School having different uniform/behaviour standards depending on child's socio economic background

[BarbaraPappa]

Sorry for the wanky title but I didn't know how to word it! I've name changed as have discussed this with several other people.

Our catchment secondary school has a catchment area which is basically half a very very deprived area and half a few villages which, whilst not affluent, are far more affluent than the deprived area. We live in one of the villages but aren't well off and have an average income, home etc. The school had an Ofsted inspection fairly recently and got a 'Requires improvement', and has been inadequate in the past several times. Our area only has two secondary schools; the other is much better performing but is oversubscribed even within its own catchment area, and so we had no choice really but to use the catchment school. We have DS, who is in year 8 and is aged 13, and DD who went to the school but is now at a separate sixth form.

Basically, I feel that the school is very harsh, and strict in terms of behaviour and uniform for the kids that aren't from the deprived area, and there is never any leeway at all for them. Whilst the other kids get away with a lot more in terms of everything.

For example, the kids that are not from the deprived area get hounded about attendance. If their attendance drops below 98% they get hauled into their year head's office about it. Whilst both my children have told me that there are many children from the deprived area that rarely attend school, and when they do attend they are treated like long-lost war heroes by the staff and praised repeatedly. One girl who was in DD's year even got rewarded with a Dominos pizza sometimes on the days she actually decided to grace the school with her presence.

Regarding behaviour, they are so strict with children that the deem from the more affluent area. My son recently got given two days in school isolation for something which I consider to be fairly minor (I have no objection at all to him doing isolation if the discipline was fair), yet both my children repeatedly tell/told me about kids from the less affluent area that behave badly and get no sanction. On the day my son committed his misdemeanour a girl in his form called their year head a 'fucking whore' and was not faced with isolation or exclusion. A boy in his class recently sprained a teachers wrist on purpose, but again was merrily back in the class and school the next day. The teachers seem to see the less affluent naughty kids as 'lovable rogues' and yet govern the other kids like some military operation. There is also another boy in my DS's class that gets angry regularly and even pushed a table over recently, but again, no sanction and the teacher just ignored it. If your child has any problems with any of the children from the less affluent area then the school will not sort it and will look for ways to blame your child.

Lastly, uniform! The school are so strict on uniform for one half of the school, yet the others get away with anything and everything! I sometimes drop my son off at school and have seen children going in wearing jeans, trainers, no tie, no blazer, and the teachers do not say a word. My daughter was once sent home from school at the gate because he (school, from the school supplier!!) trousers were deemed too short! Yet they happily let other breaches of uniform slide. The boy in my son's class that pushed the table never wears a school jumper and instead wears a Nike one, with no sanctions. My son once had his tie stolen when they had to take them off for PE, and his head of year phoned me and said he had to have a detention even though it was stolen as 'they can't be seen to let someone not have a tie'. When I queried the blatant lack of uniform from other children she said 'you need to understand that people have different financial circumstances and can afford different things'. So clearly the message is ; if the school think you can afford to buy proper uniform, then your child gets punished for not having it. If you are very poor, your kid can wear anything and everything.

I am getting so pissed off with the general unfairness of it; I'm happy for rules, and uniform and all the stuff that goes with it, but how is it fair to enforce it to half the school and not to others? I'm thinking of making a complaint to the school governors but I don't know if this would achieve any change at all?

What you describe sounds very extreme, and I can't really see how every teacher would know the economic background of every child.

However you have no idea what any other individual child's circumstances are. Some children need to be treated differently, equal isn't always fair.

You need to focus on how your son is being treated.

It sounds like the school are aware of individual children’s needs and not having a one size fits all approach

I agree with you, my DD’s school were obsessed with showing of ankle and colour of socks. But only some of the pupils.

In the case of the girl who was “rewarded” with a pizza, you do realise that was probably done to ensure she had a meal at least that day.

My DD is currently at college.
She missed all of last year due to illness and even attending college is a push for her.
Sometimes she really struggles to attend at all. On those days if she does make it in she may not participate properly in lessons, but at least she is there.

What should college do on those days?
a) tell her off for not working hard
b) appreciate the effort she has gone to to be there

It sounds like quite an extreme discrepancy, and there are times where accommodations need to be made for different circumstances, but having noticeably low expectations of one group of students is probably the reason they're Requires Improvement.

Attendance is tricky because 90% attendance sounds good, but it's actually one day off a fortnight. Most students should have attendance above 96%. If a student has low attendance then that's often a red flag for other issues and a red flag that this is a child who is unlikely to do well at GCSE. It's in the child and school's interest to put things in place to get those children in school. I doubt any of the good attenders who are on track to do well would want to swap lives with the ones who need additional support.

If there's glaring inconsistency in application of the behaviour policy though, I'd not hesitate to contact the school. Unfair application of policy is a quick way to switch students off learning.

Why couldn't pizza girl have got a school meal instead of pizza reward? No doubt her parents get free school meals for her

Sophie She might have a separate attendance monitoring system in place for her with different rewards at each stage.

I've worked with students who have attendance at around 50%. Working with those students and their families is a very different situation than those who are regular attenders. I strongly doubt that the well-attending children would want to swap circumstances so they can have a pizza occasionally at school.

@TeenMinusTests

My DD is currently at college. She missed all of last year due to illness and even attending college is a push for her. Sometimes she really struggles to attend at all. On those days if she does make it in she may not participate properly in lessons, but at least she is there.

What should college do on those days?
a) tell her off for not working hard
b) appreciate the effort she has gone to to be there

I don't think teachers should appreciate children's effort to attend, no. I was a very unwell child and missed loads of school / sixth form college, but when I did go in, I think it would've been even harder to deal with 'appreciation'...! Being there benefits the child most of all; it isn't a favour to the teachers.

Also, I think additional health needs are quite different to being from a very deprived home.

Are you sure this is not just some of the students perceptions? There may be good reasons some kids are given exceptions, and some of them are more common in deprived areas. For example not being able to afford the right uniform.

Are you sure this is all true?
If they have their hands full with deprived kids how have they got the time to police all these other minor things?

Isn't it simply because the kids from the more deprived area are more likely to have complex needs which require various reasonable adjustments?

The "school refusal" girl, for instance, is probably under the radar of multiple agencies (CAHMS, social services, and/or various other local authority service providers)

This thread reminds me of people moaning about blue badges getting all the good parking spaces.

There seems to be a lot of ‘my child says there were no sanctions’ but how do you know what is going on behind the scenes with a child?

It sounds unfair, but kids moaning that ‘Johnny is allowed to do x’ don’t know that there is a very good reason that that is the case.

I’m surprised that everyone is so keenly aware of how much money each family has. I doubt there is a school policy based on family income, rather other circumstances you are unaware of.

there are many children from the deprived area that rarely attend school, and when they do attend they are treated like long-lost war heroes by the staff and praised repeatedly.

she actually decided to grace the school with her presence.

I genuinely cannot tell you how deeply unpleasant you sound about children from what are clearly deprived backgrounds. I would be embarrassed to have written such a bitchy post. Also - bear in mind you are simply getting your DCs second hand descriptions of what they think is happening. You aren't actually in the classes and don't see what's going on.

Maybe you should just focus on parenting your own children instead of spilling out bile about other people's?

How do you know all this OP?
Because there is no way that a parent would be party to all this information from the school as a lot of what you are suggesting is confidential information about each child.

Therefore you are getting this information as here say, from you DS and from what you perceive the situation to be. So you are in no place to cast the judgements that you are doing.

Well done OP you send your kids to school, you can feed them and you buy them uniform.

Have you considered what the backgrounds of the children you're discussing might be?

Yes a child may have called a teacher a fucking whore, but do you know the details of that child's home life, school life etc? No, you don't. Maybe another child would be reprimanded for that but what you've not considered is that if the child who said that to a teacher was reprimanded that could well be the last straw that meant that they went from attending school, albeit with not great language, to just stopping attending entirely.

None of what you've written, none of it, is as simple as what you perceive to be fair / unfair. And you're being extremely naive. Extremely

So I suggest that you're grateful that your son attends a school that takes each individual child's personal needs into consideration, values their attendance and learning above all else, and you should focus on what the school is doing for YOUR child. Not anyone else's - yours.

Your post shows very very clearly that you have little idea what families face, and so whilst I'm glad for you that you don't experience those struggles, I would leave off judging those that do.

It does sound difficult. But if you believe that the standards of behaviour and discipline are slipping, why don’t you raise that with the Governors as a concern in its own right? And if you ever feel like a punishment for your own child is disproportionately harsh, you can bring that up as a separate matter with the head of year or the teacher concerned.

What you describe does sound unfair, although I would want a bit more evidence than just your dc say so. But assuming you are right about what's going on, it's not that I think they are wrong to show some understanding and tolerance for the children from deprived backgrounds but it shouldn't be so different for the others. Especially if as you say the children from the villages are not from really wealthy backgrounds and some families may still be having some problems too. Equally if someone has a deprived background it doesn't excuse extreme behaviour like swearing at a teacher or hurting them and they should be treated the same as anyone else.

Christ OP. How embarrassing for you. I can't actually believe what I'm reading.

But hey there's a simple solution! Ditch your job, live in the shit bit of town, either go on benefits or minimum wage, don't feed or talk to your kids at home, and then school can step in a bit more. Hurrah!

Wow op you sound staggeringly naive and I echo everything @makelovenotpetrol said.

Are you very stupid? I’d imagine they have seen your privileged kids in the proper school uniform, and therefore know that your kids do own it, so are just taking the piss when they come in incorrect clothing.

Are you aware there are kids who have nothing? Parents who don’t buy them the right socks and jumper? But yeah, as @Vanishun says. Give up all your privileges and force your kids to live in abject poverty and social and economic deprivation so they can share in the sympathy that kids in bad situations get.

Also, in regards to the Nike jumper - I wore an adidas sweater to school every day when I was 12/13. I didn’t have a school jumper and lived in Scotland where it is not warm enough to wear a t-shirt or school top. I remember one teacher telling me rather sharply that if I could afford a sports jumper I could afford a school one. What she didn’t get is that was literally the choice. That was my only jumper and I wore it everywhere - school, shops, out about the scheme. If I had a school one instead I would have to wear it everywhere outside school.

There is not, by the way OP, a day goes by where I work, that I do not have to seek support for families who have nothing.

I mean nothing. Not enough to feed the children let alone the adults. As a PP has so delightfully said well the girl who got a pizza could get free school meals. Also someone else naive I see - it's not that easy to just get them - some families, for example don't speak English and so need to seek support to fill in the forms,. Some families feel too ashamed that they have literally nothing and don't want to draw attention to this by asking for help - and the schools of course will gently try to support and help them.

God forbid a child is rewarded by a pizza? What's so offensive about that? Do you know the background of this child - do you know why they haven't been attending? Perhaps shes being abused at home, perhaps she is witnessing abuse at home, perhaps she is a young carer for a family member, perhaps she is working to help out in a family business to put food on the table, perhaps her parents are working to put food on the table and she is caring for a younger sibling. I could keep going with an endless list of possible situations a child could be in which is preventing them from attending school? Does a pizza sound so bad in any of those situations.

No, you know what a lot of people don't realise that there is this level of struggles that a family could face, and examples I've given only touch the tip of the iceberg... But if thats you OP - which it has to be judging by your post - please just be grateful for what you and your children have, and please, please take opportunity from the responses I and others have given you here to realise that there are always reasons behind things like this, and a lot of the time those reasons are deeply upsetting.

This sounds like a very extreme version of the way the infant school kids labelled "naughty" often get more stickers and more "star of the week" awards than the well behaved ones who do as they are told, sit nicely and are advanced readers etc.

I would frame it to your kids how lucky they are that they are being held to a higher standard and more is being expected of them. Rules get slipped all the time for children who have bigger worries in their lives. The child whose teachers buy them a bar of soap and let them shower at school are not the lucky ones, and I would hope any child in that position gets some leeway on uniform.

These things can cause a lot of perceived unfairness and I'm not saying it's impossible for these allowances to morph into something else, but I would just encourage your children not to take it personally and to assume there is a good reason why certain kids get more accommodation. There is often a reason, and those reasons are never the business of peers or peers' parents. And, children who don't need them are often the lucky ones.

This video made an impact on my children.

One girl who was in DD's year even got rewarded with a Dominos pizza sometimes on the days she actually decided to grace the school with her presence

I knew a child like that who rarely made it to school. She was a young carer for a parent with severe mental and physical health problems. As the oldest child she also had to deal with younger siblings. She had mental health issues herself and regularly self harmed. She found it hard to get up in the morning. She often had no clean uniform and a lack of hot water at home meant it was difficult for her to have nice hair etc. So she got teased/excluded/ignored by most of her peers. If she ever made it in to school it was indeed a cause for celebration. Sadly it eventually all became too much and the school off rolled her to be “home educated”. So like many other children in these circumstances she was effectively abandoned by the state.

I imagine many families in her school would have shared your views on children like her. But I assume this is a result of a lack of exposure to what life is like in some families rather than deliberate unkindness.

Sounds to me as if your school has a better understanding of individual circumstances than many.

@SophieKaczynsky

Why couldn't pizza girl have got a school meal instead of pizza reward? No doubt her parents get free school meals for her

You’re assuming that she lives with 2 parents, talk about just not getting that some kids are actually living shit lives!

OP, as a teacher, I once had a pupil in my school who was late every day, hardly ever arrived in uniform and often fell asleep in class. After we intervened and brought in social services, it became clear just how horrific her life was at home. She was being abused by her mothers many boyfriends, was expected to look after her baby brother and generally neglected. But sure, let’s assume that these children don’t exist, that they’re all scrotes who should be punished for not remembering to shine their shoes every morning.
It’s so easy to sit in your ivory tower.