Crap teacher - how to raise with school?

[thesunisastar]

DS has just started Y8 (at a very average comprehensive, not that that is particularly relevant). He's bright, keeps his head down and gets on with it, is generally polite and has not received a single behaviour point in his time at the school - just to set the scene that he really isn't a difficult student.

DH and I are generally very pro-teacher/school, and we've never tolerated the DC talking disrespectfully about any of their teachers. We've always made it very clear that teachers are humans, they are not infallible, that it's a fact of life that they will experience a mix of great, good and not so good teachers, and that at the end of the day they (DC) need to take responsibility for their own learning.

However. His science teacher is new to teaching this year, and since the first lesson DS has been saying that she is absolutely hopeless. According to DS, she very is difficult to follow, doesn't have a good grasp of the subject, is setting tests on material that she hasn't taught them, and cannot control the class at all.

He's just come home genuinely upset following yet another lesson which none of them understood, and that also included the teacher getting into a heated argument with the class when she absolutely insisted that the sun is not a star, which to me just seems a really poor lack of knowledge for a secondary science teacher. Science is DS's favourite subject and he's gone from enjoying the lessons to hating them.

As I said, I don't expect perfection from school or from teachers, but I feel I need to raise this with the school.

My question is who should I talk to? The progress leader for the year group? The Head of Science? Leadership (seems overkill?).

I think the head of science would be a good starting point

I'd be tempted to send the following:

Dear Head of Science

I am concerned about how my year 8 son <Name, tutor group> is getting on with science since the start of term. He has gone from really enjoying science to 'hating' the lessons.
I am concerned that he is reporting confusing lessons, being tested on information not taught, and ongoing poor behaviour disrupting his learning.
Is there any way you could check up on this for me please as something has obviously changed for him since year 7 and science is a core subject so I want him to progress well.

Kind regards

You can sometimes get a situation in teaching where a class takes against a teacher.

This is much more likely to happen with a new teacher as an experienced teacher spots it happening and makes sure that the students are under control and not permitted to be disruptive.

New teachers almost always have at least one class that is very difficult to control, and usually the students say the teacher is crap and the teacher says that the students are badly behaved. Both are usually true.

New teachers are observed very frequently. In addition they have weekly meetings with their mentor (a more experienced teacher).

Standard solutions for this are:
Move some of the difficult teenage boys out of the class (because often if the teacher makes one mistake they decide she is crap, spend the lessons throwing things/hitting people/refusing to work and blame it on the teacher and won't be open to resetting the relationship)
Get a member of the leadership team to sit in the class to help with behaviour (teens are feral but are much less likely to be little shits with a senior person sat there)

Sometimes you do get a situation where a new teacher has been given very difficult classes (in terms of behaviour) that they should not have been given, there are departments that dump all the crap classes on new teachers.

That's really difficult to deal with because a group of teenagers can be very hard to control. Behaviour in schools can be pretty appalling these days and new teachers are often shell shocked at how bad it is.

What you can do:

Email in and let them know there is a problem with behaviour and with the class generally
Tell your DS to keep his behaviour impeccable as it's likely other teachers will start dropping in to the class and checking in behaviour and anyone they find being disruptive will be in trouble
Cut some slack on the knowledge mistakes. If they keep happening then there is a problem

Unfortunately teachers that can't teach are becoming commonplace. Good for you to address it. When my DS got a Maths teacher that couldn't teach Maths, we just accepted it (why?!) and all got tutors for our kids.

In our case, we had an excellent high school which then had a change of leadership at the top.

Very quickly, the best teachers jumped ship and the whole school now seems filled with teachers who can't teach!

Pls do keep posting with how your complaint goes - i am intrigued!

Cut some slack on the knowledge mistakes.

A science teacher that argues that the sun isn't a star? No, I wouldn't be cutting some slack on that. And I'm a teacher.

My question is who should I talk to? The progress leader for the year group? The Head of Science? Leadership

I am surprised that you have the first.
Go for the Head of science, and only the head of science in the first instance. Including more people will just allow the excuse 'I thought X was dealing with it'

Keep the email (or whatever) factual and keep emotions out of it, most schools will have a respond by policy, but put in something like 'I know that you are busy but I would appreciate a reply by X date'

Could it be that the science teacher actually isn’t a science specialist? She could be a teacher of another subject and just got science dumped on her too. This happens because of the shortages we have.

Agree with this

This particular instance is very poor

Knowing the sun is a star isn't secondary science subject knowledge, it's general knowledge that anyone should know.

It's taught in primary schools.

A friend of mine had to teach science to Yr9 when he was newly qualified. It was not his subject area but they had a shortage of teachers. The head of department gave him the lesson plans and he had to deliver them. He hated it because he hadn’t even done science A-level and as a new teacher he had more than enough on his plate. The sun comment could be because of a situation like this, although you would have to be completely uninterested in science not to have picked that up. I would email the head of science and say how much your son likes the subject but that you are a bit concerned.

Cut some slack on the knowledge mistakes.

Oh come on, my 5 year old knows the sun is a star. It's not some complex scientific process that requires real in depth understanding to explain to a class. It's an extremely basic bit of general knowledge.

I feel a face to face or phone conversation would be better than an email. I'd suggest making an appointment to meet with the Head of Science

Do you think she actually said the sun is not a star though? I seems peculiar for anyone to not know this ,let alone a Teacher ! If the class is noisy and disruptive it might be easy to get lost in translation as it were .However I would see what other parents think ,I think the more people who complain the better

Sadly there are some teachers out there who aren’t great. A newly qualified teacher still getting to grips with the whole process will make mistakes. But subject knowledge in important. My daughter had a teacher a few years ago teaching RE who was adamant all Catholic Churches use bibles which are in Latin. She attends a non religious school but we are catholics and she attended a catholic primary. Firstly the church doesn’t an actual bible for weekly mass. It’s more a collection of mass readings and bible extracts. And none at our church are in Latin. That’s a very old fashioned thing. My dad attended church when it was all in Latin but that was the 1950s. She tried to correct the teacher but wasn’t listened to. Can’t recall if it turned into an argument or if her comment was just dismissed. I contemplated emailing to complain but decided against it at the time. However I have emailed school about other things.

I would send an e-mail to the head of science.
New teachers are observed teaching but it isn't as often as you might think and they know when they are going to be observed so they will make an extra effort to do a good lesson and check the facts.
It's only a month into the school year and it could take a while for the mentor/head of science to notice there was a problem if observed lessons were ok. Meetings with mentors won't necessarily indicate there is a problem either if the new teacher isn't honest about what is going on or doesn't think there's an issue (eg. the sun thing, the teacher is adamant she is right and probably thinks she has good subject knowledge)

I think you need to let the head of science know. I suspect you won't be the only one. The sooner you contact them the sooner it can be dealt with and support put in place for the teacher to help her improve.

Thank you very much for everyone's responses, it's really helpful - as I said in my OP I wasn't sure which channel to go down and it sounds like everyone agrees that the Head of Science is the best place to start, so I will do that.

I'm definitely not going in all guns blazing and I wasn't planning on mentioning the specific sun/star incident, because as a PP pointed out it is possible that there may have been some misunderstanding there. I'll just mention that DS has reported finding the lessons somewhat confusing and that there may be issue with content not being covered before KPIs, and see what they say.

I actually think you should give examples if you can OP - including the sun/star issue. Vague feedback, even if intended politely, is not helpful for resolving problems.

'Finding lessons confusing' is not something they can really act on. But 'the lesson on Friday really upset DS because he didn't understand the content and teacher couldn't explain ABC' is much more helpful.

Yeah because teacher don’t already have too much to do in the time they have! An email like the one drafted above is perfect.

If she has no clue then her ‘teaching’ is worse than useless. Better to be told nothing, than to be given incorrect information when there will be exams to follow. She must stick to what she knows and plan her lesson in advance, so it is at least factual. She will have a computer and should double check her answers to any questions.
Reminds me of a useless teacher at my son’s primary school who marked his homework wrong and wrote in the margin ‘is this a word? ‘ They had to write 6 words beginning with ‘tw’ and one of his words was ‘twine’. I wrote back, asking if she knew what a dictionary was, because rather than ask in the margin, she should have looked it up, marked accordingly and learned something in the process rather than upsetting my son marking him down. That was not the only incident but it’s one that I remember as if it was yesterday

I was a teacher and as I got older I would make mistakes as my brain was going faster than my words or writing or I was busy spinning plates and sorting out about 5 issues at once. I made it a game that if they caught me out then they got bragging rights. This was y3. We turned it into a learning opportunity as if the kids asked a question that I didn’t know as I can’t keep a comprehensive list of all the Greek gods and their respective areas in my head then we would look it up together so everyone knows or I would park it and put on a post it note to find out later if it wasn’t the right time.
gave kids confidence that they could make
mistakes and it’s ok. As some kids have a meltdown if they make an error.

you need to follow the chain of command. So subject teacher as they were there and can clarify or tutor and then if you don’t like their response you continue up the management line. This is because if a complaint goes to Governors to decide on then the complaints policy must have been complete ld correctly

Dd is year 7, she’s always been academic but is having some problems with a few of her teachers. Her food tech teacher seems to be a problem, dd rants about her every week, DS had her a few years back and confirms in his words. “She is a bitch” so I’m just waiting to see how things go. She’s given dd achievement points so it can’t be all bad.
im a bit concerned about her maths teacher. He’s a lovely guy but with a very strong African accent (I’ve met him) he taught DS towards the end of his GCSEs (DS had to swap classes) and back then DS said he’s very hard to understand. Now dd absolutely loves maths but I’m concerned she may give up on because she’s complained several times that she can’t understand him properly. I’m not sure how to approach without sounding like a complete bitch. I once got called racist by a teacher b3cause I said I couldn’t understand his hand writing. So it’s a bit of a risky move.
I say op start with the head of science and see how far you get, if not his head of year should be able to help you..

YouTube these days has excellent lessons in common subjects. You can look up almost any topic. Or bbc bitesize. I expect there are more resources now, too. When any of mine complained about a teacher, I'd suggest they taught themselves a topic and then explained it to someone else.

Good idea but (like the action i took in getting a tutor when DD's maths teacher was hopeless) it does not address the issue of an incompetant teacher in the school.

I think OP is doing the right thing by tackling the issue head on. It will improve the situation for many pupils if it gets resolved.