To tell you how schools changed within 15-10 years

I was a technician in a school for 12 years 10 years ago. When I started, my own children were in school (not the one I worked in) so I saw two different views of education, but both were positive, although when I started 22 years ago SEN wasn't as recognised as it is now. But, by and large, education both for my kids and where I worked was a good, largely positive experience.

When I left (because I was going to be expected to teach classes on a technician's salary because we couldn't recruit teachers) the entire department handed in its resignation. Only one teacher remained. Classes are now being taught by anyone they can find who is upright and can read. There is a lot of recognition for SEN but no provision being made because the numbers are just so high, and any TAs are being used to teach.

I totally agree with this.
I was an additional needs TA for nearly 15 years and the decline, especially in behaviour, is enormous! This isn’t helped by parents who complain about anything being said about their child, even if that child’s behaviour at school is atrocious.
I was trained to run interventions with children that weren’t at the expected level but was then moved from this to ‘babysit’ an autistic, pretty much non verbal child that was still in nappies. We fought and fought for an assessment to move them to a specialist school and it was like walking through treacle. I left. It’s demoralising.
Oh and TAs are paid peanuts for what we have to do. Apart from not having to do planning etc, we were easily doing the same jobs as the teachers were.
So yes, in my opinion, schools have definitely got worse!

I'm surprised that stricter behaviour policy is actually effective - is this because children with entrenched behaviour problems are excluded or has the stricter policy actually caused behaviour modification for the better?

Behaviour at my school has gone up and down depending on behaviour policy. It's much better now that we have a stricter behaviour policy than it was a few years back.

But the teacher recruitment situation is definitely a crisis. My school didn't used to have any problems with recruitment, we have more than one teacher training provider nearby that used to be a constant source. But they don't have the trainees anymore.

Yeah, I have really mixed feelings about SEN provision. I can see it from all sides.

I actually agree with you that 'inclusion' as it was imagined has failed. My children go to special schools and there is absolutely no way I would ever, ever want them in mainstream unless things radically changed.

BUT, I don't think it is good just to isolate and segregate disabled children on a mainstream campus without trying any inclusive strategies, especially not in a freezing temporary shack. They weren't even allowed in our PSRE lessons, only tutor group. It was really othering.

And cover staff will most likely not be teaching the subject that they have a degree in and are often not qualified teachers...

We have a situation now where kids with SEN are educated in 'SEN units' on the mainstream site and this is in fact the proposed model moving forward https://www.gov.uk/government/news/740-million-allocated-for-10000-new-places-for-pupils-with-send

So 'taking kids with SEN out of lessons and educating them together' certainly wasn't left behind 20 years ago.

I think I was trying to get at the fact that there hasn't been this massive decline in what schools / behaviour are like, they were bloody rough 20 years ago.

You write as if taking SEN kids out of mainstream class was a bad thing. Inclusion policy has been an epic fail.
Do you know what is worse than being taken out of class and being educated with other children who also struggle in class ? (I was one of those children btw).
It is worse to be left in the class when the work makes no sense, you can't keep up, left with no choice but to copy from peers or get everything wrong and deal with getting detention for being wrong. At least when they took the child out they were taught at a level they could make progress at. Now they are left to drown and the gap with their peers widens constantly.

That doesn't sound particularly different to today in terms of resources and run down tired schools?

I don't think your behaviour list sounds wildly different to today either, maybe exchange smoking for vaping. Behaviour is less visibly chaotic, I think, probably because there are so many CCTV cameras around, but there are still fights, racism, sexual assaults and abuse of teachers. A lot of that behaviour has moved online. 20 years ago we didn't have to deal with students' 'nude pics' being shared with the year group, for example. Knife crime is also far more of a concern than it was.

Not enough money to pay for TAs or whiteboard pens, but enough cash sloshing about in these wealthy academies to pay for the salaries of 10 assistant headteachers who don't teach. The bloat is unreal.

Oh and about resources - every single book had to be shared, even the copies of class novels (I.e. not just textbooks). Pupils would also fight over the non broken musical instruments, PE equipment science equipment and have to share instruments. The whole school was really run down and tired, with lots of chewing gum stuck everywhere.

There are a few things that were better about schools 20 years ago, mainly teachers were more permanent so there wasn't the constant use of supply. I can definitely see how disruptive that is.

What happens to the ‘runt’ children?
What if your child struggled in school? Would you still feel the same?

I agree and will go further... I think people are forgetting what secondary schools were actually like.

I went to a comprehensive secondary but in a very affluent area at around the same time you started teaching. It was chaos and there was quite a high threat level all the time. Just a few memorable incidents include:

• A group of year 8s took it upon themselves to make jokes about a teacher's breast cancer and would throw things at her to see if they made a sound if they hit her (presumed wooden for some reason) prosthetic breast.
• A group of pupils crowding around the only black pupil in the school making monkey noises while she cried.
• Food fights.
• Real Fights.
• Smoking and very heavy petting in the toilets so frequently the younger children would hold their need to go to the toilet until home.
• Very regular sexual assaults and things like boys dumping bottles of water over girls to make their white shirts go see through.
• Happy slapping became a thing, although we didn't have smartphones so I actually can't remember how this happened but it had just become a 'thing' with a group of friends having to go to the police because of a more serious incident.

The SEN provision, as far as I'm aware, was children being taken out of nearly every mainstream class (even the non streamed ones) and 'educated' in a temporary shack building all together.

Even in the toughest schools I've worked in more recently (PRUs / SEMH schools), it is nothing like that anymore.

Can't speak about the primary sector - don't remember as much, very little experience of it later in life.

Yes - one of my issues. I don’t need more counsellors, pastoral care assistants, SEN coordinators etc. I need subject specialists who can teach my kids algebra, Latin, etc.

I get that we need these because some kids need them and therefore in order that the subject specialists can focus on teaching algebra and Latin, someone needs to deal with behaviour and SEN to avoid whole classes being disrupted by kids having meltdowns. But that’s what I’m saying - this very necessary massive shift to these non-academic issues is hurting everyone.

Our local secondaries have entire departments of pastoral support staff, who don’t teach but are there to deal with what is effectively student mental health and the fallout of WhatsApp groups. That’s where the money has gone.

Teaching salaries are also significantly higher in Scotland (and Wales) making the jobs more attractive in comparison to what else is on offer.

I have no stats on this but my LinkedIn inbox tells me there is increasing brain drain of UK teachers to other countries. I have no desire to teach in the Middle East, China etc but recruiters are certainly keen I do so!

That wasn’t the point she was making. The point is that in some areas the local schools on offer are such a poor dxperience for students that people will make significant sacrifices to go private, and obviously very few people can do that but it shows how bad the situation is, from a parental perspective.

Interesting graph @noblegiraffe I noticed that the percentage doesn't change much it's just there's a huge increase in the amount of children. So it's an expanding population issue?

Discipline is more purposeful and less reactive and we consider all sides

This is working out really well isn't it.

It’s not always easy to get a teaching job in England. If you’re too high up the pay scale then you basically can’t move as schools just want to employ (cheaper) newly qualified teachers.