What exactly is the strictness in English schools actually achieving?

OMG can people really not get that professional adults and children in school are not the same? If an adult has forgotten a pen they borrow one calmly and return it at the end of the session. I’ve never, ever seen an adult take a pen they’ve borrowed and deliberately break it in half. I’ve never worked with any adult who persistently failed to bring a pen to meetings. I’m absolutely astounded at the incredibly low standards some have for teenagers. They are very capable of bringing a pen to lessons, excepting the most severe learning or developmental needs.

I think this thread illustrates that some parents just dont appreciate that managing large groups of young people is very challenging and requires compromises and management strategies that arent needed when you are engaging with young people in small groups or one to one. There has to be rules to keep kids on track and focused. @FrippEnos description of how missing equipment can descend into fuss & disruption as equipment is thrown or damaged is spot on.

I'd love to see some parents who seem to be very good armchair critics enjoying being 'challenged' by a group of Year 9s who dont see the point of trignometry ... They might find it isnt quite as easy in practice.

🙄

Completely agree. I wouldn’t do it for all the money in the world and my favourite people are young people. I totally respect the people who can.

I have kids who I know haven't got a pen due to home life

Yes - and there will be children who don't have a pen due to their home life or something else going on who you don't know about. It is great that you provide things for them (although the school should have a stash of those things for teachers to keep in the drawers rather than you paying yourself).

The child you are talking about may be an NT kid from a stable home, he may not be being bullied, he may not have any issues whatsoever - but he is still a teenager which means raging hormones, peer pressure etc.

In your example you said:

Teacher- oh dear. This was the same last lesson. Can you please bring a pen to class.

Yes - its perfectly reasonable to expect John to remember a pen, yes, he should have spoken up about not having a pen - but again....teenager!

It may have only been a pen but patronising him in front of his classmates and bringing up a mistake from a previous lesson was never going to end in anything but a distraction - he was always going to talk back either out of embarrassment or because he is one of the smart arses who thinks it's big and clever to talk back in front of his mates and you handed him the opportunity.

If you were in a meeting with colleagues and you happened to make a mistake and it was the same or similar to one you had made before, you wouldn't be happy if the head called you out in a patronising way in front of your colleagues.

You may not talk back like John did and you may take responsibility and ownership of your mistake, but it would annoying and unprofessional of the head to call it out in front of other staff.

Schools go on and on about the strictness and rules preparing children for adulthood on the one hand, and refuse to treat pupils with the same respect that they would expect from their colleagues.

It's confusing and incredibly hypocritical and the kids know it. The teachers that get the most out of children both in terms of respect and results are the ones that treat their students like people - I've seen it time and time again, at my school and my kids schools and colleges and at the schools their friends and cousins go to.

Again- staying behind after class- I might have to get to the opposite side of the school for an over lesson or go on break duty. I might have a kid who’s upset about something and wants to talk to me. I might have a kid who’s lost their timetable and needs me to look up what they have next. I might have a kid who needs a bit of help with hwk. So whilst it might seem to be no issue at all in the scenario I described it can have a knock on effect.

You'd take the time to help a kid that's lost their timetable, but not have a quiet word with the kid who has forgotten their pen a couple of times? I was suggesting a 20 second conversation that could be had while you were grabbing your papers / laptop / lanyard or whatever, while the other students were filing out of the classroom - it certainly would have taken less time than disruption outlined in your scenario.

@Differentforgirls i honestly dont know how the teachers 'keep their spirits up' they constantly seem to get bombarded with new mandates from SLT or parents about how to do things and it is so difficult to get any culpability for anything re the students whilst also having to put up with an inordinate amount of people going in and out of the classrooms whilst trying to teach and cope with all the behavioural issues.

We were singing that song back in the 80s. It’s a teenager thing.

In my opinion, the worst problems in schools today are down to parents having far too much time on their hands which they use to complain about teachers.

I’d love to see the parents teaching 5 periods a day with 30 pupils in each period, each period having a different year group, so 150 a day and then it could be a different 150 the next day and they need different lesson plans for each year group, and also different lesson plans per single class as some pupils can’t write properly so need to draw a poster etc, but they are, apparently “shite” because they get a bit exasperated as some of the pupils don’t even have a basic thing like a pen ffs and other ones need some kind of unique timetable because they somehow “get lost” between classes.

They don’t get paid enough imo.

My children went to a school which regularly makes the top 3 in the county and the top 50 nationally. When they went there they were told by slightly older friends that there were rules and if they were broken there were sanctions. Few children were rude and mostly went along with behavioural expectations, parents had opted in to a reasonably strict regime and supported the school or withdrew their children. Results are exceptional, relations between pupils and staff seemed cordial but respectful. Teachers could teach, those who wanted to could learn and most importantly, enjoy learning. Surely this is what we should aspire to but it’s a three way contract between staff, pupils and parents.

I dont know a single teacher that wouldnt welcome productive discussion within the lesson about the content being taught, but outside of that, the students should be respectful and not challenging staff imo.

It's achieving nothing positive. It is destroying the education of many children with SEND and will be a huge factor in the number of NEETs.

We discuss it at home - solutions, ideas, making things happen. We checked every email they sent a teacher to ensure they were getting the messaging correct, less so to lecturers, It has served them in their graduate careers and they occasionally need to ask ask about how to deal with people at work - we are all about the win win. Dh especially is a master at it.

What an awful post.

How are you training your kids in these skills @SanSeb?
Learning how to be effective I mean.
Knowing when to challenge etc.
How do you teach this?

Other parents have been training their kids to argue any reasonable request which is definitely not a life skill that will benefit them in the long run.

What’s wrong with walking to school?

Do you not get footwear and clothing grants in England?

@Skooled I should add - that knowing how often and when to challenge is important - chose your moment, don't create noise, don't waste your chances by challenging over trivial nonsense that you can sort out yourself or that doesn't really matter - learn to be effective. These skills are hugely important in the workplace and we have been training our kids on it for years. Life skills!

@SanSeb there is not always time for negotiation, some rules are in place for a whole raft of reasons, safety being one. Do you expect this to be negotiated or constantly explained?

There is always a time for negotiation - missing that is what separates the truly exceptional from the mundane. It is what employers look for in talented people - not mindless, rule following compliance. And from what I hear from my friend who was a Bursar at a very successful private school it was exactly the behaviour they encouraged! State school kids are told to shut up and get on with it. The drones if you like.

I don’t understand why pupils don’t have a basis pencil case in their bags tbh.

School just doesn't feel relevant to a lot of kids - they don't see the point. Lock them up in isolation to punish them and it just gets worse, the only thing they liked about school was their friends! And now they really hate school and really hate theri teachers. I don't know how we fix this but more rules is not the answer - we have broken them - we have punished and tested the system to collapse. The kids hate school - Pink Floyd might be appropriate here - we need a new contract.

So we're in Spain at the moment - went to a lovely Cocktail Bar - the mixicologist was a very talented individual - mind blowing creativity! He learned English tending his bar - before he didn't see the point, he can now speak several languages. My brother was crap at English at school, no interest, it wasn't relevant - he got a good job as a grad engineer in the telecoms industry and learned to write and communicate because he needed to for his job - that was his motivation - he'd never wanted to before - we need to make education more relevant or we need to provide more access to adult education, so that when these kids finally grow up they can get themselves educated.

@SanSeb there is challenging and there is being inquisitive. No issue with inquisitive, the other is disrespectful. In my view if you are asked to do something by an adult member of staff, your first instinct shouldnt be to challenge the need to do it. That is literally what happens all the time, the children think that rules dont apply to them because the rules are optional or to be negotiated...this is a home issue.

Here in England, school has been seen as optional pretty much since Covid - hence the strict rules.

I agree @ThrallsWife. And have a lot of sympathy for schools trying to close the stable door several years after the horse fucked off. It was a change in the wider consensus on school attendance, which I think a lot of people in 2020-1 didn't realise was as fragile and relatively new as it was.

Hence it's not a surprise that the strict rules don't work. You can't change the social contract without buy in from all sides. Poor teachers, office staff being expected to do the impossible.

I agree with you but I don't think kids are encouraged to challenge teachers and authority in an appropriate way. I did encourage my kids to challenge their teachers in much the same way as I'd politely challenge someone at work - it was good training for them, I'm sure the teacher's found it bloody annoying but I taught my kids to expect everyone to do a good job - including their teachers!

I am not a teacher, but work in a school. I am constantly shocked by the behaviour of children, their rudeness, ingratitude, lack of respect and sense of entitlement is off the charts. I would be massively ashamed if I had raised one like this. I dont however like the sausage factory of overly structured learning to pass exams, there seems little joy in it and whilst children may get better exam results, i dont believe they are any more employable as they seem to exhibit strange ideas of how you can and should behave towards others.