To think that a pupil premium should be paid for children who live in home where none of the parents have qualifications

[ReallyTired]

I think that the education of the parents has a more significant outcome on a child's attainment than income. (Especially as many working poor don't have much more money than those on benefits.)

I feel that children who live in households where no adult has five GCSEs or equivalent should get extra support at school. Often these families aren't entitled to benefits because the parents do work so currently don't get the pupil premium.

It is harder for uneducated parents to support their children with homework than someone with a degree. Better eduated mothers are better at getting their children's needs met as they are often more articulate. For example making sure that statemented child gets what they are legally entitled to. (Getting a child assesed by an ed pych so that the child's dyslexia is spotted.)

Unskilled people often do physically hard work for very long hours for very little money. I believe that a child with unskilled working parents is at a major disadvantage as their parents are time poor as well as cash poor.

Have you ever worked in a school?

Only on a voluntary (admittedly sometimes / mostly of the twisted arm type basis). Only advice is to be absolutely selfless sometimes. Put yourself in the child's shoes, know what motivates them and go from there. Discipline is about preserving the individual child, as in you want to prevent them from making a wrong decision because it is harmful to them. In short love. Is all that actually works IME.

Once there's more than one of those students, it's a game changer. I've tutored friends one-to-one, because they needed it, and it's difficult then, if they have decided they can't do it. Once you have more, like a core of the class, winding each up in to paroxysms of self-doubt, it... gets impossible to deal with.

I remember sitting and watching the people doing [insert GCSE] because they had to at college, before they got kicked out. Because college lecturers can do that.

I've also been in tiny A-level classes where there was just one student who'd given up, and even then it's difficult for the lecturer. People who have given up are very high maintenance, if you want to keep them in a state where they're capable of absorbing any information, and there's no out-of-class support.

TheBig What got them to that stage is not always down to the parents though.

Poor teaching can have a dreadful effect. I have experienced this myself, my parents experienced it, seen this with my son. Some children cope better than others. My cousin actually ran away because of it.

Once they're there, they're there though. Parents, former teachers, bullying, out-of-family abuse, medical issues rhatbled to missing school. Fixing problems, whether they're psychological or physical, costs money.

Let's call that student Frankie, because it's a nice name. Lecturer could perform a miracle one Thursday afternoon, cheer Frankie up, and get her through the lesson. Were those positive, optimistic feeling of hope for the future still persisting by Monday afternoon? Like frell were they. No, Frankie was back at self-harming. And given that she'd spent the weekend self-harming, she'd hardly been in a state to do the homework, had she?

It needs a sight more than an effective teacher to deal with underlying issues.

One opposite example to what I am talking about. My cousin did succeed away from that school and on her own. She now is highly qualified and working for Youth Services. She did come back home, to visit, once she was well on her way to making it. God knows how she managed, she lived in squats in Brixton in the 80s, but she certainly did manage. It was her who blamed her school too.

The answer, as ever, is much more complex than simply funding the schools. Give complacent people benefits and they don't see the point in working, complacent schools funding and it does not help. Yet for some (people and schools) it is a lifeline, they put it to good use, and go on to succeed.

I would make it easier to remove those responsible for poor practice from teaching.

So what? Seeing the problem as being about sacking teachers who aren't up to the mark presumes there's a bottomless pit of capable, experienced teachers sat on the bench, itching to work once the posts in failing schools under the cosh of an Ofsted category call empty. The reason why failing schools end up staffed by a revolving carousel of temporary and/or inexperienced staff who leave within twelve months, burnt out, is because the experienced staff would rather work in schools with fewer problems, and there are plenty of jobs for them there.

This thread has an endless fund of edge-case anecdotes, so someone will tell us about their cousin who left school at 12 and now is the head of a failing school that has to employ riot police to keep out prospective staff desperate to pay for the privilege of working there, but in the real world, there simply aren't enough good staff willing to work in challenging schools. It's the same problem that large cities have recruiting social workers, or big hospitals have recruiting A&E consultants: it's stressful work at anti-social hours, and the adrenaline buzz wears off.

If the target of your ire is Michael Gove's "blob" of "the education establishment", there's too much hysteresis in the system. If you imposed root and branch reform on teacher training, which Gove is pretty much doing, it's 20 years before it has a major effect, and that is assuming that your reform is so powerful that NQTs arriving in schools retain their new-thing-ness, and aren't absorbed into the current thinking by osmosis.

So applying sufficient voltage to alter behaviour is the only option, and as voltage is illegal, it has to be money.

What money though friday?

And I do wonder sometimes how edge case the anecdotes are. How thick an edge are we talking? How narrow a centre?

Any way if you don't live life on the edge you're not living, that's what I say. Just don't fall off!

So you should respect parents instead of demoralising them. We're an influential bunch.

By suggesting it is appropriate to demand they hand over a CV of their qualifications to deem whether they are the cause of educational deprivation (as a blanket policy) and attempting to judge children's potential on their incomes.

Oh, capsicum, please stop taking the piss.

It is a generalisation granted, but this is the subject of the thread. Tell me, please, reassure me, that you are not guilty of this.

You mean you have been posting on this thread all day, and you don't actually know what it is about?

Indulge me...

No. Read the thread.

No thanks. Far better things to do. I shall delight myself in the powers of my parental influence, thanks to that little gem from the RISE review.

That's not snarky. It's positive. Hope is good.

No worries.