What exactly is the strictness in English schools actually achieving?

Same in Scotland. No fees helps.

This... and especially the sentence "Young people leave education seeking external praise instead of having developed intrinsic motivation" sums it up.

My DD is at s top girls' private school, with a scholarship and bursary, and yes, there are privileged girls who attend thanks to well off parents, but it seems apparent the school has a "can do" attitude to encourage confident self motivated pupils who will have emotional maturity. Their eeducation results in pupils who have better leadership skills, rather than training workers who are looking for instructions to follow, rather than motivation to lead.

The difference is there, and yes, it is absolutely partly due to paying for the privilege, but I personally think even my excellent state grammar school wasn't that great. I was swot-like and others thought it was 'sad'. The teasing wasn't good.😐

All it achieves is stressing normal parents out. The kids who's parents are crap are still missing school, and problematic parents dont give a crap for letters or fines.

I had to send my son to school ill a few times to only be called later in the day and told to collect him.

I’ve been teaching in the same school for two decades. Yes, there was poor behaviour 20 years ago but the difference now is obvious, particularly post-covid. This is in a reasonably sought-after school with good results.

People who try to claim it’s normal don’t know what they’re talking about.

I think it is about how children are brought up in Ireland. From my albeit limited experience, young people seem to be much more polite and respectful, especially the young men. Meaning schools are not left to pick up the slack of appalling parenting.

You think schools should adapt to suit kids with no self-discipline who can't regulate themselves, rather than try to teach them self-discipline and self-regulation? Some of these big teen boys have the self-regulation of toddlers.

Spot on. 👍👍👍

Irish people do get fined for non attendance. Im not sure why you think they dont. Its just the theshold is much higher. 20 days missed in a year and you will be issued letters from tusla and if you dont have a good reason fined and risk prison.

Superb post.

I feel for schools getting lumbered with the dafter side of attendance management. Can have an awful impact on relationships with parents. Because ultimately, lots of people are sufficiently well informed to know that what you just said there is correct. We know full well there's fuck all evidence that a child missing a few days for a term time holiday is going to have a significant negative impact. And even for those who don't specifically know this, we have all just lived through a period where school attendance became a nice to have, something that could be stopped if there was a good enough reason. Our society values travel, so naturally the dots are joined. And school staff have to piss in the wind.

Uniform doesn’t even seem strict in England compared to NI, sure some schools will have their own stricter rules but over all primaries have polos, there are colleges that have no uniform or just a polo and trousers and plenty of secondaries with a more casual uniform.
In NI many primary’s are already in a shirt and tie and the vast majority of schools have a formal strict, and largely branded uniform policy.

OP, It sounds ridiculous because it is often ridiculous. I never understood fixation on the attendance while insisting unwell children stay in class/come to school.

This! It also makes the children very cynical about whether the school really values education if every punishment deprives them of it.

Until 1960s you had to pay for your child to attend secondary schools in Ireland. So free secondary education is probably still respected. I imagine therefore the schools there don’t need to manage children in quite the same way as more impetus comes from home.

I was at secondary 2004-09, behaviour was hideous then, it isn’t exclusive to this generation.

That’s nice, but could it be a factor in the worse educational outcomes in Wales than in England?

The thread is about English schools though.

There is only one true reason in my opinion.

Attendance, which impacts a schools ofsted rating.

I’ve said this on a few threads recently about similar topics BUT I was at secondary school under New Labour and it was like Lord of the Flies. It was, as Alistair Campbell famously said, a “bogstandard comp” in a deprived city with almost 2000 kids. The teachers had zero control over us, we very much ruled the roost. Think of the early series of Waterloo Road and it was actually probably worse…

The headteacher was a hippy and she believed in kids “expressing themselves” so our uniform rules were fairly lax, we were allowed to have multiple piercings, wear jewellery, crazy makeup and dye our hair whichever colour we fancied. Most of the teachers had given up on us all- some were plainly waiting out retirement, others just didn’t last long. One teacher threw chairs across the classroom in sheer rage a few times and didn’t get sacked. Girls were getting pregnant before year 10 even. Fights happened daily and loads of kids would run to go and watch. Kids were smoking daily just openly on the fields. Kids would set fire alarms off to get out of lessons - sometimes multiple times a day.

It was insane. This was considered a “progressivist” school, quite popular under New Labour. I recommend Nick Gibbs new book on the education reforms. I don’t agree with everything they did by any means but it’s difficult to argue against schools now being much better. Also find the Michaela school interesting.

The level of basic behaviour in kids has fallen off a cliff in recent years, I haven't seen anything like it before in my school and I've been teaching a long time, 11 year old kids looking at you like you're a piece of dirt if you ask them to not sit in the middle of a corridor, for example.

My school is not strict. Absolutely zero consequences for those kids who refused to move. And yet a group of parents have gone absolutely batshit about our attempts to impose any serious form of sanctions for kids who seriously disrupt the learning of others. Those parents have moaned about 'sanctions for stuff like forgetting a pen' when that's not even a thing (my kid was sent to iso for not having a pen - no, they did fuck-all work for half the lesson then when this was pointed out, said it was my fault because they didn't have a pen etc etc). Those parents

1. don't have a clue what it's actually like and
2. are actively destroying the school's ability to teach kids in any orderly way.

Thing is all schools are different. You might have a particularly strict school near you. I have read about Michaela school - that’s quite unusual. There is a whole range of behaviour policies and where I live they are quite relaxed. Uniform policies are ridiculous though and yet school kids have never looked scruffier so they clearly don’t work.

I grew up in a country that did not have uniform. I don't see it as the social equaliser it is hailed as here. But I do see the need to adhere to rules in the workplace. If my workplace says I wear black, I do not turn up in blue. If it says black leather shoes, I do not wear bright orange trainers.

The issue is that we have far too many students (and parents) who think the same rules don't apply to them. If you turned up at your workplace tomorrow not even vaguely adhering to their uniform standards, what would happen? And the day after? And another?

Uniform is just one symptom of a much wider issue.

Yes. If you want children to learn, and set an environment that is best for the majority you need to be strict.

Otherwise the inmates run the asylum. I find what Michaela do fascinating and inspiring. It does influence aspects of my own practice. At my last school my students consistently made the best progress in the faculty and I built positive respectful relationships based on the boundaries I kept. (I was 'firm, but fair..')

Strict does not have to mean bad.