Behaviour, is it just my school?

[PupInAPram]

In the decades I've worked here, behaviour has never been this bad. Off the scale bad. Is it something to do with my school, or is it happening in all schools?

It’s filtering through to the courts. We are just about to run out of space.

The pandemic is mainly to blame but woke discipline and a lack of standards has been happening for years.

I've been teaching secondary for 15 years and am getting out this year. Behaviour + workload are the joint reasons. Huge decline in support staff, I can't remember the last time I worked with a TA, despite having kids with reading ages of 20 and 5 in the same class. The few behaviour/wellbeing mentors we have are temporary, UNPAID volunteers.

Also worth mentioning, due to funding issues in state education: in our setting we are having to teach more hours to save the school money, so teachers are less prepared and more frazzled. This makes it harder to meet everyone's needs, plus the needs seem to keep increasing! So many undiagnosed needs in current Year 8 and multiple children within a class needing 1:1 support and encouragement with one adult to go round.

Camhs needs to treat children with ASD and other diagnosis. Scratch that they actually need to treat children full stop.

Mental health professionals need to be in school. Physios need to be in school. Occupational therapy needs to be in school. PE needs to be as much about fitness, movement breaks and core strength as team sports.

At the most fundamental end of the scale you need a functional criminal justice system. As a society we need to decide whether prison is primarily about rehabilitation or protecting the rest of society from antisocial behaviour.

Similarly exclusions. At the moment many excluded children just end up bumped to the next available school until it gets too late to do anything else. Internal exclusions are a waste of time for the children involved as many prefer it there as they don't have to do any work and it's quiet. They also mean the child misses out on education so have more gaps in knowledge so are more disruptive. They can however act to protect the rest of the class from disruption, although even that is not particularly effective if actually you end up sending the whole class out

We need kids out and working earlier with more opportunities for a return to education later. Plans to extend compulsory maths to 18 are a disaster.

I have a Turkish teacher friend. He is shocked at behaviour in primary schools here, but says it's because of unreasonable expectations. He says the behaviour wouldn't be tolerated in Turkish schools but neither do they expect 4/5/6yos to sit still for long periods of time.

Absolutely. My teen daughter and her friends have been absolutely infuriated by rise in misogyny among the boys at her secondary, with some actually telling their (often female) teachers that their beliefs 'are the truth'.

Male students who are bigger than me regularly approach me in the playground with comments like "what do you think of Andrew Tate then miss". Not in an inviting debate way. In a dick waving, intimidating way. Horrid.

Bad at our school, was getting much worse in the year or so before lockdown. Staff have left/are leaving.

When I hear the way parents go on in the schools what's app group I'm not the slightest bit surprised. God forbid any of their kids might ever be asked to do something they don't want to do 🙄 parents constantly on the phone to the school. What does that teach them?

Can you tell
Me what you mean by woke discipline ?

I work with children who show some extreme behaviours & yes I think you are onto something here. Schools have become much more rigid (they have no choice - it’s what the govt and curriculum demand) but you have a bunch of children who just cannot cope with this (for various different reasons) - and they can become extremely demand avoidant and extremely disruptive. I have no idea how these kids could manage a mainstream school. The special schools near us are bursting at the seams, a lot dangerously oversubscribed. There is literally no room to add more children.

I suspect it will get worse as well - increasing numbers of families being put under significant financial pressure will increase stress & workloads on families.

I gave my previous reply before reading this. But yes. And the children who can’t do it start to spiral.

We definitely need a complete rethink of the purpose of early years education (well most people working in it know what it should be, the govt should allow them to lead rather than focusing on academics at such a young age).

Do you think Covid has something to do with it and also the cost of living crisis. The gap in kids secondary socialisation through particularly schooo in particular will no doubt have an impact on year 7 and year 8 kids. Also, I know from friends who work in school there’s more and more kids who are coming to school hungry and who are not entitled to free school meals with the way the rules have changed yet their parents are not able to provide an adequate lunch or to pay for lunch and you have issues with heating etc etc etc don’t imagine it’s a nice time for a lot of kids. Feel for the teachers as there’s not much they can do with constant low level disruptions in class and the the endless play fighting etc in playgrounds. Tough times.

An observation from Melbourne. After lockdown, incoming Year 7s'behaviour was often immature, and the penny dropped about the missing socialisation windows due to lockdowns. The principal said that all principals in the local group said the same, so not an individual school. While a mix, the general social level is reasonably comfortable.

Parts of the the English curriculum were overhauled to take account of gaps.
Nothing noticeable in other year groups, but I retired at the end of '21 so can't comment further.

In the school of a teacher acquaintance, a worrying trend was SLT starting to treat the behaviour as the new normal, doing fuck all to support staff.

Yes it’s truly awful and definitely been in decline since covid.
we can’t keep blaming covid though.
these children don’t seem to have boundaries or respect or manners. Just a sense of entitlement and a belief that they’re the main character in everything.

I agree with PPs connecting the rigid, uninspiring and often challenging demands of early years education to teen MH and behaviour. I would speculate also that these kids are the first to be truly imbibed from birth in the mobile phone/screen era. Older siblings leading the way, parents gaming through the night. This environment does not encourage social engagement. The social behaviours are learned through practise and emulation and cannot be taught by teachers.

When the kids hit secondary it's too late for many. And the rest they plug away in class reading Shakespeare in Y7, cramming a list of dates of battles in history, and learn to behave appallingly. They soon realise that punishment by isolation (which isn't isolation, it's meeting up with mates) is far more fun than class and, wham, there is suddenly no incentive for good behaviour.

This has been a growing issue in our society for years now. COVID may have accelerated the trend so people are finally pricking up their ears but it was there before

My school must be in the minority then. We had a family look around today and they couldn't believe how well behaved and calm the children were. It's a primary school if that makes a difference op.

It's not just early years though. In KS2 children are expected to get through 2 foundation subjects every afternoon to ensure that music, re, history, geography, pshe, computing, art and science (double the time of the others) are all covered. It's like a secondary timetable for small people. English and maths all morning every morning of course in various formats.

And don't forget MFL and DT too!

@Meredusoleil
Of course - thank you ! It's a very long list for children who are still learning to read fluently.

I agree about the children coming through that have been badly affected by the lockdown. I’m extremely grateful I don’t have an EYFS child currently.

DD secondary is in special measures. Old head sacked and new super head and MAT In place. They have gone back to basics and enforcing the behaviour policy to the letter with all teachers being as strict and consistent as the next. SLT are on constant patrol and children are starting to respond.

However it IS a blunt instrument which I think is detrimental to some of the kids. The nice well behaved polite kids get overlooked still, all the attention is on the ones that need it (fine) and there is no bandwidth for developing relationships. It all feels quite reductive.

However with that all being said it was desperately needed and DD hasn’t been up skirted in the loo since. And no more loos as “social spaces” for vapes and TikTok’s

I'm curious about the move in some LAs to a Steps behaviour management approach. It's a "a therapeutic-thinking and trauma-informed approach to behaviour". Is this approach working for teachers?

Behaviour at my dds primary is terrible.

Parents scrap in the playground and outside the gates most weeks though, so it’s no suprise.

A few years ago when we still lived in a good area, behaviour was fine.

I think some research had to be done about parenting from the last decade or so - gentle child-centred parenting, lazy parenting, the trends in social media, lack of positive male role models and affirming everything good, bad and indifferent has left children without appropriate boundaries and more entitled, spoilt and less psychologically resilient. The Covid lockdown just poured fuel on that fire.

It's covid. We've been recruiting lots of new graduates in the last few years and they don't know how to behave professionally. They don't clean up after themselves in the labs, there has been a lot more rudeness including some sexually explicit graffiti on a noticeboard which has never happened before in the time I've worked there (and I'm old). They had shitty university experiences and haven't had the opportunities to do work placements and get their corners knocked off. And these are the lucky ones. I can imagine schools (who don't have the luxury of exerting quality control) must be having a nightmare.