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.

If you need confirmation that Katharine Birbalsingh is a cretinous individual, it's in that book

I heard her speak earlier this year, cretinous or not she was describing much the same things I saw in the 80's when I was teaching. This has been going on for a long time.

Cortina Firstly, knowing Mandarin doesn't mean you understand Chinese culture, which, in terms of doing business in China, is far more important than language. Secondly, to work in a Mandarin speaking job in China, you're going to have to be absolutely fluent, because why would they employ you otherwise, or even then? They'll have plenty of talent of their own. My personal belief is that "China will be for the Chinese"

Yes, there will be opportunities to do business with Chinese businesses, but my view is that Chinese people are pragmatic. If they want to do business with you, they'll find a way.........and all middle class Chinese people will speak fluent English.

Maybe that sounds complacent, but far more important than being able to speak Mandarin, is being able to compete with these people in other skills, valuing education, working hard, not thinking the world owes you a living.

Just as an aside, Dh's company were very keen for him to learn Mandarin. He agreed to have intensive lessons- 1 hr private lesson per day for as long as it took. He mentioned this to a couple of Chinese colleagues, who told him not to bother as firstly, "It'll take about 5 years to get close to business fluent" and secondly, "if they want to talk to you, they'll talk English. if they don't, they don't want to talk to you in Mandarin either"

Bride - they don't do whole class teaching anymore. Every child in the class is given different work (or there is at least 3 different levels of work) - that is how you engage every pupil. That is why teaching is so hard.

It'd be a damn sight easier if they just used sets rather than explaining 3 different things in every lesson.

I've been working in schools for over a decade now.

When I was at school I went to a primary in one of the worst council estates in the country. We had about 2-3 kids in the class who might be termed "tricky" in their behaviour - I was one (I'm under no illusions - I was a little shite at school - very very intelligent and bored... that hideous recipe for causing utter mayhem), another was a lad who was just a bit mouthy, and another was a lad who had genuine massive issues. One day he lost it completely, snapped a ruler and walked out of the classroom - we were all utterly, utterly stunned by that.

Fastforward to me starting to work in schools and you'd tend to find about 5-6 of the "lively, little bit mouthy, need to keep on top of them" type kids in the class and the odd 1 or 2 dotted around the school of the ruler-snapping storming out level - but those acts had started to lose their shock value and the kids would just roll their eyes at the (much more frequent) kick-offs.

Fastforward a few more years and now pretty much every class you go in in lots and lots of schools has at least 1 or 2 kids who will kick off on a daily basis, storming out of class now merits no sanctions at all (possibly a chat with and a sticker from a learning mentor) and the "lively and needing managing" kids get away with so much more (and are so much more in number) because so much time and attention goes into cajoling the kids with the real issues into some form of compliance.

I've gone into schools on supply and been told "If X storms out - let him go, enjoy the break and someone will round him up en route out of the school" and another one where it's "this class is crazy gang with behaviour -just survive the hour and yes, they ARE always like that and it's not just you" (the second part of that was nice to know) and it just seems to be getting worse. In the metaphorical (NOT LITERAL BEFORE ANYONE GETS UP IN ARMS) carrot and stick situation - there is no stick, there's only carrots, and they've become so devalued they're meaningless - so you have kids expecting their sticker for each lesson and smashing up the classroom if they don't get one - so it's not a reward anymore - it's just an expected end of lesson routine.

What breaks my heart are the pained looks on the "always children" (the ones who are always sensible, always trying their best, always doing the right thing)'s faces when the room's in uproar again and they just roll their eyes and say "he's always like this Miss."

Incidentally - the reason I quit full-time teaching and will never ever go back is because I was begging through all possible avenues open to me for support for a child who had massive anger and behavioural issues - no one was interested in offering any support (SENCO, GP, Head, Deputy, KS leader... anyone) for this kid who regularly assaulted staff, smashed up the room on a daily basis, would storm out of class (oh how many lessons I taught from the classroom door keeping an eye on him kicking the corridor wall), destroy other children's work - and I made myself ill to a point I'll never fully recover from trying desperately to help him and protect the other kids' safety and education from it all. That child is the sort who, as well as everything else, is incredibly easily led - and I can quite see how his future is likely to pan out - he'll get peer pressured into carrying a knife or something stupid, someone will look at him and aggravate him... bam. It's terrifying to think of - but no one gave a stuff when he was 8 - will they give a stuff when he's 18, six foot tall and REALLY loses it? Because so much time and energy was devoted to pre-empting the potentially massive explosions there (you could defuse some of them by suddenly changing the pace of the lesson, or moving from desks to carpet or similar) - lots and lots of low-level stuff then starts to creep in and make things even worse (and there are always some who'll take the lend of a gap in your armour).

I suppose if Ofsted had rolled in when I had that class they'd have blamed me for what was going on in there - but I can put my hand on my heart and know that I did everything within my power and gave everything I had (and paid the price myself in terms of the destruction it did to my health and wellbeing) - and I don't think, without the backup from higher up, anyone would have managed that class better (indeed when I went off-sick the supply refused to teach the child in question, the person who took the class after me also left within a year as well). I think with lots of these cases the blame for a culture of disruption lies much further up the line than with the classroom teacher - it's up into the hands of school management - if there's no behaviour system in place that's working, the buck stops there.

School should be about learning, not about being entertained every minute. The problem is we get education free at point of use, so many people no longer value it all all- after all it cost them nothing so why make the most of it.

I think the main problem is that school is seen as something that should be entertaining and fun, possibly this leads to why so many parents seem to think it is merely free childminding.

Learning is not always interesting particularly, it is hard work, and it can be repetitious (how else can things be committed to memory?)- but if anything is worth doing it is worth doing properly.

ha- x-post Jade- you said it more succinctly

YANBU.

We have removed our children from the school they were at as the school wouldn't do enough to protect them.

I actually think we'd be better off excluding more children for extremely poor behaviour. Yes, those kids are going to get no education, but they're prob going to fail all their exams anyway, and at least if they're not there, other kids can learn.

Great post Dejawho.

As a teacher who has recently left teaching. Mm, can't think why , I agree with a lot of what I've read on here.

When I was at school, the work was incredibly boring. Lots of working out of workbooks in silence - tough if you were bored, tough if you didn't understand, just tough. Obviously the tough if you didn't understand wasn't good, but there were only a very small number of children who ever played up.

As a teacher, most of my 'free' time (by that read family time) was spent making fun and exciting resources, making my classroom look like a time machine, a jungle, a spaceship. Dangling things from the ceiling, creating interactive displays, making my planning exciting, providing opportunities for independent learning, creating challenges for the challenge box...

Yet I was still held accountable for not being exciting enough when some of the children played up.

Some of the children are actually more badly behaved the more interesting and interactive the lessons are!

The idea that education should be 'relevant' is disastrous. Essentially what it's saying is that children already have all the resources they need, and the rest of reality should adjust to how they see it. It also implicitly denies the unavoidable fact that learning is often repetitive and boring, and that many worthwhile things can only be gained through years of patient hard slog.

This kind of education policy teaches children that they don't need to pay attention to anything that hasn't been predigested to fit in with their as yet unexpanded horizons, that they never need to put any graft in and that if something is boring or hard work then it's entirely reasonable to abandon it. Then, when we are confronted with the self-centred, idle, ignorant adults this produces we sneer at their narrow horizons and condemn their reluctance to take or persist with the crappy types of job available to the self-centred, idle and ignorant.

I've heard that said Bride and perhaps it's correct. It just feels like a bit of a 'reasonable reason' if you catch my drift.

If you're in Asia for a long period and have young children for example there's no reason they couldn't become fluent in time. I think many of english are very negative, unadventurous and scared about other languages generally. I think most chinese would be impressed with a westerner who'd bothered to try to learn mandarin. Two people competing for one job that involves liaising with china in the future and one knows no mandarin but the other is intermediate and prepared to go to China to improve who'll get the job?

I'm being a bit simplistic and of course this would be very difficult to do in the UK but you'll see where I am coming from. I'm reminded of a friend who went for a banking job with a Japanese company. The competition was fierce but she had studied Japanese for a couple of years and had the basics. She knew Japan and seemed keen and enthusiastic. She got the job over others who had more banking experience. I think increasingly a knowledge of mandarin & Asia will be a huge advantage. Some go further and think it's the most important thing we should be teaching our children as I said before.

I agree that it is unfair to encourage children to think it is the teacher's fault, if the lesson is too hard or not interesting enough, if they misbehave. This was a lot of my problem with Jamie's Dream School - they were all being asked leading questions and told to think that their schools had let them down and it wasn't their fault that they'd been rude and obnoxious and squandered their opportunities.

I see at university that we are continually meant to make things easy and engaging and accessible all the time, when sometimes it really should be more a case of 'fuck off and read a hard book', actually.

My issue with Burbalsing is that her book does actually admit to being a fictionalised account of her experiences, and as such she portrays herself in a very self-aggrandising fashion (all the kids adore her and she's dead sexy and everyone else who teaches is some kind of arsehole who wants every child to do a degree in PE because they are hell bent on wrecking their chances - which I think is unfair). I think it's important to remember this is one woman's subjective account, in which she does seek to portray herself very positively, and not the written summary from some kind of proper investigation.

Cortina I can totally see both sides of it. I just feel that Mandarin is seen as the holy grail, when it's more likely to be a marginal factor, as per your post. All kids in HK learn it in school. Some may stay long enough to be pretty good at it. Most probably won't and will just forget it all.

Agree with you Bride that the chinese are pragmatic & also they would be impressed by the adoption of traditional chinese values, mastery, hard work etc. Also agree that a knowledge of Asia/China would be more important but that's probably easier to acquire.

This kind of education policy teaches children that they don't need to pay attention to anything that hasn't been predigested to fit in with their as yet unexpanded horizons, that they never need to put any graft in and that if something is boring or hard work then it's entirely reasonable to abandon it. Then, when we are confronted with the self-centred, idle, ignorant adults this produces we sneer at their narrow horizons and condemn their reluctance to take or persist with the crappy types of job available to the self-centred, idle and ignorant.

Nail on head. Please put this in an email and send it to Cameron. I know it's not his fault, but he's the one who has to fix it. I especially love the term "pre-digested". Am adopting it for my next dinner party rant about the state of the nation

Personally I think it is the whole inclusion thing that is causing problems. LA's way of saving money.

I agree. The school we used to be at so were intent on being "inclusive" that they were failing NT children and those without SEN.

I just can't believe Ofsted could have been irresponsible enough to write that in a letter to the school's pupils. What a way to spread a culture of disrespect for schools and teachers. If there genuinely were issues with lessons being "boring", they should have raised them with the staff alone.

Unfortunately, I think the whole of British society fosters this culture of disrespect for teachers. Children don't live in a vacuum- they pick up on this. It is this disrespect, I believe, which has led to the imposition of the National Curriculum- which has made it far more difficult to let teachers devise their own lesson content to reflect the needs and abilities of their classes, and to include stuff that is more "interesting".

I used to work in schools (as a technician, not a teacher), and I would totally agree with Dejawho that allowing this amount of low- level disruption is desperately unfair on the majority of children who actually do want to get on and learn.

FAB, AS WELL as the children with SEN usually.

Of course, Starlight. In my head I had added that at the end.

The child I was speaking about has attacked someone else and clearly can't be very happy. My son was told he has ADHD.

I agree with most of what has already been posted.
Inclusiveness does not always work.
Exclude those disruptive kids or send them to a special school.
Discipline a major issue and so it is for parents too as lots of rights eroded by consecutive governments.
Totally wrong to blame the teacher for the child's behaviour.

What on earth do you want all these excluded kids to do?

These kids who are talking in class when they should be silent?

Do you want them to go straight to prison? Or would you rather they hung out in your town centre looking menacing for a few years first?