To think droves of teachers will make the decision by husband made today- to leave

He's been coping ok lately but he is also good at masking so it can be hard to tell.

No can't home school. Single parent with almost full time job and not much help. I'm also disabled.

And no, can't possibly afford the cheapest private school..

All I can do is complain every couple of months. I feel as broken as the system today. I pray for better funding for schools but I also know this is a bigger societal issue. We've got lord of the flies on a grand scale now. No empathy. No respect for themselves or others. I can't bear it. My beautiful boy doesn't belong with those nasty kids. It's cruel.

Thank you for listening though. I feel the need to offload at least. I'm so stressed and upset this evening.

@Windywuss don't feel bad for challenging them. It is probably water off a duck's back. If the bullying is really bad and the school are ineffective, I'd be tempted to keep my child off school for a while. Can you homeschool for a period? Is private an option? I would be concerned about the toll this is taking on your child's mental health.

Whether or not the test was introduced for poor reasons, I see absolutely nothing wrong with that list of grammatical terms. They all refer to commonplace parts of speech etc. Knowing the proper names for things is good. Being able to analyse how sentences work can be helpful.

British adults largely seem rather scared of grammatical terminology. It sounds alien to them because most of them never learned in themselves. That doesn't mean they should assume their children can't cope with it. Children in other European countries seem to learn grammar properly. That's probably one of the reasons they tend to be better at learning foreign languages.

I should say they were trying but it's ineffective overall.

No other options. I felt school were trying but it's gone quiet lately and I fear the head of year leaving.

All schools that are feasible and decent have huge waiting lists and we're not near enough. I've been told by their admissions to get an ehcp before even bothering to try and move.

No guarantee it doesn't happen elsewhere either. 80% of autistic kids are bullied. What an awful statistic.

I really regret my actions today. I've been in tears all evening worrying about it.

That sounds appalling. Have you checked the school's bullying policy on their website? Are they following it? Can you put in a formal complaint if they are not? It sounds an absolutely terrible environment for your child. Do you have other options? Sorry lots of questions!

I work in the NHS and the entitlement of some people and their utter disregard for the rights of others astounds me daily. I do think society has become very selfish and no one dares challenge terrible behaviour, adults and children’s, for fear of been complained about or being verbally or physically attacked. Unfortunately this has fed into how children are raised and how they subsequently behave in schools.

I grew up in the 80s and went to the nearest comprehensive school. I never really appreciated how much discipline and order there was in my old school until I started reading these threads. We stood up when an adult entered the classroom and didn’t sit down until the teacher said we could. If you misbehaved badly enough you were expelled and your parents were responsible for finding another school to take you. We had the very low staff turnover and always had specialist maths and physics teachers. Nowadays you would have to pay for that sort of education.

They don’t know how. There are people who lack basic communication skills, their modus operandi is usually to ‘kick off’. Anyone working in public facing roles will have met them. As rights have overtaken responsibilities that kind of behaviour has grown. Sadly.

I have emailed the school. I'm absolutely mortified.

I got a real sense of what my child puts up with. There were so many of them and they all talk at once, so mouthy and so incredibly rude. I lost all sense of exactly who said what. It was just awful.

They don't respect anyone. One child slapped another across the face while I was stood there too, screaming and swearing.

I told them that I was disgusted at how they speak and their behaviour was appalling. They don't care. I just despair. I feel like I've failed my child.

I should not have spoken to them. I've probably made it worse. But I am not someone who can ignore terrible behaviour. I've always stood up for what I think is right. It seems you can't do that now. I'm probably lucky I wasn't assaulted. I'm dreading my child going to school tomorrow.

I have emailed school twice in two days and once last week. No reply so far.

The phonics check is an aberration. As a dyslexia specialist I use a phonics check to help me decide if a child is dyslexic. This useful tool has been taken away from me by making every child do it. Teachers teaching to the test as they always do has made standardised tests such as I use useless. If children can read real words they don’t need to practice nonsense words. And if they can’t read real words they need to be taught how to read them not how to read nonsense words.

Do contact the school about that verbal assault. In fact, I would contact the police too.

I haven't rtft but my child's head of year has quit due to stress. I'm very sad about it. She's wonderful and a good person. My son's year group are horrendous. They've bullied my child since y7. I can't get a different school without ehcp. Can't get ehcp for at least two years.

Today a child of 13 called me a cunt when I challenged their behaviour bullying my child in front of me when I collected him. I'm really scared for our society. Wish I could leave the country frankly.

I don’t get why people can’t see that working together would be in the best interest of the child, and for our society in the future. Maybe it’s an ego thing, I don’t know…..my school really helped my daughter through a bad time, and I am so grateful to them.

I have worked as management in a special school (amongst many other senior roles) where behaviour can be extreme in terms of staff assaults and attacks. Parents will fight you on everything and expect the school to be managed according to their own child. It is incredibly hard to sanction children, especially without parental support. Especially at secondary school age.

I glanced at Rosen's breakdown of the Sats test. He is snooty about the fact that 'artisans' (printers in this case - so literate men) invented punctuation, so not erudite, clever people. How snobbish can you get?

Sorry, if you write 'the sun shone bright' except in a poem, you have made a grammatical error. As long as you know it's an error that is fine - you will have had good reason for using 'bright' rather than 'brightly' (I think it sounds better, so I'd use it) but if you do it because you don't understand that it is grammatically wrong you are writing without clarity.

Well, if it's doing all that (and healthcare ain't free btw, it's paid for through taxation and it's good or bad according to post code and also what is wrong with you) then it's mis-spending. Nationalize the utility and water companies (re-nationalize) and make them do the work we need: affordable power for industry, clean water and waterways. Don't pay child credits - that's just subsidising crappy employers (part of the very well-off's welfare state to the detriment of the rest of us). Instil discipline in schools by allowing the exclusion permanently of disruptive pupils so the rest can have an education. Make state education as good as that bought (tax free) by richer parents e.g. include the arts and the humanities, not just STEM.
Stop forcing parents out to work whilst leaving their children in nurseries. Unlike other European countries, the UK does not care about the educational outcome of childcare (though it says it does) but only to make sure every economic unit is out there making money for the rich (who benefit massively from the NHS, the welfare state - above child credits and also payments to workers to top up wages - and the services which we all need but they use more e.g. police, defence). When a society calls the mother of three children under five unemployed there is something deeply rotten at its core.

This thread has been an interesting read. I don't think the reason there's such bad behaviour in schools these days is just because there's loads of bad parents now. There's always been shit parents saying students vape in the toilets like it's a new thing when they were smoking in the toilets decades ago. There's always been angry spiteful kids but in the past they wouldn't dare get caught so they'd take it out on weaker kids or bunk off school to go out on some mischief.

I think the difference now is the teachers can't do shit to discipline these kids if you even shout at one you run the risk of being reported and sacked. Which emboldens them further. Can't even expel them because it looks bad on the Ofsted so everyone has to suffer their bad behaviour the classmates and the teachers, reading about the pregnant teachers who have miscarried because they've had things thrown at them is especially infuriating

Nobody is saying that we shouldn't teach grammar at all. It's just that the depth of knowledge required of 11-year-olds is unnecessary. How often do you think about these things when you are writing? They have all come from this year's SATs paper.

adverbial
passive
past progressive
prepositions
simple past
co-ordinating conjunction
modal verb
relative clause
noun phrase
subordinate clause
preposition phrase
possessive pronoun
relative pronoun

As Michael Rosen says, "Please let's bear in mind right from the start that this test was NOT introduced because a group of grammarians and educationists said that it would be a good idea if 10 and 11 year olds knew this stuff. It was only introduced for one reason, as stated clearly in the Bew Report (2011). That is, that it would be a good way to assess teachers. Why? Because (again the Bew Report) 'grammar' has right and wrong answers. There is not a grammarian in the world who would or could seriously claim that. Language is not regular. The descriptions of language are not regular. As one simple example, as Professor David Crystal pointed out with the first of these Grammar tests, there was a question about the sun shining 'brightly'. The word the children had to insert was 'brightly'. If children wrote 'bright' that was wrong. It wasn't wrong, it's a 'variant usage'. Let's never forget that 'variant usages' are the nightmare of every examiner of these tests. In life, it's what makes us interesting. "

https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2024/06/this-years-ks2-grammar-punctuation-and.html

I think it's quite sad that people, including teachers and graduates in English, see little or no need for grammar knowledge.

In music, sport, any field where you wish to master your subject, you learn the rules. Yet our own language apparently doesn't merit this.

In my Scottish state primary school in a working class area many years ago we learned lots of grammar. That all disappeared soon afterwards from the curriculum.

It enabled me to learn foreign languages to a high standard. I know not everyone wants to learn other languages but I am firmly of the belief that our economy has suffered because of our very low achievements in languages. And anyway, a high standard of English is important in many jobs for clarity and accuracy.

I know the OP was about bad behaviour in schools so this is off topic but important!

Michael Rosen does a good breakdown of the issues with it if you're interested in why.

Thank you - I’ll check it out.

I’ve worked in a school and my DCs have been through the education system and it does seem to be getting worse wrt behaviour. Is it parenting/social media or what?
When my DS was at primary and he was rude to me at home I said - you wouldn’t talk to your head teacher like that so don’t say it to me & he said he was scared of his HT (hated getting told off at school) so that’s why he behaved there & was a bugger at home!
I am sorry your dh has found it so tough, but some parents are just really entitled and can’t see their perfect child has done wrong. I have seen it myself.

Me too.

That's the point of the nonsense words. They should not have to make sense of the word to read it using phonics. Using context to identify a word in a text is a poor reader's strategy, not a good reader's strategy (shown by the fact that 'better readers' make mistakes, i.e. turn a nonsense word such as 'strom' into a real word: 'storm'). A good reader reads the word actually there and then says, I don't know that word, how do I work out what it MEANS, cue using context for meaning and own general knowledge (point of a knowledge rich curriculum) or asking the teacher - what does Brobdignagian mean? or get a dictionary and look it up.
The 'better readers who perform less well because their brain is leaping ahead to make sense of what they are reading' are the poor readers. They are using context and meaning to decode a word. The 'good readers' are the one's who can read 'phob' with automaticity (and possibly ask what it is, but the pictures show it is the name of an alien creature) because they can decode. They will use their knowledge of things/people/ideas to work out what the word means whilst your 'better readers' are struggling to work out what a letter string (aka word) says from the words they recognise around it.
https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-letters-cambridge-typoglycaemia points out that although we do use word shape and prediction when we are reading that is not as revealing as it would appear (also the text given has never been used in any research). Good readers can read the jumbled text, with effort, acting just like a poor reader using word shape etc. That does not mean reading using word-shape, prediction and context (and pictures! where are the pictures in the Tractatus?) are good strategies for reading. They are strategies for reading for people who have not learnt to read using phonics, some of whom may never read well, and many will never read for pleasure because actual reading is much too hard for them to also enjoy the story.