Mr Gove - AIBU to ask you personally to come on here and explain why schools never punish or exclude the bully

[marriedinwhite]

In response to the bullying and behaviour thread and the comments that have made it clear that teachers can do nothing to properly manage bullying and poor behaviour because it links with Ofsted's idea of behaviour management and means schools are less likely to receive outstanding or good at inspection, would you care to explain why it is the usually silent and compliant majority who are made to suffer.

As a parent good behaviour management means ensuring that the compliant, well behaved and hard working majority are allowed to learn in a reasonable environment.

As a parent I would expect teachers to be congratulated for trying to ensure this is the case.

As a parent I expect the achievements of the majority to be maximised by ensuring there is a positive educational environment for the majority.

As a parent I expect the bullies and those who behave badly to be the ones who are punished and to lose educational opportunities.

As a parent I expect organisations such as Ofsted to be supporting the well behaved majority and ensuring they have every opportunity to succeed and that those opportunities are not diluted.

As a parent and a citizen I would be happy to pay a few more shillings in tax to fund specialist units to deal with those who are ruining school experiences for the majority and to ensure they receive the specialist help they need to both conform to society's norms, to receive an education and to support them to lead peaceful, productive lives later on. This would be an investment in all our futures because the damage that is presently being allowed to take place - the chipping away at standards for all - can only have a detrimental effect.

So come on Mr Gove, come on here and tell us if you think it would be acceptable for your children to have be educated alongside, thieves, the violent, the uncontrollable and the disruptive whilst you watched their teachers do nothing but make excuses because their hands are tied behind their backs for all but the most exceptional cases where someone undoubtedly has been badly hurt.

Seconded. This would be a good MN campaign

Sorry, I missed the other thread.

Does this mean that there is now evidence arising from the pilots under the new measures from the White Paper?

Grateful if this evidence could be linked. The measures were welcomed on a thread here a little whil ago. What is in this evidence that has changed things so much?

I typed out a long response in which I got a few gripes off my chest!

But then deleted in favour of saying.

I agree with you.

Unfortunately, Ofsted take the view that bad behaviour and truancy occurs because the teachers haven't made the lessons interesting enough.

Some kids need other help alongside interesting lessons. When you're 6 and you've witnessed your dad stab your mum, you don't give a shit about whether the teacher's given you a worksheet or created a whole other planet to work on.

Some schools do deal with bullying. Dcs' schools have all been very good at this. I think there should be an incentive to study good practice; schools that have little bullying and deal with it efficiently. The difficulty would be identifying those schools, when headteachers of the worst schools are often the ones most likely to deny the problem. Carefully worded questionnaires to parents might be one way to go.

what maryz said
parents often feel entitled to be able to witness a punishment that meets their expectations. Which is not always how the child's problems need to be tackled. Also agree that bullying is often due to bad management by schools.

what's the other thread?

This is where I think dcs' school have really shown their strength, Maryz; they have been able to nip a lot of problems in the bud before they developed into bullying, and with the children who really did have serious problems they have still managed so that the other children (and parents) have been able to feel safe. There is a lot you can do with good management.

The problem with exclusion is it doesn't really solve any problems, not even for the well-behaved children. The bully will still be around, either in a different school (and what have those children done to deserve being bullied) or on the streets.

Specialist schools sound good, but would be expensive and there is a risk that children going through temporary trauma could end up labelled for life. The children who have caused the most trouble for my children have all been children who happened to be in a bad place at that particular period in time- some of them have gone on to become dcs' very good friend. Sending them to a special school would not have helped with their real problem, but would have made it more difficult for them to get over it. What did help was ordinary teachers who were confident and well trained enough to deal with the problem firmly.

agree with maryz

bullies have ishoos alot of the time and what would help might not be what parents want. but hey I am sure once DS starts school and gets bullied I will feel v differently

And I would add that I never felt any need to know exactly how the other child was being punished: I needed to trust the school when they told my dc that they could now feel safe. And I needed to see results. That was all that mattered.

As a school governor, inhale been involved in the punishing/excluding of 4 bullies in the last 3 years. The parents of the bullied children would not necessarily have know.

Just saying.

Bullying happens in all schools. I don't see why they can't all have an extra member of staff that is specifically trained to deal with bullies, and then does exactly that.

I think a better solution would be to exclude bullies within school. They get escorted to lessons, made to sit alone, and do not get to choose who they work with during group work. Then they get collected from every lesson and spend break times under contstant supervision. They could receive any help they need to deal with their issues during that time. I really don't see why it would be that hard to implement, and as they have a duty to safeguard the victims, this would be an effective way to do that.

exactly seeker - parents shouldn't be informed about another child's circumstances through school as it should be confidential surely?
I've witnessed parents demanding that other children are excluded (rarely and usually unreasonably) as a teacher though.

oh and YABU, yes.

They get escorted to lessons, made to sit alone, and do not get to choose who they work with during group work. Then they get collected from every lesson and spend break times under contstant supervision. They could receive any help they need to deal with their issues during that time.

You have just described almost exactly how my son, a repeat victim of extreme bullying leading to serious injury, was dealt with.

Hear Hear! Good idea for a MN campaign.

Repeat offending bullies should be excluded.

Sod their rights what about the rights of the other children in the school?

I find the whole topic very heart rending. I also agree that repeat bullies should be excluded. I dont think all bullies are from a shit family, some are just vicious little cxxts. But some are, which worries me

I also know that the girl that bullied me the most was in a childrens home, nuff said.

But if you are parent that sees their child suffer it must be just hideous, and like any mother my heart breaks when I read about bullied kids that self harm

But I do agree with Maryz in that some bullying is going to part and parcel of school life, and anything we can do to help our kids defend themselves somehow will help. Put another way, us rushing in like avenged angels may not give the right message all of the time.

What JustGettingOnWith it says, is chilling.

Disruptive children/ bullies/anti-social behaviour - should be dealt with, whether thats through exclusion or other methods. That is not to say a "knee jerk" reaction, but dealt with nonetheless.

Teachers also need to make a stand. I sometimes see teachers on the internet talk about the appalling experiences they have "put up with" in the classroom - but it seems a case of "whatever you say, say nothing".

Children do get permamently excluded for bad behaviour. There are special schools for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. However this is a last restort.

However bullying is not that simple and sometimes the "victim" is not that sweet and innocent. There are situations where the parents declare their child has been bullied, but its infact 6 of 1 and half dozen of the the other.

There are hideous situations in a school when 29 childen gang up and bully one child. Is it really practical to ship an entire class of other normal children off to an ebd school? Or is it better to address the problem through high quality PHSCE lessons.

I feel that bullying is an area where there needs to be better research. Knee jerk reactions like putting a four year old in an ebd school are not helpful. I think that the governant should fund research to see what works.

JustGettingOnWithIt Wed 25-Jan-12 09:16:01
They get escorted to lessons, made to sit alone, and do not get to choose who they work with during group work. Then they get collected from every lesson and spend break times under contstant supervision. They could receive any help they need to deal with their issues during that time.

You have just described almost exactly how my son, a repeat victim of extreme bullying leading to serious injury, was dealt with."

But in a different school- such as the one my ds attended - this would have been the bully, and your ds would have been free to play in the playground without fear.

I think one risk with telling ourselves that a problem is universal is that it makes it harder to put pressure on the schools: if all schools are The Same there is no reason why School X should devote endless staff time and money to becoming Different.

(On a similar note, I failed to claim support for my disabled dd because I thought no schools had a sensible plan for adjustment, so it just seemed too much to ask.)

Which is why I want to shout from the roof-tops that there are schools who have working anti-bullying policies. They involve constant training of pupils on how to avoid becoming bullies, how to deal with being bullied, how to look out for other children and intervene if they are being bullied. They involve well-trained staff who listen to children. They involve swift action if a situation arises. They do not necessarily involve staff confiding in other parents about how they deal with a situation: but they do involve staff who can make a parent feel listened to.

If some schools can do it, we should demand that all schools do it.

There was a particularly nasty little lad in my eldest sons school who assaulted pupils on a daily basis.

He had exclusions for a week or a day at a time over the years of his reign over the school.

It took him attacking a teacher to get permanently excluded.

No prizes for guessing who the head teacher thought whose rights were more important.

It's important to think about whatnwe mean by bullying too. Of course there are loads of clear cut cases- but they aren't all. If you dig deeper- and I have done as a governor- things often get more complex and grey area-ish.

Perhaps I had a little knee jerk reaction myself, so what Cory and Really Tired says makes sense. I do think there will always be a little bullying in schools, unfortunately it seems to be the nature of "schools" - sometimes just jockeying for position, sometimes because some children are a little different, e.g. sensitive (I was bullied slightly at secondary school).

However, when serious disruptive / antii-social /bullying behaviour goes unchallenged (and unpunished) it is a different matter, and I agree with OP. Also OP makes point it is a "political" decision re. OFSTED and that is where the problem lies. Good to see some schools have proper policies as Cory outlines.