Funding may not be the issue in schools?

Some of this but by no means all, is that children go to school very early in the UK. The little boy next door will be attending school in September aged about 4 1/2, in my view he shouldn't have to go till Christmas when he'd be rising 5 and just more adept at everything.
The cutlery/nappies thing is awful. I don't know why parents can't get sorted but there obviously needs to be much more support for them, Surestart centres etc. Some of it is social change. I would have been ashamed to send a child in nappies to school but some people are not. Do we exclude the child? Dunno, they are possibly better off in school.

It's not a schools issue. The problem is systemic, this was identified in the 1990s and measures were put in place to address it holistically rather than just throwing funding to patch up the holes where they appeared. Ignore Iraq, focus on the manifesto that Blair-Brown came in with and it's focus on Education, Education, Education. The investment made in early years and parenting support alongside broader changes in education.

It was entirely predictable that subsequent austerity cuts that stripped out Sure Start, support services for children and young people, support services for new parents, etc. from the system would lead to cascading problems in parenting skills, child development, behaviour, resilience and ability to cope, mental health, etc. over the next decade.

Covid was just the icing on the cake - throw a major stressor at the population 5+ years after you stopped providing them with the skills and support to be able to cope. This just accelerated a decade of decline into 3 years.

If measures were put in place next week, it will still be a decade for the current problems to work their way out of the system, and there will still be a forgotten generation working their way through life without the skills that should have been taught and developed from pre-school. And this generation is going to need extra support to help them become better parents in turn.

One of my Dc has moderate learning disabilities. In the 80's/90's when I was at school he would have been at special school for definite. Now he is in mainstream. He started school in nappies and didn't have an ehcp until year 3. My youngest has autism. He's 10 but with the emotional development of a 3 year old. He's in mainstream too. In my area there are 2 special needs schools and neither take children who are academically able. You have to go to private specialist school at a huge cost to the LA or struggle in mainstream.

We need Camhs to work properly, waiting list for asd/adhd assessments to be a few months maximum, not years. Also we have to remember that some children struggle for years before being allowed to join the waiting list. One of My son's was showing symptoms of autism aged 1. I was robbed off for years but he finally got on the waiting list aged 14. He is now 16 and still on the waiting list. We need the nhs to see children with medical issues promptly, not have children waiting for 9 months to get grommets. We need sure start and We need early help and the family intervention service to work properly. We need social services to work too. We need proper support for young carers.

We need more TAs, more pastoral support, more equipment. We need affordable school uniform and we need the threshold for pupil premium and free school meals to be higher. £7k household income is ridiculously low.

We also need more respect for school staff and other professionals. So many times on here I've seen people criticising health visitors or nursery staff or schools. Now we have Google we think we know more than someone who has a degree and years of training and experience.

I think we need to reframe what education is for.

It is not just about passing exams but about getting life skills, being 'oven ready' for the adult world.

This is a complex notion. In our broken society (and it is broken) many people are unable to provide all this for their children in the home setting. This could be because they have never been taught themselves or because the pressures of their lives do not allow them to do it. I am applying this theory to all levels of society. There is significant neglect in many affluent families.

So - if what we need as a society is citizens who can contribute tax and have fulfilling lives then we need to provide supports to help them get there. At the moment it is schools who are filling the gap. It is actually difficult to imagine a body better placed to do this given the time they spend with our children.

Parental support can make a huge difference.

Funding is also required but no good just throwing it at schools if you don’t throw it at other services too.

One thing I also noticed when I came back here was the level of interference by the school in our lives. I was quite shocked by it. I can’t quite explain what it was, but I definitely felt it. It is like the state is responsible for your DC, not the parent. It felt like a wedge between me and my DC. It just felt different to when I was overseas, and the school did a great job, but you dropped them off and picked them up, and there was no interference. Even now, I feel the teachers at my DC’s school overstep the mark and do things which is not their job. Whether that is their choice I don’t know. I think maybe it is the state who has told them it is their responsibility to look out for issues as parents are doing such a terrible job.

So, I agree. There is a blur between where parenting ends and school starts. An overlap. It takes resources away from the school when what they should be doing is teaching, not parenting.

We have become used to a sub standard education system. Classes should be no more than 20. EHCPS should be sorted in two weeks. TA’s in every classroom that they are needed. Laptops for every single student. High quality graduate teachers for every subject. A proper full time school nurse. Sufficient administrative staff and plenty of books and equipment. Parental support is absolutely vital but schools also need a lot of money.

My sister teaches in a primary school in a working class multicultural area. She says the biggest problem is declining behaviour. In particular more and more incidents of overtly and detailed racist insults between children. In some cases the parents will defend their children and even in one case agreed with their views, upon which a safeguarding referral was made.

My sister says this is now so serious it's affecting education overall. She says it's got worse since Covid.

I think it’s Ofsted, unreasonable expectations for all staff, dire wages for TAs,a rubbish curriculum and a severe lack of SEN funding that are the main issues. Some of these issues could be put right with a better government.

We have to teach the cohort we have.

It's all very well saying parents used to do x, y and z but you can't force a chikd to have better parents.

To some extent, I can see that school funding could be kept similar, if there was a huge increase in funding for social services, parenting courses, school nursing teams, SaLTs OTs, mental health support, housing, food, heating, outreach, alternative provisions etc and cut backs there have put enormous pressure on schools as the chikdren have a legal right to be in school, whereas there is no legal right to heating.

But I also think schools need to be able to fund safe buildings and appropriate staff and learning resources. Which they are struggling with.

My two teacher friends are worn out mainly by the behaviour of the pupils.
So funding is needed but that’s a crisis in schools currently.

There are a lot of places where money will improve things - mending crumbling buildings, updating not fit for purpose IT systems, buying a few glue sticks... the list goes on.

I understand what you are saying about having to do more but there is now an expectation in society that schools can somehow resolve many social problems. The problem is that all the other agencies are as cash strapped as schools so if they need to refer a child to social services for example the council social services department may well reject because the bar is too high. Or they take the child on but push all the expectations for action upon the school.

It's a really complex issue and goes way beyond a cash injection. However working in a properly resourced and functioning school will and can reduce stress on staff and students. That needs money.

It's not just funding cuts in schools, it's that schools are picking up the pieces for more funding cuts everything.

Benefit cuts/freezes - more hungry, cold, stressed kids that need support. Cuts to social care/council services - parents turning to schools for support because they are the only "frontline" services still open. Waiting lists for speech therapy/physio/paeds - children arriving at school with delays they have not had any support for. None of these are "parenting" issues in the sense of stable families just not doing their job. Austerity has led to many people having more unstable lives and fewer places to seek help.

YABU
actually we do need entire departments for pastoral care. Bullying was rife when I was at school whereas that behaviour is now dealt with swiftly by the schools my children attended.
children with SEN deserve time and attention.
we are higher rate earners and very happy to pay more tax for these things, and a functioning NHS. Sometimes funding and more staff IS the answer

Surely more funding IS the baseline for improving education?
Higher wages would keep and attract more teachers.
More TAs would help teachers in the classroom.
Money spent on essential supply's and improving schools.
Dedicated staff for Sen.
I could go on. If education is to improve we need to seriously invest in it.

I too think it is both.

I used to live overseas in a small, very overpopulated place. There are so many DC, versus resources, that they have 2 school shifts in a day. One starts really early, and the other in the afternoon. Class sizes are 35. Despite this, these DC are one of the highest educated in the world. They are top in maths globally. The reason is that the culture there is one of “education is everything. It is the answer to all problems” and the parents and government support this. A teacher can stand in front of 35 DC and they will listen, and they are respectful. Learning doesn’t stop with school, they all carry on doing courses and self development afterwards. There is a “Life Long Learning” campaign by the government. As a result of living there my DC have done really well in school back in the UK because this culture and attitude to learning really rubbed off on me. Funny how back here, I am criticised by friends and peers for being obsessed with education, and harsh on my DC, but I am often told my 2 are well rounded, have healthy doses of self esteem and humility and are resilient.

Yes, there are budget issues here in the UK, but there are some very deep rooted attitude and behavioural problems. I saw it at my own state school 40 years ago, and it has only got worse.

One thing that boils my blood here is that people think we have no resources or opportunities here in the UK. It is laughable. We get to go to school and college for free. We have access to fast internet, libraries, 2nd hand book shops and resources online. We have top Universities. Once you leave school and Uni you can access lots of courses and self development. Since lockdown I have done 3 Free courses online that I have added to my CV things I have no connection with whatsoever. If I want to learn something I can find it very easily locally or online.

But the question is, do we take advantage of all these resources? No we don’t. Very few of us develop ourselves, despite everything around us. We have taken all our educational opportunities for granted.

My DC have done very well at school. I put this down to the discipline I instilled at home, and the support we gave them. They are expected to work hard and get good grades. If my DC came home and they had bullied someone or been disrespectful to a teacher, they would be in a lot of trouble. I’d been told loads of times in parent evenings that my DC are kind, respectful, engaged and a delight to teach.

You can throw as much money as you want at schools, but if there is no discipline, poor behaviour, and a large chunk of the DC don’t want to learn, it is pointless. I have a good friend who is a supply teacher in our area, a nice MC leafy suburb. She now says she won’t go to two of the local schools as the DC (mostly year 9-11) are too abusive to the teachers. I work with a lot of 16-25 year olds and they just have no ambition or work ethic and it infuriates me that Kier Starmer wants people like me, who give a very massive shit about my DC’s education, to get back in my box, and not get above my station by sending my enthusiastic DC to an independent school.

My sons Y6 class has at least 5 children with an EHCP for autism (including him) and at least 2 others who are clearly experiencing other difficulties.

He now has a specialist place at senior costing the LA £70k a year. There’s a state provision which was our first choice but they said his needs couldn’t be met there.

My son will be going to a school of 100 ish pupils so that’s £7m a year for children who all have an EHCP which dictates specialist care for ASD.

If the state actually invested in schools and trained teachers and made it pleasant to work in them and fully supported staff and pupils it wouldn’t be the shit show it is.

Many private school kids have 2 parents working full time. They still get potty trained before starting pre-school, still come to school in the right uniform, still get breakfast. The same type of wealthy parents ime who send their kids to state then let things slip. So it’s not just a poor person problem.

Are some parents very poor at parenting? Yes, absolutely. But if only funding hadn’t been cut to things like sure start, CAMHS etc we wouldn’t be in such a pickle with schools left to pick up the pieces.

This. Pupils with poor parents deserve help to break the cycle.

If two parents in most families have to work a lot of hours from when their children are very small, inevitably we have to hand more of the essential parenting skills over to other people eg potty training, eating with cutlery. Has to be done at home but if your children are in some form of childcare from the age of 1, the childcare provider has to take that on too and work with the family. This naturally then extends to schools, and carries through eg with mental health.

Society has changed and what role schools play has had to change with it. They need more money to do it and pay has to keep pace. What the NHS could or should provide is a different question.

Not what you said in your OP.

schools didn't need entire departments dedicated to mental health and pastoral care.

Children with SEN didn’t used to be entitled to an education. So those kids were at home and didn’t require any expensive support. Let’s not go back to that.

Are some parents very poor at parenting? Yes, absolutely. But if only funding hadn’t been cut to things like sure start, CAMHS etc we wouldn’t be in such a pickle with schools left to pick up the pieces.

People want a fully compressive welfare state but aren’t prepared to pay for it like the Nordics. And the expectations are higher.