What is really going on in our schools? Well, Laura....

[noblegiraffe]

Laura Kuenssberg appears to have just discovered that schools exist. New to the concept she has written an essay discussing what might be going on in them, from the perspective of someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. Basic errors include "standards haven't crashed because GCSE and A-level results in 2022 were up on 2019".

She mentions the lack of funding, but doesn't mention the lack of teachers. She mentions increased pupil absence but doesn't mention the implosion of support services for children like CAMHS, or the huge waiting lists for SEN diagnosis and the cutting of TAs in schools due to lack of money. She suggests covid might have had an impact, but not that the government have done basically nothing to address this and that their covid catch-up adviser resigned in disgust.

She says a minister says that 'teachers have had a bashing since covid'. Since covid! She doesn't mention this is led by the government and has been going on for years.

So, what's really going on in our schools? Anyone want to help Laura out?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65360168

I recognise a lot of this from teaching in a secondary comp before covid - a sharp and shocking decline began when Cameron and Osborne introduced austerity and clearly it's accelerated since covid. But my kids are in a small private school and the experience is completely different. These kids have screens, phones and social media but they don't have the same issues with concentration and behaviour. I think poverty, class sizes and teacher retention are the biggest issues. Children are coming from unstable homes to unstable schools - the stress, ill health and exhaustion caused by not having enough money and then the lack of resources at school meaning that everything is constantly being stretched too far. There might well be more environmental factors, but largely I do think this is the result of Tory government decimating all the public services that people rely on.

Agree. I think parenting has a lot to do with the behavioural issues. And lots of feral children are the result. ‘No’ is an alien word to many children, who are allowed to be ‘free spirits’, resulting in children who just don’t have guidance as to what’s right and what’s wrong, which is then introduced into the school setting.

Good post.

I am happy with a class of 30 at primary level. Quality first teaching and all that. However, there needs to be well paid, well trained support staff to help the teacher meet all the needs in the class. Without them the class size needs cutting in half.

Out of 30 children I have 3 autistic children, at least 6 with diagnosed / undiagnosed ADHD, about 10 needing support with mental health, 2 working at least 4 years below their age and everyone else.

How anyone thinks I can meet their needs alone is shocking.

Looking at the level of funding chart I was at Primary School in the 70s. In my last year of Primary they tried an experiment where pupils could pretty much choose their own timetable as long as we did half an hour of maths and reading a day. The teacher pretty much sat at her desk talking to pupils individually, can’t remember much teaching going on at all. It was shocking.

There were no other adults in the room. No provision for vulnerable children, no fancy equipment just a blackboard. No photocopiers. Paper records

Now think of the equipment, technology, additional staff, numerous IT licences etc that also need to be funded for

From a SEND, pastoral and safeguarding perspective, there isn’t the money to meet need.

My last school was well run financially, but over the past 3 years it has been in dire straits.

Every year KCSIE adds more safeguarding responsibilities to schools, but our pastoral staff team has been decimated as there isn’t the money. When staff leave they aren’t replaced. HOYs and SLT take on ever increasing remits. Our DSL dealt with 450 safeguarding incidents last year with no safeguarding support staff.

Children’s social care, CAMHS and safer schools police who support our work are all in crises of their own.

It’s a very stark time. I’ve never known anything like it in 25 years in education.

The SLT debate is an interesting one. We have a fairly decent SLT but in schools where people aren't applying for jobs, either because they are more rural or because of poor reputation, there seems to be much younger SLT members. I don't think in this case it's about being out of touch, but lack of experience. That lack of experience then means they don't have a clear understanding of the ramifications of their ideas. Other times it is a case of SLT being hired because of experience within a whole school role, where teaching time will be vastly reduced and they forget what it's like to teach a full day of bottom sets and then have twilight CPD and why we might not be functioning at full capacity the next day.

A large problem ultimately goes back to what noble was saying before about getting warm bodies in. The same applies to leadership roles, because fewer people, in my experience, are applying for them, or the wrong people are applying for them and schools just need to hire someone to do the job.

Real terms state education funding has doubled since the 1980s. This IFS graph shows this. The situation in the average classroom hasn’t improved two fold though; it’s got worse.

This is a good point to consider.

We know that real terms state education funding has been below 2010 levels for 13 years now and isn't set to return to those levels until 2025. Schools are really struggling and have made many staff and budget cuts since 2010.

It certainly doesn't feel like we're rolling in money compared to the 80s. What has changed? The role of schools. Back in the 80s there weren't league tables, there wasn't inclusion, schools didn't really care about attendance. Schools weren't seen as the solution to problems in society.

Since inclusion as a policy and the closing of many special schools, the expectation of schools to deal with pupils with SEN and disabilities has shot through the roof. These require a huge amount of resources.

In addition, schools have been tasked with a huge number of extra responsibilities. Getting kids to actually attend school. Pastoral support. Mental health support. Preventing radicalisation. Keeping kids healthy. Providing wrap-around childcare.

League tables have put a huge amount of pressure on schools. Intervention. Catch-up sessions. After school revision. Holiday revision sessions. Kids are not allowed to fail anymore, and if they do, the question asked of the teacher is 'what did you do about this child and why wasn't it enough?'.

Tech in schools is also an expense that wasn't there back in the 80s. Computers and projectors in every classroom. Huge suites of education software. Technical support teams. The maintenance of devices that kids use (and replacing vandalised equipment).

Running schools now is so much more expensive than it was back in the 80s.

The government recommend highly complex (phonics) schemes which while brilliant, require the funding and staffing we don't have.

This has been a huge problem for us. Many schools had been using ‘Letters and Sounds’ happily for years which was a freely available DfE-endorsed scheme. The government recently decided that wasn’t good enough (despite our school, and I’m sure many others getting excellent results) and introduced a list of approved schemes you had to choose from instead. None were free-most cost hundreds if not thousands as you then need to ensure your reading books match the scheme. There is no guarantee that the one you choose (and spent hundreds of pounds on) will even be on the list next year!

I’m sure if we looked into who set up many of these schemes and who is raking in the profits, it would be very interesting. I wonder if Mrs Sunak has any plans to set up a phonics scheme…

This seems to be a commonly occurring theme for new Tory ideas-schools are forced to buy into expensive things-with limited or no evidence base-that then make a few other people very very rich.

Many support staff don’t have the training for what they are asked to do, one half hour online course is not going to cut the mustard. But schools can’t afford to hire more qualified staff. Support staff do what they can (and many schools can’t even afford them) but it isn’t enough.

Also what we are expecting support staff to do for pretty much minimum wage is horrendous, which is why it is getting increasingly difficult to recruit anyone

My dd did her second year placement in a primary school in Luton last year. FIVE form entry! There were well over a 1000 children in that primary school. And no where near enough staff or space tbh either.

I agree. Running the phonics scheme is now a full time job. For a class teacher who also has a full time class responsibility.

On the theme of running schools being expensive - look at the funding gap per pupil between private schools now compared to 2010.

Private schools would say that they are struggling for money too! The costs of running a school have risen so much.

A lot of the phonics schemes are staff intensive (splitting into ability groups) but schools don’t have the staff

@noblegiraffe private schools also struggle to recruit and retain staff

My DC’s excellent primary school recently got a Good in Ofsted because they hadn’t decided on a new phonics scheme. They were in the process of choosing but as it will cost £1000s wanted to spend some time coming to the right conclusion for them. So they couldn’t get outstanding. I know the school and staff very well and anyone who walks in there would see immediately it’s an outstanding school! Even the report opens with something like “X primary school is an exceptional school”. But…no new phonics scheme in place.

I can believe this. The problems in teaching is seen as systemic. When I started teaching, if you didn't like your school, you just moved somewhere else. Now, people are almost afraid to move because there is the belief that it will be the same or worse. With more and easier access to other staff lived experiences via social media, teachers are hearing some of the toxic experiences and this culture is almost regarded as a norm in schools now, rather than the exception. This then leads teachers to quit the profession completely, rather than risk trying another school.

In my last school we had a huge number of children with learning difficulties. The families were low income and many were single parents who had been raised in single parent households themselves. Many of the parents had been pupils at the school and also had learning difficulties. They weren't capable of 'making a fuss' to their local MP, writing letters to the education minister. Getting through the day was a monumental struggle . You can work yourself to death to try to lift them towards some sort of useful life but the likelihood is that the majority will simply repeat the cycle . Lots of them want to support the school and care deeply about their children but they don't have the skills to do it.A friend of mine runs a family centre in a deprived area. The library there is long gone so she arranged for the group to visit the library in the next ,much more affluent, part of town. No one turned up. When she asked them why they said " Thats not for us. We don't leave X area". They lived and died ( and chose partners) from that area and nowhere else.

Yup. DD's ofsted report this year has pages upon pages on the positive aspects side. The results are well above national average, kids can usually access the year 1 phonics test by this time of reception, the children are using mathematical terms I've never even heard of. Yet literally there was 1 bullet point in the improvements page - the art curriculum isn't challenging enough - and they are apparently good.
But it's at the stage where people are expecting a good or lower even if they are an excellent school. There's a mentality now of it being unachievable so why bother trying? And then aiming and being pleased with good.

Many of my secondary students come to school:

• tired because they're on their phones at all hours
• over stimulated, because they're on their phones at all hours
• hyper, because they're drinking energy drinks on their way to school because they're tired
• badly nourished because they just eat crap all the time
• Unwilling to follow the "rules" of a classroom because they don't understand why they can't just shout out/wander about/argue the toss
• anxious, because they might be missing something vital on their phone when the evil teachers won't let them check

And on the subject of anxiety, I think we - as a society - have made "normal nerves" (like we all get before a test) into a really big deal. It is totally normal to feel nervous before a test... but suddenly we have a huge influx of kids who can't possibly be expected to do a test in class or answer a question (or even the register!) Of course some people have extreme anxiety. I'm not talking about those. But if we are never allowed to put controlled pressure on them, they will never learn to cope with it.

@MrsHamlet i teach sixth form and my colleague and I had to have a “come to Jesus” talk with our classes about exam nerves being normal, expected, and even helpful. That you should feel anxious before an exam and this is what makes you study for it and want to do well. That the only way to conquer a fear eg giving presentations is to do them. And so on. Obviously there are some highly anxious students but in our experience the vast majority can and should cope with the entirely age-appropriate challenges they are being set.

Now, people are almost afraid to move because there is the belief that it will be the same or worse.

Plus since pay portability was scrapped (Gove: 2014?), moving schools will literally mean a pay cut for many. I haven’t seen a UPS job advertised for ‘just’ a classroom teacher for years.

I think that we have seen a rise over the past decade or so, of parenting techniques that involve negotiating with your child instead of just telling them what you want them to do and them getting on with it.

Supernanny is a good example (and I watched avidly when mine were little). The naughty step followed by the conversation about behaviour. I'm not dissing it as a technique.

But, it has led to an expectation from children that endless discussions about their behaviour are the norm.

"Take your coat off" - "I was just...." "But I'm cold..." then someone else chips in with "it's freezing today..." and so on and so on.

Sometimes it feels like every single instruction is challenged or responded to. This is incredibly tiring.

@AtomicBlondeRose That doesn't surprise me at all. One of my year 12 dropped my subject after a week because I'd put too much pressure on them - I'd asked what they thought about a character in a text we were reading. Hardly Mastermind levels of pressured there.

Pathologising normal emotion is unhelpful. We now have a significant number of students who are too anxious to go to lessons.

I have another friend who teaches in a primary school in a naice area. The effects of "gentle parenting' are the bane of her life. She has reception. They have to impress on parents at the new children meeting in July that they need to use ( and mean) the word no. Everything is a long winded negotiation. Fine if you have one child and lots of time. Not fine if you are going to do PE with a class of 35. She said that so many of the children look absolutely astonished when they are expected to actually do something right now not when/ if they feel like it.

I've worked in a large comprehensive in the North for the best part of 3 decades. Since our return after covid this is what I see that's different from before covid:
Between lessons, very large numbers of children wandering corridors being disruptive or taking over toilets vaping and playing music on phones.

When staff ask students why they are there or where they should be, students are incredibly aggressive or just completely ignore staff.
Teachers, utterly burnt out, leaving the profession, or retiring early, at all times of the academic year, not just in the summer.
Adverts being placed for teacher and support staff vacancies that receive no or very few applicants.
Students who have barged into, threatened or verbally abused staff, receiving lunchtime detentions (which they then don't attend).
Parents being very abusive about the school and individual teachers on social media without any knowledge of the facts around why school rules are in place or how they work to keep children safe.
Children filming staff dealing with difficult situations, then posting onto social media.
I can't give details about individual incidents for obvious reasons, but I used to love my job and have now joined the ranks of the many school colleagues planning their escape.
My school has become a bleak and scary place.