to be horrified at the behaviour in bohunt school

[SEsofty]

Just watched the programme about Chinese teachers in uk. Whilst I appreciate that it is reality tv and thus exaggeration for effect I was still horrified with the apparent number of children who were talking in class.

I'm not that accident and went to a very normal school but talking whilst teacher did simply didn't happen. I don't agree with the Chinese methods but talking whilst someone is trying to teach you is simply rude.

I did not think the behaviour was that bad (with the exception of Sophie). The problem was 90% of the pupils had been left behind and there was no in-lesson assessment going on. I think adults would struggle to sit still and listen if bring spoken to in total gubberish (which I suspect the pupils felt).

I thought it was very positive that some students actually sought out help from their maths teacher.

The reality is, though, that for better or worse, children are no longer brought up to respect adults per se. They feel that their respect has to be earned. Personally, I believe this has a very negative impact on schooling as teachers effectively have to entertain as well as teach. Clearly, going back 60 years would not be positive but, imo, there is a happy medium.

I suspect most schools have a similar structure but there is a group which is heavily represented on MN that wants you to think that the average state school comprehensive classroom is chaos.

This.

I went to an excellent state comp (genuinely comprehensive - places went to all those in the catchment who applied). We wouldn't have dreamt of talking over the teacher, we stood up when an adult entered the room etc. We were expected to do our best at every subject, and individual achievement was recognised, whether that was getting straight 'A's or getting a 'D' where last year you got an 'E'.

The most dramatic incident in my entire time there was when 2 girls blocked the sinks with paper towels and flooded the girls' toilets. We were all so shocked we talked about it whispers - and the girls got suspended for 3 days and parents brought in several times.

I looked at their website the other day, and they are rated as 'outstanding' in all respects - so obviously others don't reach their standard.

But the 'comprehensive' bashing and 'no state school will be able to match the ethos of a fee paying school' stuff is rubbish. Some (non-selective, co-ed) state schools are excellent, and some fee paying schools are crap.

I haven't seen the program but have been reading this with interest.

DD goes to an Upper School which has a clear behaviour policy installed over the years which turned round behaviour in the classroom. They clamp down hard and fast on disruptive behaviour and the teachers can phone for someone to retrieve a pupil from class. Not sure of exact details but after a bit they end up in isolation and DD said the behaviour in class was good with very little low level disruption that was quickly dealt with.

It used to work and as the only school not to be an Academy in the area was very helpful for the teachers as the Head was often forced to take people who had been kicked out of schools in neighbouring LEA's. Also they were the school considered to have the best Pastoral care locally so got a number of children outside catchment whose SW's felt it would be the best place for the children they represented.

This was all well and good until Ofsted came in and ripped them to shreds. One of the things they praised was th good behaviour in the classroom. But they were heavily criticised for the number of exclusions from the classroom . A number of parents wrote to Ofsted highlighting this , the answer was it might work for our children but isn't fair on the ones excluded.

The whole exercise was quite blatantly to force the school to become an Academy which it will now be doing. The Head tried to fight it but gave up in the end and retired once Ofsted said the school should be reinspected as was back to Good in the monitoring Insopector's opinion, (less than 5 weeks after the School cracked and entered talks with an Academy Trust)

Sadly the stress of a very difficult 18 months really showed on the staff this summer and year 11 has been really difficult for DD - the increase in disruptive behaviour in class has increased significantly and a couple of teachers have walked out in tears, which was unthinkable before . Dreading her results and just hoping she can scrape into L3 courses.

Toad I said trig was only taught to the brightest students in Y9, not only taught to the brightest students. Many more students will have met trig by Y11.

I found it interesting that the headmaster openly admitted (indeed seemed rather proud of the fact) that the teachers in UK schools don't actually 'teach' in the traditional sense any more. They no longer impart knowledge to the students; the students have to flounder around trying to find things out for themselves.
What a waste of time! No wonder UK pupils are 3 years behind the Chinese. I'm surprised that it's only 3 years, to be honest.
I was appalled by the insolence and rudeness of some of the children in the programme, most notably the girl called Sophie. That kind of consistently disrespectful and rude behaviour would have been enough to get a pupil expelled from the school back in my schools days! I suspect that the child was acting up for the cameras but her arrogance was shocking. Presumably her parents have watched the programme. If I were her mother I would be mortified and would be making her write a letter of apology to every one of the Chinese teachers whose lessons she deliberately disrupted! Disgraceful behaviour.

I haven't seen it but I expect Sophie was deliberately chosen to fit the agenda of the programme.
I think that you are going to extremes with what the Head said. They have league tables, they need to pass exams so , since the school does well, they are not left to 'flounder finding out things for themselves'. Thankfully they are not taught the Chinese way, where even they are discovering that lecturing to pass exams leaves them lacking in other skills.

I can't see why Sophie should be singled out. They must have known what she was like before they began and it was easy to stop her- have her and her parents into the office and lay down the law about expected behaviour and consequences if she didn't keep to it. Make her sign a good behaviour promise to be allowed to go on TV. Her parents would have given permission for her to appear. You can't even photograph a child these days without parental permission.
She was picked to behave in the way the programme makers wanted- she was manipulated and so it would be very unfair to make her a scapegoat.
They could easily have picked enough children who would just have done as asked and kept quiet. Totally boring TV and not what they wanted.

80smum I suspect that is a misinterpretation and perhaps a wilful one. He was making the point that teaching has moved on from just being chalk and talk.

80smum- he said nothing of the sort,

"They could easily have picked enough children who would just have done as asked and kept quiet"
Like about 45 out of the group of 50!

I must have misheard him then Bertrand. I was sure he had said that the teaching nowadays is what he termed "child-centred" and that the Bohunt children are therefore not used to being taught facts.

This is what I mean about 'lambs to the slaughter' 're kids on programmes like these. Sophie is a 14 year old girl. She could be gobby all the time or this may well be her annus horriblus. Her year 9 melt down. Either way, because of the worship of television her attitude is reserved for posterity. Her parents are idiots to give permission for this, and the school is failing in their duty of care towards her, especially if they put her forward as the 'troublemaker'. I think she stands out because, actually, the majority of the other kids are just getting on with it. The production company better give her a big 'kid done good' moment as a reward for being their fall girl.

The thing is, girls like Sophie are just terrible. Really they are, and for my standards , outspoken disrespectful behaviour especially to a teacher - well, at home my child wouldn't go there.

The likes of Sophie is very influential in a class and just one child like her can disrupt a class. By the time a teacher has ''delt'' with Sophie, the class has missed 5minutes of lesson.

Why should my child have to miss out and suffer because of her? I think the likes of Sophie, well they need to be pulled out of that class altogether and put in a classroom with other kids like her and have their own ''lesson'' - until she apologies back to the whole class and can be put back on 'trial' to sit her original class again.

It's utterly pathetic that this kind of thing is ''allowed'' to even happen at school.

And on the other extreme given that Sophie is a ''good'' child, you get teens just sitting on street corners with nothing to do, smoking (under age), no money to spend and getting up to no sorts. I got hurled racist abuse by a bunch of them the other day and yet, they all go to our local (and only) comp. I know as police had id'd them on CCTV and at least one of them is known to the police. Sorry - but it makes me shudder. What is wrong with their parents to even allow them to loiter?! How did society get like this in the UK??

Sorry - I don't mean to demean the UK in anyway, I shouldn't have said that. I'm actually grateful to the UK in so many ways!!

I found this article interesting regarding the trend for "child-centred" learning.

It's a TV programme! With the success of Educating Yorkshire / Essex I'm sure the BBC wanted to produce a similar style programme. To suggest the school doesn't have a behaviour policy is ridiculous. In a normal school day children like Sophie would have been dealt with very differently. to expect all children to behave perfectly in a situation where there are TV cameras, teachers they have no relationship with and who aren't following normal behaviour policy is unrealistic.

Children like Sophie probably felt a bit special as over 150 children signed up but only 50 were chosen. Let's not forget they are 14 years old and just want to be on the TV. Besides, like it or not, every class will have a 'Sophie' - including my Year 2 class!

It's fascinating how people are focussing on a couple of children and ignoring the vast majority. Also, have people read the school's OFSTED and looked at the results? They must be doing something right! I think it unlikely that the kids are "left to flounder about" if they are getting near selective school level GCSEs! Or if they are they are definitely floundering to some purpose.

It is a not an entirely silly programme.

It was an 'experiment', admittedly, but flawed from the very beginning. The children chosen to be in Chinese School were in competition with the rest of Y9 who weren't. Children of 13/14 can very easily screw test results if they so wish to make the Chinese method seem 'wrong' or 'inadequate' and make our education system - a supposed child centred one, which I know is in words only, not practise - the one of choice.

Chinese method of teaching works because of the culture of the country. Chinese and British cultures are very different. A system and method that works in one country, will not work in another country without first changing the culture and attitudes of it's citizens.

That aside, as a teacher myself, there is a growing problem with the behaviour, attitude, stamina and drive to succeed and be ambitious of our younger generation. But since many of us were in education (70s, 80s even the 90s), society has changed as has parenting. Gone are the days of a 'clip around the earhole' from a police officer, parents, grandparents, neighbour etc (let's face it, it was seen as the norm back then), the times of dreading getting home after being sent to the head teacher's office because of talking in class and then getting lectured and a smack from not just 'dad' but 'grandad' too and 'proper' detentions and sanctions. Nowadays if a child has misbehaved and been sanctioned at school, they go home wailing to mum and dad who then approach school, all guns blazing, wanting to know why their 'precious child' is so upset!

We are not going to fix the problems with our education system by comparing it with 'Chinese School' BUT we can learn a lot from it whether that means adopting methods they use, tweeking what is already in place or using what has been seen and experienced to develop something new.

But it is exams and tests that are used to measure aptitude, performance, knowledge, understanding and in the 'Big Wide World' it is a measure of how suitable someone is for the competition of life - getting a job. And China win 'hands down' when put against the British. So they MUST be doing something right.

I am less inclined to be complacent, so I have to wonder what the GCSE results might be if the disruptive students were not doing their thing in the classroom day in and day out. Five to ten minutes of teaching time lost on a daily basis adds up.

The problem with disruptive students is that you don't have to have more than a couple in a classroom to ruin things for everyone else. To say it's fascinating that people are focusing on Sophie is to spectacularly miss the point, therefore. Some here keep on trying to push the idea that the disruptive students were hand picked and put in front of the cameras just to prove the point of a script already written -- if that is so, and there are students whose behaviour makes them stand out, then the school is in effect admitting failure.

Clearly the normal 'dealing with Sophie' strategies have not taught her anything if she thought it was ok to behave as she did. If others were able to get on reasonably well then you have to ask what the heck was wrong with her and the others who were disruptive and why it seems impossible to teach basic manners to a child.

The results couldn't be much better, math!

And do you really think there is a school in the country without a gobby 13 year old or two?

Yeah cos it's all about results.and progress at the expense of other skills, the more efficient the exam factory the better. I don't think OFSTED necessarily concentrate on what they should.

I shudder with all this 'good teachers can always control the class' stuff. Er no, if a class want to kick off no teacher can control them. The only person who can control behaviour is the pupil themselves. A teacher should be teaching not controlling who wants to be controlled? It is usually a negative thing . This whole mindset causes teacher blame, stress and guess what bad behaviour.

If a teacher is weak then fair enough they shouldn't be teaching but making it so that its ok to kick off if you perceive the teacher to be crap is not the way to build a world class education system.

The school I attended had a Sophie, she works a Shite minimum wage now according to my friend. I think they have used sophie though and it was a bit mean.

My school was pretty strict but first year was quite disruptive, there was pressure if you did well (swot). Then streaming into a high set I escaped it.

Basically I think your at a massive disadvantage in low sets in a comprehensive. If I ran the world..the parents would be called in. Every single time their darling played up. it would soon stop it. However I appreciate your often dealing with parents who couldn't care less or support their child's rights. I would have a School policy of exclusion for children who's parents fail to support.

My children go to a v middle class school, on a visit day I was amazed /appalled by how much time the two naughty chikdren took up. I was shocked at how the teacher failed to just nip it in the bud, lots of warnings and repeated requests. They needed a naughty step, if a child disrupts then throw them in the corner, if they don't want to learn fine, they should not be costing everyone else an education.

Sophie would be properly dealt with CookieDough in the normal classroom. It would have spoilt the programme had she been ejected from the lesson near the start!
Teenagers are gobby- they do push the boundaries- some are real rebels.
You only have to read about some of the countries most successful people to find they they were expelled from school- generally a private school.

Programmes like this just play into the hands of the "comprehensive schools are bear pits full of knuckle dragging chair throwers" brigade. It's so depressing.

Stephen Fry was expelled from two schools and then did 3 months in prison before going to Cambridge. I can't see him sitting down and meekly taking the Chinese system. I have some admiration for those who protested because I would have just got on with it.

The problem for many schools is that it is so expensive to exclude a child. The school must pay for alternative provision, which is usually at least double what they receive for that child as part of the budget.

We aren't allowed to just exclude a child from lessons, we have a duty to educate them as well as the others. It is so complicated.