The two-parter is about children who have been excluded from mainstream education and have instead been sent to High Close, a Barnados-run residential school in Berkshire, in an attempt to sort out their behavioural problems. And sadly, 12-year-old Courtney, whom this first episode focused on, had plenty of those.
In many ways, Courtney seemed mature beyond her years – she looked like a teenager and swore like a sailor. But she has ADHD (and, the staff at High Close suspected, numerous other undiagnosed issues including a learning disability. Courtney’s mother Sara had her when she was just 16, and was one of a long line of women in her family to suffer violence and abuse.
Often in these documentaries, the families come across as hopeless cases, but Courtney was clearly loved and cared for – she just appeared to be beyond anyone’s control.
In some ways, it was tough to sympathise – Courtney’s behaviour was consistently maddening (at her worst, we saw her kicking and screaming at staff when she was gently asked not to get involved in a snowball fight) and she seemed to revel in the special treatment and attention it brought her. But when she said she felt like there was “a little cell inside me ’ead that says ‘I don’t care’,” it was heartbreaking.
The sad ending, when High Close ran out of ideas and referred Courtney to another special school, had even the toughest staff at the centre in tears. It was all rather bleak – especially when you consider that Courtney and next week’s subject, Josh, are just two of 6,000 children who are excluded from school every year.
ITV recently revisited Kelly and her Sisters, the fly-on-the-wall programme about a family on a run-down Birmingham estate and showed us that they’re mostly doing alright, thank you very much. It would be nice if Channel 4 did the same with these lost children – you never know, it could prevent Courtney from becoming a lost adult.
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