If you work in a school does this sound familiar?

[1newname]

I'm not a teacher but work in a school and am wondering if my school is particularly bad.

A number of teachers and TAs are off sick with stress. We seem to have so many children with SEN and behaviour problems who need 1:1 care but they don't. Even the school dinners have gone down in quality massively since I joined the school 9 years ago.

I'm in London so is this happening all over the UK? It's pretty depressing to be honest and I'm increasingly feeling like the whole country is going to shit.

Not a teacher or even working in education.

What has gone on to create so many children with special needs?

I spent 7 years in a secondary school.

With many of the parents, you couldn't get an ounce of support. Would ring them to discuss horrendous behaviour, violent outbursts, swearing and disrupting lessons and truanting, usually in groups to vandalise and vape in the toilets.
The parents simply did not care and would even defend the little darlings.
A favourite and recurrent theme in the school I taught at was for families to accuse staff of picking on a child simply because of their Surname- the parent or an Uncle/Aunt may have been permenantly excluded from there 10-15 years previously and so they would imply that the school was deliberately targeting their child on this basis.
The idea that they had failed miserably at the basics of parenting, and that their children were completely out of control simply didn't cross their minds.
I myself was once threatened and told to watch my back when I left the school grounds! Because their child had kicked a hole in a door and was facing a 3 day exclusion!
Another parent told me if we tried to issue a detention they would have us 'done' for false imprisonment etc etc, you get the idea!
A friend of mine also works in a different state secondary and last year they had the police out when a Father physically assaulted a female TA during a reintegration meeting! In front of his teenage son for goodness sake!
I found it soul destroying and it really affected my mental health, so I had to get out.
What hope do these kids ever have of getting any sort of education and leading any sort of crime free, half decent life?
Many of these families were well known to SS and one Father was banned from entering school grounds. The parents would eff and blind at the SLT when the children were excluded or put on managed moves and blame everybody but themselves and their children! The problems were nothing more than bad upbringing and zero love, care or discipline.

Never any shortage of DLA forms being dropped into Reception though.
(The kids rarely had an official diagnosis by the way)

Interesting the thoughts on increased sen. There is definitely an increase in cases even once you take into account better diagnosis. That said in my DD's primary there were 4 children with autism including her, this was 18 years ago, small primary with pan of 15, all had parents who were academics, so I suspect it's an inherited condition(s) that we as of yet don't recognise but causes autism, DD's dad definitely has traits.

I work in schools - Mgment but non-teaching. I’ve realised that most of the staff are waiting for the HT to resign/retire/leave/get hit by a bus, while the HT is moving staff into difficult positions to force them into resigning/retiring/leaving.

School budgets come from a fixed pot. 85% to 90% of which goes straight out on staffing costs. Schools are left with the remaining 10% to 15% to pay for everything else (resources, transport, utilities, IT, SLAs, insurance, subscriptions, etc). Teacher salaries are only going up, so less left for everyone else.
On top of this, the Covid kids are now in schools with greater needs, and less diagnosis. Budgets in real terms are also getting cuts.

Glad my children have left school, and I won’t be in this job much longer either.