashamed, powerless, angry?
Pause 3: The transfer
Is it possible the young person was struggling with a version of this feeling?
Pause 4: The response
How do I hold the boundary without returning humiliation?
