How would you want UK schools to deal with badly-behaved students?

[GeordieDownSouth]

Everyday on Mumsnet, I see posts about children being bullied by other kids, teachers having breakdowns due to poor class behavior, and teachers leaving the profession in droves for better conditions.

As an ex teacher, my main reason for leaving was poor student behavior, and a lack of support from the management in relation to this. For example, a 14 year old girl once pulled my hair roughly when my back was turned. The SLT told me that her behavior was my fault as I should have been disciplining her before she did it!

Prior to being a UK teacher, I taught in China and South Korea, where bad behavior was not the norm. The approach out there is very much the stick over the carrot. If a kid was naughty once, they'd be punished. In Korea, they got no lunch or were made to clean the school toilets. It might sound harsh, but it definitely worked! The kids who confined to behave badly after this would simply be excluded, which everyone supported.

In my opinion, I think UK teachers should be allowed to punish students for poor behavior, such as by making them clean the school. I mean, in an ideal world, teachers would have the time and money for positive reinforcement but at the minute, we don't.

What do others think?

Who is going to staff these places?

Ex military, security staff, ex police, etc. Once they're controlled and behaving, we can then start to think about educating them. Whilst they're feral, there's no point at all in wasting qualified teachers' time on them. At first, they need "crowd control" to get them to comply with the law and rules that everyone else manages to comply with!! We're far too soft with them and it's affecting the well behaved kids who want to learn and do well.

all these people have retired for a reason. You think they want to come in to work on effectively TA money and get kicked in the head every day!

Where they go shouldn’t be the schools’ problem. They should be too busy getting on with actual education, not being social workers.

I don't know what the answer is but it's making schools impossible for children to learn in. We've always had children from terrible backgrounds and dysfunctional homes, and we've never had the amount of attention and intervention that we have now, yet behaviour in schools is shocking.

I don't know how teachers do it. I barely tolerate my own teen on her worst days, I can't imagine how teachers get through a day with dozens of them.

Except the duty of care means it very much is the school's problem!

Schools can refer to other agencies but there is only so much the can and should do for a child. They have a duty to every child to enable their learning, education and academic/personal potential. They should not be so distracted from that by tasks and responsibilities that actually belong to police, social workers, medical professionals etc.

In my academy students are so well supported. They have access to two counsellors, pastoral support leads and assistants in addition to a bespoke program to support them. They also have a wonderful school community who deeply cares for them. I work in a lovely school. Unfortunately they refuse all help and enjoy disrupting and destroying everything. I feel that too many excuses and concessions are made for them. They come from challenging backgrounds for sure, but the school cares deeply about them, and they just will not engage. They will deliberately go out of there way to be spiteful and mean.

I find it shocking how they are allowed to be in school... they will soon be 16

I think that the type of adults who think a lot about how they wish they could punish more kids probably shouldn't be teachers.

Kids are not an amorphous group. They have different needs. Follow this plan and you'll end up making the kids with a trauma history or undiagnosed neurodisability scrub toilets for behaviours they can't help. It's cruel.

There's plenty of evidence about how punishments alone are not a good way to change behaviour.

I'm not convinced that a scenario where teachers don't connect with or care about the welfare of the children they work with would be the huge win you are imagining.

I think this sort of zero tolerance would effectively be a form of disability discrimination.

How is this fair to children with sensory issues, communication issues, trauma experiences that mean they haven't learned that adults can be trusted, all sorts of other situations?

If I could make a change, I'd want all schools to have their own access to mental health, SALT and OT support, and teachers to have time to practice in the way most of them want to.

Of course an overtly strict and draconian environment will be counterproductive and potentially increase behaviour issues.
Schools can have clear boundaries and be " strict" without loosing their humanity.

Unfortunately there are students who repeatedly make the school feel unsafe for other pupils and teachers.
I don not think it is necessarily related to funding. Pastoral/ social services and various key workers in school try to help these students. My school is a state school and we have a fantastic bespoke provision

My school will not expel the students for fear of loosing money

There are students whose EHCP basically forbids us from sanctioning them in any way, even if they throw furniture and verbally abuse us in front of 30 other students. There are no special schools in my county and only a handful of PRUs.

If parents insist on sending the child to school rather than providing the 1-to-1 care the child needs at home, there is nothing we can do. It breaks my heart seeing the faces of some of my most well-behaved students when they are being subjected to this every lesson if the child with needs also refuses to leave and continues to rage distruction around them. When I, once again, have to remove my class from the room, because it isn't safe. Or I just have to stand there and tolerate being told to fuck off repeatedly while the rest of the class do their best to ignore this.

Those children legally cannot be excluded if their EHCP forbids it. What keeps one child safe is putting many others, and many staff, at risk.

So what is the answer to that? We have several of these students in my academy.

I am an ex-teacher who left and behaviour was a huge factor in my decision. Many children had needs but the level of general disruption was vast. I didn’t have an issue coping with the behaviour, I just couldn’t stand back and watch while children struggled everyday to cope in an unsuitable environment.

Schools have no power but even if they did, we would only be treating the symptom. I think this is a result of a steady decline in society as a whole. There is no respect across the board for any public services. It feeds down through parents and is exacerbated by social media. We need to be treating the cause. I also think there needs to be more studies into how technology is changing our brains. There is some science to suggest that scrolling causes a decline in our attention span. That is very worrying for our youth.

A simple and clear behavioural policy, which is the same for all and enforced by SLT.
This needs to be escalated to temporary and permanent exclusion.

If you have needs which mean that you can’t stick to the policy, mainstream school is not for you.

We need to get back to pupils being allowed to learn in a quiet respectful environment, and teachers staying in teaching to inspire learners in their subject.

This happens in the private sector and the vast majority of other countries around the world in all types of schools.

Yes it is tough for the 5-10% with troubled backgrounds or educational needs, but these need to be provided for in another way.

We cannot be prioritising the 5-10% over the 90-95%. If you look at other cultures, they have all the same issues but it doesn’t lead to teens behaving like animals. Behaviour is also one of the main factors driving parents to the private sector.

The current culture for education though is that the majority of pupils with SEN or SEMH needs are placed in mainstream schools, with schools required to meet their needs within specialist provision within their mainstream setting

Where the funding comes from for that I couldnt say.

Parents over the years have argued for children to be included in mainstream schools, even with specialist need and unfortunately it doesnt work in my view.

I dont understand this because children with ehcps are excluded at a higher rate than any other children.
These are very peculiar ehcps. Schools can also 'not meet need' which is not excluding them as such but happens a lot too.

But obviously the answer is your area needs to build some special schools and set up some PRUs. Maybe all the schools in the academy can join forces and create a unit.

My DD has just started her first role as a newly qualified English teacher in a secondary school, working out classroom management for herself.

She's so passionate about teaching but I must admit I do worry for her.

@soupfiend ,

You are definitely right. Most adults would not be expected to do a thoughtful job with others screaming and throwing things around them, so why is it fair to inflict this on children?

Although, to be fair, the majority of misbehaviour is just rude undisciplined children and nothing to do with SEN.

If we want social mobility, we have to make schools good enough that the brightest and best can fulfill their potentials in mainstream schooling.

She was telling me about a parent berating her for her child being given a detention after a series of warnings. My DD had spent several hours of her own time producing a resource to help that child, the mother casually admitted they hadn't even looked at it.

She also told me about a parental WhatsApp group that had been set up specifically to moan about another new young teacher.

Im not saying that genuine issues shouldn't be raised in schools but I find this sense of parental entitlement and disrespect very sad. I'm old now but I always believed that home and school should be a partnership.

I do pull up my 6th form DS sometimes if I hear anything I think that is unnecessarily critical.

My DD is worried she's too strict at the moment but i reminded her that as quite a meek child who was desperate to learn I felt so much safer in that classroom with a stern presence at the front!

Op behaviour in Korean schools has changed - a teacher committed suicide last year after being bullied by abusive parents, and if children misbehave in school there’s nothing they can do.
Here is an article about it:
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/07/13/national/socialAffairs/Korea-teacher-violence/20220713184417492.html

The poor behaviour is not he fault of the teachers. It arises from:

• schools being too big, so that "crowd control" becomes paramount.
• children feeling lost in the mass of rules and regulations that arise from school size.
• lack of parenting help in the early years.
• poverty and unemployment
• restricted boring curriculums
• schools run by business people just looking for a quick buck and the chance to create leadership jobs for their mates.
• homogenising schools into MATs that ignore their individual characteristics and go for the "clone" approach

Education in the UK needs a massive rethink.

Problems with your ideas -

The children who are badly behaved do also have human rights. Their failure to learn good behaviour is probably more their parents fault than their own. Their human rights involve the right to be kept safe and the right to an education. Excluding a child from education due to their parents being crap is not going to help in the long term.

Giving a badly behaved child who is acting out harsh toxic chemical cleaning products is a really bad idea. Cleaning needs to be done by properly trained adults who can handle these substances responsibly.

One of the reasons kids behave badly is poor nutrition due to poverty at home. Their school lunch may be the only balanced meals they get. Depriving these children of their lunch will make things worse.

What would help is more staff in schools for smaller class sizes and additional backup support staff to double up the adults in a room so that one can be dealing with discipline issues while the other teaches

It is a societal problem not a school problem. The U.K. has for the past 40 years championed individualism over communal responsibility and personal gratification over societal duty. Every badly behaving child in school is a reflection of their parents - the parents who pavement park with no thought to vulnerable pedestrians, who drop litter with no thought to the effect on the school surroundings, who sit there with their engines running with no thought to the children’s’ lungs, who teach their children that success only comes at the expense of others, who teach contempt for the rule of law and societal bounds, who believe there is no value in books, or art, or music, or learning for the sake of learning, who, in a myriad ways everyday set out to make the world a little worse, because their instantaneous personal gratification is all that matters.

This problem cannot be fixed by schools. It will take a revolution (a real one, not a metaphorical one) or a war and the subsequent re-invention of society.