Sadly, a lot of schools are like these these days. I think it’s so that the government can start paying less for teachers because who really needs a degree to read a PowerPoint to children all day?
They used a method of behaviour management which they use in prisons called restorative justice (or something along those lines) and all staff had to wear a lanyard ring of laminated scripts to read from, when dealing with children who had done something wrong.
We weren’t allowed to speak to children in front of their peers so each time a child threw a chair, threw a rock at someone, hit someone on the face with a metal bar, told me to shut the fuck up (they were 5&6!) I had to leave the 1:1 support assistant who was dealing with a disabled child in a room on her own, with 30 children whilst I calmly took the misbehaving child out of the room to talk to them about their behaviour- never deviating from the script.
Because we were to record all behaviour incidences on the school’s system, I was made to attend a Zoom meeting with the deputy head, where she read a behaviour management presentation to me for 45 minutes in my own time one evening! It was then that I realised I was being punished for actually telling the truth about the sheer amount of behaviour management incidences that were happening, because once I’d reported it as I was supposedly meant to do, it was recorded on one of their data sets which she trust would have to explain to their CEO. They basically blamed my ‘poor behaviour management’ and responded by giving me training which was humiliating and infuriating as I’ve always been very good at behaviour management.
The last straw came when a 6 year old in my class completely smashed it up and was throwing chairs around the room. The deputy was called and she told me that “this is one of those situations where we just need to ignore it”. Meanwhile, kids were literally having to duck because he was lobbing chairs at them. Such a departure from common sense, it felt like a cult! A cult full of lobotomised adults who had allowed recent training courses to addle their critical thinking.
I was a part-times maternity cover teacher in this school and the other 2 days a week was taught by a range of different supply teachers for the entire year so all of the report writing and extra bits fell to me. It was just awful. I wasn’t allowed to tell the parents that the Thursday and Friday were being taught by loads of supply teachers and was made to lie to them by the head.
Safeguarding was awful too. One child disclosed something that they’d witnessed being done to their mum and the safeguarding lead told me I had to go onto the playground to tell the mum what their kid had said. The next day the kid told me they’d been punished for telling me what they’d told me the day before. It was all a mess.
I left this school m, and went to work in the independent sector which was great at first, due to being allowed to be creative but I’m sick of that too now!
All the pandering to parents who call the shots and old boys club vibes in senior management. Burrowing my way out of the whole charade slowly!