To ask teachers about disruptive behaviour in secondary schools?

It takes ours the whole of lunchtime to get their food and the supervision of the queue is inadequate tbf so there is running, pushing in, shouting for the whole lunch period. They also wander the corridors with their food. We have no plates or cutlery.

The HOY was speaking form experience. He said in meetings the SLT say behaviour at lunch is good because they literally count the reported incidents up. . It isn't.

No that's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is the system is interpreted as meaning that they need to be warned first, even for serious misdemeanour. Really they shouldn't pass go.

I would argue with your system , the writing on the board can become a competition. Also, if that's not formally logged how do behaviour staff know which kids ae picking up loads of one off warnings?

There is no perfect system but, personally, I am extremely adverse to one that involves letting them do something shit as if everyone is allowed to. Just don't do the shot thing in the first place!

Having taught for a loooooong time, I would say the skills of many new entrants in terms of bossing their own classrooms are not what they once were.

Disagree with this. When the kids are queuing up in the canteen to eat their lunch there are behaviour expectations and they are supervised. It's when they've finished eating their lunch and are bored and looking for mischief that things really start to kick off. Shortening lunch gets rid of the really unstructured bit of unstructured time.

Surveys show that kids also don't want the longer lunches (at secondary) because they get bored, there's nowhere to go and they aren't allowed on their phones.

A very wise HOY said to me yesterday 'when SLT say short lunches improve behaviour, what they actually mean is it halves the incidents'...

I totally agree-but in my previous school we had to reduce lunch time to 30 mins because of the amount of vandalism, bullying and feral behaviour from a sizeable minority of pupils. It’s just awful ».

In our local, Ofstec outstanding secondary school, a bit more than 50% of pupils have been excluded at least once in the last year…

Management/HT/SLT need to remember that they have a duty of care to their employees not just to the pupils.
HTs need to remember that just because a teacher disagrees with their plan it is not an excuse to get rid of them.
HTS ned to remember that experienced teachers and long term members of staff are needed in schools and shouldn't be forced out because they are expensive.

We don't log warnings on the computer, just write their name on the board, so warnings aren't recorded anywhere.

So in your case, you've said that you've intervened to improve their behaviour, but there is no follow-up if they don't improve their behaviour? You can only send them out of the lesson if they do something bad enough to warrant it in a one-off incident rather than persistently low-level disruption?

Then you get parents moaning at the school about how little Johnny is being picked on for wearing trainers or little Sally for wearing leggings and all it does is undermine the school when the parents joins in with their kid in moaning about how unfair it all is, (Or worse, a Daily Mail sad face article).

If the school uniform is shoes or trousers, then don't be surprised if the school tries to enforce shoes or trousers. And just tell your kid 'those are the rules so stop wearing your leggings to school and put on these trousers I've bought you'.

Also, I wouldn't count your example as needing to log a warning. I'd just tell them in no uncertain terms to fermez their bouches and get on with teaching.

I don't have time to faff about with my laptop to log a warning.

Yeah, but what this has led to in our school is teachers being told (or assuming) they should have warned little Ian first for calling Violet a dreadful name , or spitting , or hitting Jonty.

Isn't that a double punishment? Or do you mean the rest of that day?

Our school now operates a system somewhat in between the two you have described. But we still have RJ mush to everyone's chagrin.

I'm lucky . I have well behaved classes anyway (touch wood) but, even when I had some rogues, I somehow managed to circumvent the tyranny of the spreadsheet and logging warnings etc. Probably because my classroom is far away from the axis of power.

Parents tend to hate this sort of thing though 'I don't understand why they are so strict about uniform/homework/equipment' - because that's setting the culture where the kids actually do what they are told which feeds into everything else.

I’ve got sympathy with that as find it bloody annoying if I was at work and people were inflexible about something minor - imagine being in the office and being to put your blazer on in the middle of summer!

I’d be really interested in how these Uber strict environments set people up for adult life. Great if this actually creates an environment in which children can learn, however in adult life we want give and take, initiative and discretionary effort in a modern work place.

Sending out of the lesson in my school would result in a day in isolation btw.

Because I would say that sending someone out of the class for talking when you are talking is too harsh a sanction. But if they are given a second chance and don't take it, then out they go.

Just a question - why warn a child first? If they do something bad enough for me to have to intervene, they're out as far as I am concerned.

I'm glad someone has mentioned lack of proper breaks and physical activity as a contributing factor to poor behaviour

This is a massive issue

My 12 year old gets about 30 minutes lunch break and that includes eating lunch

He finds it painfully difficult to focus and he is not naturally disobedient or rude. But he just struggles to concentrate

We then expect children...many of whom will be naturally high energy teenagers...to sit and really focus on a range of sedentary based learning tasks .

It's unrealistic and bad for their ability to work properly

I agree. But it demonstrates there was a need. We cannot possibly have been the only school with kids who needed that help. I suspect kids just weren’t given it. But it was more acceptable for kids to drop off the radar. They could get out at 16 and start a trade. It was more acceptable to do fewer GCSEs instead of ‘everyone must do 9 and if that’s unrealistic-tough.’

Schools can't afford to keep handing out equipment. My department budget stretches to everyone get 2 exercise books per year, 1 box of glue sticks (to be divided between 3 staff) and our gcse book subscription. All our glue sticks have been stolen whilst we had a supply teacher in. I now have none left in the department and insufficient funds until April.

Behaviour at my school a few years back was absolutely dreadful. We'd implemented a Paul Dix-style system where behaviour was almost entirely the responsibility of the class teacher with very little back-up. Any negative sanction meant the teacher then had to have a restorative conversation with the pupil before the next lesson. The kids racking up negative sanctions did not give a toss about restorative conversations and they had zero impact. They also had so many that you had to 'book' your restorative conversation two weeks in the future as they tried to fit you into their busy schedule. It took 7 warnings before you were allowed to remove a child from your class, but then you didn't send them out, you had to call for SLT to come to get them. Often SLT never came, so you were left trying to teach with the disruptive kid continuing to be disruptive and also smug that your attempt to deal with them had failed and there was nothing else you could do about it.

Behaviour is now much better because we binned all that crap, introduced a centralised detention system so that implementing the behaviour system correctly doesn't create extra workload for the teacher (this is really important, any system that creates extra workload will not be implemented properly as no one has time for that). One warning for poor behaviour and then you can be sent out. And we don't have to wait for SLT to remove the disruptive kid, we send an alert that they have been sent to isolation and if they don't turn up in 5 minutes, they are excluded, which means that by and large, they go.

This has massively improved behaviour in lessons. Behaviour in unstructured time is quite bad, however, because we don't know the kids' names and it is very hard to deal with disruptive behaviour when you can't apply sanctions.

So the response to poor behaviour is stricter schools, which can involve sweating the small stuff. Parents tend to hate this sort of thing though 'I don't understand why they are so strict about uniform/homework/equipment' - because that's setting the culture where the kids actually do what they are told which feeds into everything else.

Are you still receiving these reports about your son?
What steps have you taken to cooperate with the nursery in addressing the concerns?

I'm trying gauge how your involvement in fixing the issue, after the reports, made things better, unchanged or worse.

I really liked coursework-I did my GCSEs in the early 90s and English was 100% coursework. I thoroughly enjoyed it and did A level as well (when we could take the books into the exam!). I loved reading and still do, unlike my own kids who refused to read at secondary school as they had been so put off how it was taught. Many of the books chosen were horribly depressing as well!

I don't know as two streams helps here. We had some vocational college classes maybe 20 years ago who still had to do core GCSEs. Their behaviour was awful because they didn't want to be in a classroom and they were also a clique and quite ghettoised.

I'd really like to restore some kind of coursework to more subjects (those that it suits at least) and have 15 year olds sitting far fewer exams.

Too many schools have narrowed their curriculum offer. This is driven by lots of factors. Kids of all abilities often don't get to do what they like. The drop off in uptake of arts subjects, for example is ideologically driven.

Ok, my mistake! A grammar-style curriculum then :)

School sounds brilliant! I wish note schools had teachers and leaders with the strength and conviction to maintain these boundaries.