To think disruptive behaviour in schools is out of hand?

I was prompted to comment on this thread as I had to deal with the worst behaviour and safety incident I’ve ever had to deal with yesterday, and it was in a private school. It left me completely shaken. But apparently that’s ridiculous, funny and should be completely dismissed as it doesn’t fit a rhetoric.

@Lucy5678

Because that’s exactly how many right leaners think! Dogmatic and either can’t see the hypocrisy in their arguments - or are being disingenuous.

Then the mockery starts…
Also see a lot of ‘free speech for me - but not for thee’ type sentiments…

I have two teenagers who attend/ed the same state secondary. The eldest is quiet and studious and absolutely had her learning disrupted by the 'feral' kids. The younger IS the feral kid. She has complex learning and behavioural needs. I have struggled for years to get her the right support from CAMHS but they have been completely useless. School does not have the capacity or resources to support her learning needs but have at least provided her with good pastoral care. She is now Y11 and doesn't really go to lessons - she is either in the loos or in pastoral. So she is being contained rather than educated. So I have thought about this issue long and hard.

The key problem is that you can't cleanly separate kids who just want to be bad from kids who really need help. It is entirely possible to turn around disruptive kids, but not if they are only ever in the company of other disruptive kids. That's also a problem with teaching kids in sets, but at least within a comprehensive school there is a pathway out of the bottom set, whereas within 'sin bins' it is much harder.

Teachers already know lots of ways of supporting the disruptive kids without harming the learning of other kids, but none of them are cheap and most people prefer to pay less tax in the short term, even if it cranks up social costs in the long term.

And of course it isn't just down to schools. Of course parents have a have role, as do our broken CAMHS services. And schools need freedom to develop more tailored learning rather than the current GCSEs or the highway approach. For my younger daughter, school couldn't agree any long-term variations to her schooling without LA approval, and LA could only grant approval where there is a CAMHS diagnosis, and CAMHS refused to even assess my daughter because she was (a) missing so much school, and (b) adopted. That's a pretty simplistic summary but essentially true.

It's a holy mess but won't be helped by the creation of twin stream schooling (didnt we used to call those secondary moderns?).

This 100%!

And with that it becomes clear you don’t want a serious conversation about behaviour in schools and serious academic research and data, you either just want to promote Michaela, for reasons I don’t understand, or you want to rant and have everyone agree with you. Quite why research in the Guardian is biased nonsense but a parent survey in the Times is the last word in what happens in schools I don’t know.

You do realise every kid with a phone watched a man die in real time last night?

Things are not quite as they were.

I can only speak from my own experience as the behaviour in each school will vary so much but I can say from experience that currently the issue of behaviour in school is a very complex one but also, sadly, deep rooted.

For context, I trained as a secondary school teacher in 2010 and left the profession in 2023 - I worked in the same
school for my whole career. Behaviour was not the reason I left the profession but it certainly made a reasonably difficult decision easier!

Between 2010 and 2019 the school was led by a wonderful head teacher who was very old fashioned but in all the right ways; there was a culture of respect for all, not just for grown ups; pupils would open doors for teachers and help carry bags or boxes etc without prompting; if a pupil forgot to do their homework, they did their detention with no questions and no argument etc. In those 9 years, of course I had to deal with low level disruption but it was fairly easy to do and pupils were aware the poor choices and actions had consequences and the school behaviour system was followed by all and reinforced by school leaders when it was was used. Although to be honest, it was used quite rarely - I only ever issued the consequence where a pupil had to leave your room and sit outside the head’s office once or twice a year. And in all that time I was once told to F off by a pupil who then came to apologise after the lesson.

I’ll never be sure be sure how much of how our school changed was down to COVID and how much was down to management but something certainly changed in our school and this became very noticeable from 2021. I’m also certain that parent engagement (or lack of) during this period also played a part. All of a sudden my job started to feel more like crowd control and rather inspiring your pupils to have a love of learning.

One lesson that I remember that highlights how much learning time is lost, often because of 1 pupil was a year 7 lesson I had in 2022. A boy hadn't written anything in the first 15 mins or indeed have a pencil case on the desk so I asked him if he needed to borrow a pen. He stood up, told me to “go F my mother and then die” and stormed out the classroom but not before pushing the door so hard into a wall that it damaged it.
Now I have to stop the lesson so I can use my computer to send an emergency alert and accompanying email to say this pupil has left my lesson. Done - so I continue with my lesson while SLT look where he might have stormed off to. Five mins later he arrives back on his own so I stop the lesson and inform SLT that he is back in my room but his behaviour in the room (swearing/being aggressive) automatically means he is at the consequence level of being removed from the room into isolation (so that the learning can continue for others). Someone arrives to escort him to the behaviour room but he won’t go, so there’s another 5 mins of my lesson gone while they try to get him to leave. Eventually he goes. Ten mins later, SLT bring him back to my room because “he’s had a bad morning so let’s give him another chance”. He proceeds to spend the next few minutes humming/clicking/shouting over everything I or another pupil says and throw paper/ bits of rubber etc across the room - so I stop the lesson, issue the alert again…and so on and so on. This pupil frequently did the same thing in lessons across the school. It was very frustrating as you can see how much time is being wasted and the effects it has on the pupils.
I feel genuinely sad for pupils who want to learn and thrive who are sat in classrooms like this - you can sense their feeling of injustice and sadness too.

My DC are now in their 20s, but I did a year's training in teaching as a second career not very successfully in the late 90s.

I don't know about ambition and I don't know if you come into close contact with many young people, but I do think that actually today's teenagers are somewhat less competent than they were pre-internet and smartphones. It is harder to grow up when you don't have to work things out by yourself and your mum is always at the other end of the phone.

I am not dissing young people at all - they have grown up in a totally different context to my teenage years. But while in some ways they are more sophisticated and worldly, in other areas they are less able to deal with their own stuff in a way that teenagers from forty or fifty years ago simply had to because there was nobody else to do it.

I can see both side to this. My dd had her lessons constantly disrupted by a group of boys. 3 teachers quit her class in 18 months. My dd went from exceeding expectations to working towards. When I raised all the issues with the teacher I was told bluntly she can’t do more than she is, the behaviour and the SEND take most of her time and even if my DD was struggling she was well behaved and one of the better achieving students so no chance she will get help. I pulled her out and home educate.

on the other had I have a high need send son. He should never have been put in mainstream school yet that’s the standard for send kids no matter the level of need. I’ve seen far too many non verbal non toilet trained kids put into mainstream while the parents fight the LA for appropriate provision. My child unsupported needs led to challenging behaviour. Massively disruptive to the class and TRAUMATIC for him. He was wetting the bed and having nightmares about school. School did illegally off roll him, they gave him a part time timetable with no plans to increase, once his application for EHCP was denied because he doesn’t have severe and multiple learning difficulties he has autism ADHD dyslexic, dispraxia, auditory processing disorder and SPD. But he has great speech and vocabulary so not severe enough for SEN school apparently not would LA find a 1:1/additional support as they rejected the EHCP as they don’t have enough money. As soon as EHCP rejected I got called to collect my child every single day. The advice when schools do this to SEND kids is to refuse and to complain and make them keep the kid and make accomadtions while you start the couple year process of fighting to get the EHCP if you can even get that. For working parents what choice do they have? I pulled my kid out of school as it wasn’t fair on anyone, I couldn’t find ANY childcare that would take him as again he needs lots of support so lower ratios and it’s not financially viable for childminders. So I quit work. I’m on benefits now and fuming with the system. We have the EHCP I took it to tribunal and won. The LA still don’t provide my child an education and flout the law and their excuse is there just isn’t a school suitable. (This was when I pulled my dd out of school why send her to school where she’s not getting an education when I’m stuck home anyway and am better able to educate her?!).

I conclude the main problem is unsupported SEND, lack of funds for SEND, lack of SEND placements. But a huge part of this is SEND kid not being given boundaries or consequences at home. Some is definitely poor behaviour in my dd school I find it hard to believe that whole group of disruptive boys had high need send but it’s possible. I was SEN myself as a kid and my mother just smacked me if I ‘played up’ and sent me to bed without food. I was subsequently a well behaved and very unhappy child. Obviously that’s not better for kids but if we go back to treating kids that way they would behave better. I obviously don’t advocate corporal punishment but with my sons SEND friends few face consequences for poor behaviour whereas my son does have consequences, he looses his screens or desert or we leave the fun place we are at/don’t attend the fun place. He still has very high needs and needs excessive support but I constantly get feedback how polite and kind he is and well behaved. That’s until he becomes over stimulated and then he elopes. At school this turned into disruptive behaviour and violence because his SEN wasn’t supported at all. He has two friends who also apparently were violent and disruptive at school but now out of school and supported with consequences I just cannot see that in them. Whereas the friends who have genuine send and parents who are incredibly permissive and excusing of poor behaviour have kids with challenging behaviour out of school too.

I do also want to add that I’m thinking of one child with sever and multiple learning difficulties who is disruptive and violent at his SEND school who’s mum is always desperately trying to change that but he’s not got the capacity for any self control or self regulation. Kids like that don’t act like that because of poor boundaries.

Seriously, I'm getting old, but I can still adapt and adopt to 2025 norms and hoist in new tech. I have been doing so since I had my first computer in 1984. I can still manage technology, although I do ask my DC how to do it right/best now. I don't think the 1970s were better or hark back, but I don't think life is innately more risky or dangerous for young people now. The risks change, but risk is always part of life.

The 1970s were indeed 50 years ago and I can't believe I'm 69 but I don't think people have changed much in either their competence or ambition or need for protection.

I am not convinced that it accomplishes much, beyond infantilising young people.

That's the whole point of safeguarding. It applies to 18 and under for children but also adults over 18 if vulnerable..
Safeguarding as a concept didn't exist in 1970s but majority of people are aware of it now.
The 1970s were 50 years ago, surely you can appreciate things have changed hugely since then?

In the 1970s, when you were old enough to leave school at 15 or 16, you were de facto regarded as subject to adult rules if you left school, because you had chosen to do so, so you crossed into the adult world.

Personal experience: children with "additional needs" (i.e behavioural problems) are pandied to and a group of "typical" children have to work around it.

It's just fall out from that.

It's not very easy to safeguard a 16 year old making risky choices. In my youth (the 1970s) a 16 year old wasn't regarded as a child.

Safeguarding goes all the way into adulthood. You claim to know a clear safeguarding concern and didn't report it?

I have no evidence to support this, but deprivation of intellect or aspiration condemns kids to generational failure. Inevitably, because intelligence is highly inherited. I applaud the outliers who escape.

How pathetic. You are aware that opting out of child safeguarding is enabling it.

Yes but you can say 'Parents ought to parent better' as much as you like. That won't actually make it happen. Whereas the government can mandate what is done about behaviour in schools. I mean... they won't. And it's unlikely anything they could do would really work anyway. But, theoretically at least, the government has more control over schools than it does over individual parents.

good lord no
they are 15/16 - nearly 17 their parents are not unaware
they don't go to our teen's school or college

if it was someone who our teen's cared about then of course we would approach the situation somehow