Teachers who have watched 'Adolescence'- what are your thoughts?

The odd day or two off for a wedding is probably not the issue, but regular truancy is. And as a taxpayer, I am reluctant to supplement the benefit payments that might be demanded of me to make up the shortfall over a very long period/ lifetime.

If true, I would suspect its heavily skewed by those who missed 2 or 3 days a week for years and never got any qualifications.

I find it hard to believe that taking two days off in Y4 to get to a cousin's wedding will have much of lasting impact at all, if any.

There are a few posts on here, saying they don’t recognise the behaviour on the show, and tell us all that their children attend private schools. It’s really quite irritating and not sure why they are bothering to post? The school in the show was clearly a state school. 🙄

I have seen, twice or three times, in the last few days a statistic that shocked me a bit. Which was... every single day of missed school, over a lifetime, ends up costing £750 in lost lifetime earnings. I have no way of knowing whether this is truthful, but it is quite a powerful statistic.

Unfortunately as we all know it depends on each teacher and how they respond to the language and behaviour day to day.
What are the real consequences for bad behaviour or language after a while it will just become noise.
I did hear a radio show about a charity getting into a nursery to teach kindness and apparently that can dramatically reduce abuse later on.

I wasn't talking about interventions actually - i can why interventions might not be well received.

I am talking about simply giving more guidance and support and motivational talks to the children on a daily basis. Kids of this age need things hammered home, the same points repeated again and again, and eventually it starts to have an effect. You can get boys and girls who are top of their classes yet still in terms of emotional intelligence they need these things hammered home. And most of the worst behaved kids are badly behaved because they are failing at school work and need help with it - simple straightforward help - not formal interventions.

Schools are engulfing teens with petty punishments which are counterproductive and sometimes damaging and creating trouble - this shouldn't be happening.

Schools are not spending time actively and consciously guiding and giving support and being motivational, hammering the messages home, daily basis.

Not enough time or money is spent on giving teens 1:1. This would not only help with school work, the teen would benefit from the attention - they might complain initially but they would respond well after a short time. It is beyond shocking the lack of basic illiteracy and maths skills in many teens, at the very least.

I am not suggesting this would be a silver bullet right now on its own -the problems go back to primary and there are many other problems - but get those three things right would make a big difference.

@opendoorsopening this is true but there’s only so much schools and teachers can do if they don’t have the support of the parents. They can’t provide them interventions without parental consent and if the parents think there is nothing wrong or are worried the child will say something that will reflect badly on them then they aren’t going to encourage the child to engage.

You say that you think that your school is proactive and has forward thinking policies but this entire thread is about the appalling behaviour you feel you have to put up with - so there is some mismatch here - it sounds like more is needed, though I also think that more direction needs to come from the government about how best to deal with teens today.

Teens should be finding their passions, learning, excited about the world and their futures, even if it gets messy once in a while. How you describe the kids who behave badly is tragic. It sounds as though their behaviour is dreadful but at the same time they are getting no guidance or support from anywhere. Behaviour is communication with all children, including teens.

So I feel as though you are trying to say "well yes, we do all those things obviously". But at DC's school, yes these things form part of policies/curriculum as you say, but there has not been any talks at all to the whole class in the last two years covering any of these subjects. There may be the odd utterance in assemblies, and things are sometimes skimmed over in the relevant class, and individual children are sometimes spoken to about behaviour, but very very little. It isn't nearly enough. Children of this age, dealing with a fair bit of crap at home at lot of the time and with appalling influences in their faces at every turn could do with these sorts of talks - emphasising all these points - on a daily basis. With a lot of emphasis. And positive comments made continuously throughout the day. So why isn't this happening? Why isn't there more provision for helping kids catch up with/understand their work?

This thread is to do with what teachers have to put up with - but think of the sort of futures they are going to have, without any real guidance or support.

Unless schools do this as a matter of course, nothing will change.

My school, incidentally, gave a lot of motivation and guidance talks (all those years ago).

A big problem is that there are not enough outside agencies, and schools are left having to sort out most of societies problems, and they are stretched too thinly and funded badly.

The things you have listed wouldn’t be a part of the behaviour policy but different aspects of school life. In most schools:

• talks being given to children about the benefits of good behaviour - these would be given in assemblies, by form tutors or by individual teacher as and when needed
• expectations in relation to showing respect to all others all the time - these would be embedded into the school rules and form a part of the behaviour policy
• anti bullying, guidance, support, dangers of porn, healthy relationships (ie against incel type thinking) motivation for the future, helping children find their passions - these would be a part of the PSHE curriculum, not the behaviour policy

the detectives in the drama described the teachers at the school as apathetic, not dealing with bullying/online bullying effectively, not being aware of emotional problems of the children
This hasn’t been my experience in any of the schools I’ve worked in. However there is only so much teachers can do. Unfortunately we have no magic wand to wave to eradicate the ills of society.

Which is? Does the policy require talks being given to children about the benefits of good behaviour, expectations in relation to showing respect to all others all the time, anti bullying, guidance, support, dangers of porn, healthy relationships (ie against incel type thinking) motivation for the future, helping children find their passions? How often are these talks given?

What did you think about the fact that the detectives in the drama described the teachers at the school as apathetic, not dealing with bullying/online bullying effectively, not being aware of emotional problems of the children, could you relate to that?

These are genuine questions by the way, not intending to score points, just interested in how you see things as you started the thread.

Totally agree - when discussing AI my dbro said his.maim worry is.loss of competence - just rely on a Google search with no grounded knowledge! Crazy imo

This! My oldest was adamant a teacher was ‘picking on her’ and singling her out. Given my daughter’s attitude at home and how she was speaking about the teacher, I said I’d speak with the school. Her guidance teacher was absolutely brilliant and said he knew about her issues with the teacher and apologised etc. I asked to speak with the teacher cos I wanted to get her perspective, lo and behold it transpired my daughter was showing off infront of her class and being mouthy. Her teacher seemed genuinely shocked I wasn’t mad at her and wanted to understand what went on.

Now my daughter and this teacher seem to have a much better relationship.

I think nowadays kids do get away with too much in school, I’ve seen my daughter manipulate the system in it to her advantage.

Same for me. Never noticed a gender split in parents being difficult.

We know what goes on, our dc tell us.

What do you do when children are verbal, show disrespect?

I certainly recognised some typical characters

I think dads need to step up more too. My friends all have teenage boys. The one having the issues with attitude from her son at the minute is the one whose husband is an ex for a reason. I've known them both for years. If ds spoke to me like her ds speaks to her, he'd get it both barrels from the pair of us. In her case, the ex basically condones it and, I suspect, fuels it.

We know that for teenage boys, a lot of what their mums say is effectively, white noise, and that they pay more attention to men. Dads need to not only model decent behaviour, but tell them. Like I've said upthread, dh is a good role model, but he could still do more in terms of explicitly teaching.

I think you’re right. I taught in primary schools for over 20 years, including in EYFS. The lack of school male role models in the first few years, the over regulated curriculum, lack of good outdoor play provision…have all contributed to poorer outcomes for boys.

Add in the austerity policy of closing children centres from 2010/11 onwards, the explosion of social media, the ingrained poverty of expectations among some parts of society and we have the perfect storm.

Our 14 year old boys were the austerity babies and then the ignored Year 4s at the beginning of the pandemic. I have teenage dcs and it is bloody hard steering them through all this shit.

You missed the work greet.
But you are still wrong.

What I said was being able to look things up using AI or the internet makes a mockery of the spoon-fed, knowledge-based curriculum. And that is in part why kids are so disengaged. It feels so unnecessary to them to learn by rote so much information in the Information Age.

I disagree with you entirely that critical thinking is associated with traditional learning. I think the opposite is true! The curriculum mainly just imparts information to students and then they regurgitate it onto a test paper. In no ways shape or form does that nurture critical thinking. In fact schools do the opposite especially when it comes to rules around behaviour, routines, the curriculum and tests. Kids are given next to no input into their learning process. Motivation is at an all time low I can tell you.

Well I don’t know much about extreme liberalism haha but I know i want better for our children. And I am a big supporter of children’s rights so if that makes me liberal then I’m all for it. Becoming a teacher opened my eyes to how we subjugate children and how unsuitable the education system is for most children. Really the education system is way for the state to educate the masses in exchange for their parents going out to work. That’s all it was ever designed to be. We’ll take over the the job of educating your kids whilst you go out to work. It was never designed with child development in mind. It was designed to be as efficient as possible. And in my opinion that system is becoming more and more outdated as time goes on.

I do not think the current education system fits at all with what we know about child development. Far far from it. It is in fact failing so many children. 40% of primary leavers leave without a pass mark in their SATs and 30% of 16 year olds leave secondary without the required GCSEs.

Of course I think literacy is important! Without the ability to read and write you can’t function well. I stated that in one of my earlier posts. What I don’t think is important is the sheer amount of ridiculous grammar structures taught in school, especially primary. Have you seen a year 6 SPAG paper??