Marcus Powell was a cheerful, happy-go-lucky child with a circle of good friends in the reception class at Trinity primary school in Hereford. His classmates seemed not to notice the side of Marcus’s face, described by his mother, Sam, as “looking as though a trench goes right down it”.
Marcus was born with a cleft lip and palate so has a gap in his lip and the roof of his mouth. The 15 operations he has needed have not helped the way he looks, but that had not concerned him.
Everything changed, though, when Marcus moved up a year and the children became more conscious of his disfigurement. “It was as though suddenly they saw me differently,” says Marcus, who is now 11. “They called me scarface or Moshi Monster and said I was ugly and they didn’t want to play with me. Before, I had lots of friends.”
Sam watched as her son became withdrawn and upset when it was time to go to school. “I realised he no longer mentioned friends. At first, he wouldn’t tell me what was happening and when he did and I suggested talking to the teachers he said he had done and they didn’t do anything.”
It was a similar story for Yasmin at secondary school. She had severe scarring after an illness and was teased and bullied a because of it. Yasmin veered between retreating into impenetrable silence and erupting into rages. She got no help from her school and, eventually, dropped out completely.
It is a wretchedly familiar scenario according to Changing Faces, the national charity working to support the visibly different and to counter prejudice. Jane Frances, policy adviser for the charity, talks of the huge effect of appearance bullying and the damage it does to children’s education. About 86,000 young people in the UK have significant facial disfigurement, she says. This is most often caused by congenital disorders, illness, accidents or skin conditions.
“The way these young people look makes them particularly vulnerable to staring, comments, questions, ostracism and bullying.”
It is not only those with a disfigurement who are affected by concerns about their appearance and who fear bullying. In a 2014 Girlguiding survey, 45% of 11- to 21-year-old females said they sometimes felt ashamed of the way they look, and 31% said they knew girls their age who had experienced bullying about a disability.
The problems around body image in schools and colleges have also been recognised by the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England, which is collaborating in a European commission-funded initiative to look at how this can be tackled. The Mirror Mirror project was set up to develop a teacher training pack of strategies to lower the dropout rates linked to how people feel about their appearance.
It was Sam Powell who learned that Changing Faces, as part of its Face Equality campaign, produces teaching resources for schools and runs training sessions with staff and pupils. The aim is to help them understand how a bullied child feels – but also to help the other pupils, who may be acting out of fear or a prejudice they cannot analyse.
Ann Pritchard, headteacher at Marcus’s primary school, Trinity, had not realised what was going on because he had kept his feelings hidden. However, when his mother explained how unhappy he was, she was keen to invite Changing Faces into school. There was a talk with the class teacher about Marcus’s situation, and discussions were held with all the children.
Pritchard is determined that her school should prioritise equality, and says: “I came in on these sessions explaining in more detail about Marcus having had a lot of operations, that he went through much pain and I wanted to help the children see that Marcus’s face has nothing to do with who he is as a person, so it is just cruel to attack him because of it. That led to us talking about diversity and how people are different in many ways.”
Pritchard says the work, initially intended to help children with disfigurement, has benefited all the pupils. “We now start with years 4 and 5 talking about body changes and body image because already then girls particularly are very aware.
“Now the children know that name calling and appearance-bullying will be challenged and I think that has made them feel more secure and happier.”
Changing Face’s teaching resources can be linked to the curriculum. For instance, drama offers an ideal opportunity for asking what facial expressions and body language say about our attitudes. In English, one exercise looks at how language about disfigurement affects attitudes.
Frances, a former teacher, has also worked with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to gather information to help Ofsted inspectors to ask the right questions when looking at schools’ equality policies. “With today’s emphasis on appearance, it is more important than ever that schools have a way of confronting staring, comments, questions, ostracism and bullying,” she says. “Without appropriate intervention, it so easily affects vulnerable children’s wellbeing and achievement.”
That is what happened with Adam, a year 8 student who has neurofibromatosis, which means his head and face are distended. His school performance was extremely poor and his behaviour bad. He got into verbal battles constantly and said his only pleasure in school was swearing and shouting. When Changing Faces came to his school, it became aware how little the staff understood Adam’s situation when a teacher asked “how long will he live?”
Adam was assessed as above-average intelligence. All the staff were given this information and the school used personal, social, health and economic lessons to raise the whole school’s awareness about visible difference. They organised a visit from a high-achieving adult with the same condition who talked to the pupils about his school experiences and how he had become successful. One-to-one support was arranged for Adam to begin studying again, he slowly made friends, and in due course went to university.
Meanwhile, at Trinity, Pritchard was startled at the positive effect the Changing Faces sessions had on the children. “Some were mortified and upset, there were even tears. They hadn’t thought about how Marcus might feel and how they were causing him unhappiness.”
Sam Powell says, with touching delight, that after the intervention Marcus had “his best year of all at Trinity”. Now he has moved to secondary school – along with a group of primary school classmates who became close friends.
