To think that schools need to get much tougher on low level disruption & it's no wonder we're apparently falling behind other countries in terms of educational attainment.

[Cortina]

After reading the Ofsted report for a local primary I have been thinking that parents and teachers should get much tougher and expect higher standards of behaviour from children. It's no wonder we're apparently falling behind in terms of educational attainment when so many excuses are seemingly made for poor behaviour and low level disruption. At the risk of sounding ancient the sort of letter received by pupils below would be unthinkable 20 years ago.

Excerpts from Ofsted 'letter to pupils':

Sometimes we saw that the work teachers set was either too hard or too easy or a bit boring and then unsurprisingly some of you lost interest and started to misbehave. We think you behave well most of the time, especially in interesting and enjoyable lessons. Sometimes, when the lessons are a bit dull and not so exciting, some of you get restless and begin to disturb others.

The letter goes on to make excuses for low level disruption and some occasional bad behaviour and say that this isn't the children's fault at all. It ends with a request that they smile through and that the officers have noticed it's a good, safe school so they're lucky.

If I read this as an 11 year old child I would assume:

1. I could blame the rather dull lessons & poor lesson planning/teaching for my disruptive behaviour.

2. Wonder why on earth rather dull lessons were on the agenda at all? If the adults think lessons are sometimes boring and a bit pointless then I may as well switch off.

3. To think there were no sanctions or consequences for poor behaviour.

I think we need to wake up. Our children are going to have to compete in an increasingly globalised world. Can you imagine this being written and circulated to children in South Korea, Singapore or China? How the teachers would laugh at us circulating letters like this to pupils.

And I hate to bring up the private/state thing but how many prep schools do you think would have this philosophy? Surely we set our children up for failure with these sort of platitudes and half-baked excuses for poor behaviour.

My wider experience tells me that these sort of attitudes are not isolated to one (good by the way) Primary. I can see that they are trying to 'get the children on side' but I don't think it's working for reasons stated above.

I haven't watched 'china school' southestastra will take a look. Is it on Youtube?

Having taught in both state and private sectors (secondary level) I absolutely agree that a harder line on low level disruption is essential for work to get done and pupils to achieve. In my current job (private) kids get sent to the head if they are caught chewing gum or eating in the form rooms and guess what - it doesn't happen. At my previous state school these things were techinically not allowed but pupils were just told to bin it and and carry on. EVERY day I would catch dozens. I could provide similar examples for in class behaviour. At this job I get to teach the subject and the kids learn it. I don't have to plan my lesson with an eye to entertaining them as some sort of bribe to behave. They understand that some topics / lessons will be great fun with group work, hands on stuff and others will be listening and taking notes. It is hugely important that OFSTED do not give ammunition to those who would excuse their children's behaviour on the grounds of boredom.

Rose, yes I have read before about the mathematician in India tutoring over the net!

Cortina - I live in China (not Shanghai though).
You are right about the concept of not letting down your family or losing face. There is incredible pressure on children to perform particularly with the one child policy.

Agree with EllaDee - students do not question the teacher and there is a lot of rote learning. This type of learning has its place but children need to be able to work independenly, use their initiative and ask questions.

YANBU but this has been a problem for a long time and there has been little will to fix it apart from slagging off teachers every so often.

Cortina - I'm sure that is true, that people take on board criticisms.

I just wanted to add some optimism and stand up for our education system - it's not all bad!

God, the amount of times I've had to remind kids that I'm there to educate not entertain and that one is required, the other is a bonus

We said! I use it as a parent in 'I am your mother, not your entertainments manager'.
It can be a vicious circle, if there is low level disruption the teacher avoids the sort of lesson that might be more exciting and sticks to something safe but boring.

Agree, there's lots of great things about our education system but the frustrating thing IMO if we could get a bit more 'zero-tolerance' about things it could be so much better.

Rose, thanks for linking the article. It was interesting. Particularly this part:

The effects of the financial squeeze and deficit reduction programme will threaten much more than this government's survival. We shall see, in all probability, a permanent reduction in British living standards that can't be arrested by educational reform. Neoliberalism, already badly dented by the financial meltdown, will be almost entirely discredited. Governments will then need to rethink their attitudes to education, inequality and the state's economic role.

Some economists, forward-thinkers, etc are suggesting that the best thing we can give our children is fluent mandarin as this will give them an edge for the future. Not so easy from the UK! Some people have even moved to Asia and engaged children in mandarin speaking schools etc. What's your view?

Shanghaidiva, what I think is interesting is how much children achieve in Asia and how far they often go. Ok, the methods might be punishing and undesirable at times but here in the UK the belief 'you can't get out what God didn't put in' seems so resilient IMO it holds many back. Most believe a small percentage are truly able and the others in the middle or low ability when it comes to academic potential and accomplishments.

The French have an expression 'dent de loupe' (wolves tooth - my French is pretty shocking but something like that). Essentially you need to be really hungry to buckle down at school and really achieve and appreciate the opportunity you've been given. They say it's the children of the immigrants, the second generation that work like Trojans and do well. I fear we've become lazy and complacent and our children will suffer as a consequence if we're not careful.

I know of several oversubscribed and well thought of schools that are, tbh, a bit crap.

This one sounds just like them.

Kids complaining that things are 'boring' really annoys me. Life/work isn't one rollercoaster of excitement and some things do just have to be learnt by putting in a bit of hard slog. I thoroughly agree with the teacher before who mentioned fraction raps and posters!

Can you imagine our parents complaining about a lesson/teacher being boring when they were at school!?

I agree with them, re: the mandarin. I think we also need to start encouraging some kind of cultural exchange so British students grow up with a better understanding of cultural norms in the countries that will be the most important when they are adults. It's not enough to speak the language sometimes - I have many Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern students in my class at uni (UK student are about six in a class of thirty) and sometimes there are huge gaps between expectations in the groups, especially with coursework and attitudes in lectures (e.g. talking/asking questions). I think European cultures contain enough similarities that we can rub along blind, so to speak, but that's not always the case.

I had a very tense row with another student last year about figures that didn't add up and I wanted to change the method, late in the day, to something that did and include that we had made mistakes in the report. He wanted the easy method and to say - having already done the work - that our answers had an acceptable error level (not true). I thought, as he was from a very conservative country where women don't have full rights, that that was why he didn't like my suggestion (and was surprised tbh as he is very pro-West). A friend later told me that in this guy's country you should never admit error and always present something that has an 'acceptable' answer even if the method or report is wrong/doesn't match the answer. It would have helped both of us in that situation to understand each other's cultures.

Fluent mandarin may give children an edge, but learning Chinese requires incredible focus and discipline.

The difference I have seen between students from Asia and those from the UK is the attitude to study, the desire for self-improvement and willingness to sacrifice free time to achieve a long term goal.

I don't think it's an outlier Jena. IMO it's typical of many. It's not that the school that's to blame here, it's about the excuses that are generally made for what I take to be disruptive behaviour from children. It's a good school with good teaching.

There was a documentary on a Leicestershire primary recently. A boy said he was hungry and someone took him off for toast. A young girl was pulling faces in reading recovery group etc. Didn't seem like a bad school and the young headmistress seemed impressive, it was just that low level disruption was just expected and tolerated every day. I believe that's largely the reality whether we want to bury our heads in the sand or not is up to us. Many don't think there's much wrong with it anyway.

And don't get me started on pushing oneself forward in education! I agree that it's great teachers and lecturers are there when you need help - and I have needed a lot over the years - but so many students expect the answers! I think this is a legacy of the new exam system that came into place just as I started high school, where answers have to be prescriptive. For our history, politics and other essay subjects, we were told as long as we wrote in the formulaic question format we would get at least a B. I put some rubbish into my exams (even used my DM as an example in the civil service question when I had no clue what a proper answer would be) and got an A. Likewise I sat a General Studies exam without seeing a practice paper (timetabling issues) and got the best mark in the year: one question was 'Tabloid newspapers are read more than broadsheet newspapers. Why do you think this is?' and was worth 10% of the paper I totally lost my faith in the A level system that day.

Good schools will encourage their pupils to study what interests them and challenges them but I have heard too many teachers and lecturers tell us to go for some easy questions to boost up results/league tables. It's created a culture of expectation that the answers will be provided somewhere. I don't think this is the case everywhere but it seems more prevalent now that it was previously.

One of my recent lecturers is teaching a topic that is not really in her remit (totally the fault of the school). As a result no one really grasped the subject and the questions - she freely admits she needs to get good student results - were worked examples from the textbook. This is in a highly-regarded university on a respected course. Luckily the rest of the course is gruelling but this module raised a few eyebrows!

I worked for a while with a lady who was a teacher in China who'd come over to work in UK schools for a year. She was telling me how utterly utterly different the two worlds were - from what I recall (was a good decade ago now) she said she had a class of 50 and her teaching was basically standing up lecturing at the class for a 2 hour session.

We also used to get a lot of Chinese pupils who'd come over to the school we were both working at (a UK boarding one) for an "English" education. Apparently if they ever did return to being educated in China they struggled massively as they couldn't readjust back to that system again.

She really struggled managing British teenagers (and teenagers from other countries who'd got into the mindset of the UK school system) - but she was a lovely lovely lady.

But yep, quite often working in UK schools now it feels like the line from Nirvana of "here we are now - entertain us" is more and more what's required rather than teaching. You do what you can to make everything interesting and fun - but there are sometimes when you need to teach some content that may not lend itself to an inspiring all-singing, all-dancing lesson, but it's content or a skill that needs to be taught, and sometimes the skills you teach just have to be practiced until they're solid... unfortunate but true and I think that Ofsted et al tend to view that as educational heresy.

And sometimes kids ENJOY things like getting to do a page of sums and getting nice neat ticks on them!

Mind you, last time I got Ofstedded I couldn't get the berluddy inspector away from the science lesson I was doing as he was having too much flipping fun joining in! Buggered up the pace of my lesson as I was desperate to say "and can the 40 year old lump in the corner please move away from the experiment so we can start to tidy up now please."

She also tried to teach me Mandarin - it's fucking HARD!

YANBU - that's why I'd pay for private education if I could afford it. Private schools do not have the discipline problems many state schools have - because if there are problems they're dealt with quickly - they don't mess around with wacky liberal nonsense.

Interesting, Rose.

Shanghai I believe that Mandarin is not necessarily that difficult to learn, in that the grammar structure is quite simple. It's a tonal language but children tend to cope quite well with that, especially if they start young. Writing is a different matter. We tend to have this 'too difficult' philosophy about many things in the West IMO.

I feel that our children and certainly our grandchildren will have the desire for self-improvement, good attitude to study and readiness to delay gratification that you describe as power may have dramatically shifted to the East by then. My fear is that they'll look back at us and wonder why we didn't better prepare them. What do you think?

Dejawho LOL! :)

Why did you find Mandarin so hard? Sure memorising the characters is tough but the tones are not that difficult there not that many of them, Cantonese is harder. Our children could cope I'm sure. Many see Mandarin as a gimmick, a poncey add on. I think we're missing a trick.

The thing is though, not all schools suffer with so much disruption. Clearly the intake plays a big role in this - but so does classroom management and effective teaching.

Depends what you mean by disruption? Low level disruption at least is fairly prevalent IME. We've even come to expect it.

Cortina it was the tones I found really hard to get my head (and voice) around - and I'm normally really good with languages. I need to give it a go again at some point cos I hate being beaten by anything.

My dd went through a bad patch last year ( year 10)

I was shocked with how school dealt with her. She was able to opt out of some lessons where she didn't get on with her teacher!! A time out card to freely walk out of lessons if she was getting bored!
I was shocked. There were many kids like her

Thank god we have discovered army cadets to help a bit. She is focused again. Her friends however, well, think it's a but late now for them

There is no 'fear' of consequences anymore......

Mandarin is not necessarily that difficult to learn??

It's probably more accurate to say that it's not that difficult to parrot a sentence in Mandarin (just like in French) but it's much more difficult to accurately speak the language. Yes there are only 4 tones but the tones can change for each word depending on the proceeding word and also each word means a different thing depending on the word. The classic example is "I am four" which, if pronounced incorrectly, could mean "I am dead" which is why there is rarely a 4th floor (like unlucky 13 for us).

Chinese seems to be best learned by rote and classrooms (IME) are set up for that with discipline playing a part.

Not really sure why Tiffany is suggesting that an entire country is worth ignoring and getting everything wrong due to one tragedy though. Apologies if I'm getting the wrong end of the stick.