School rewarding 8 yr olds for bad behaviour

[Pugwash2005]

My ds and his friends have been complaining because the 4 'naughty' children in their class have a tea party every Friday afternoon if they get over 12 'smileys' in a week, 2 'good' children are also picked to go along. There was an incident in school with one of the challenging pupils but he was still allowed to the party. Ds & I along with other mums think this party is making other children feel they are not rewarded for their good behaviour along with the fact that even when naughty these 4 kids get rewarded. Your opinions on this would be great

1nsanityscratching, bullies can be so cunning. What a neat trick, hugging you DD who will be cross with that? Glad the school was on it.

I have two 'good' children who find school life quite easy, and one child with SEN who finds school very hard and I know has been labelled one of the naughty ones (although he is getting better) so I can see both points of view.

A few points I'd like to make from my experience:
No child starts the day wanting to be naughty or cause trouble. It's no fun being told off all the time. My DS has very low self-esteem, although he wouldn't admit this to anyone. He sees what comes easily to other children and compares himself. It's pretty demoralising for any child to always feel behind. A couple of years ago at the instruction of one of his teachers we went down the 'punishment for bad behaviour' route and it backfired because he just totally lost motivation for school. What has worked instead is setting out basic requirements for behaviour and massive amounts of encouragement and morale boosting to re-set his opinion of himself. For those who are sceptical about this method I suggest you read 'Lost at School' by Ross W Greene.

For those who have the 'good' children who feel hard done by: remember class rewards/certificates are not the only ways children get rewarded in school. Has your child ever been: picked for the school football team / got a leading part in the nativity / won a race on sports day / been picked for the school orchestra / won a poster design competition / been in top set etc etc ....? Because I can guarantee you my SEN child will never achieve any of those things. So if he gets a 'trying hard' award, then I will be bloody happy for him, because I know what effort that has cost him. And his siblings are happy for him too because they are aware they get rewarded in other ways.

m.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/schools-behavior-discipline-collaborative-proactive-solutions-ross-greene
This is a really interesting article. I read Ross Greene's book and it was a bit of a lightbulb moment in how to deal with my difficult child.
He doesn't think most discipline/reward systems actually work for problem children.

This quote from the article:
'Does it make sense to impose the harshest treatments on the most challenging kids? And are we treating chronically misbehaving children as though they don't want to behave, when in many cases they simply can't?'
However I don't think many schools or teachers have the time or resources to tackle the root cause of disruptive children's problems (whether that is nature, like SEN, or nurture, like a difficult home life, or even a combination of the two). As endless punishment has been shown to be so ineffective in dealing with problem kids, schoolsgo down the rewards route instead which is a bit more effective but not ideal. However with many schools facing funding cuts and loss of staff, and difficult children still expected to be managed in mainstream schools, I can only see the situation getting worse unfortunately.

granny bullies are so sly and I expect that's the reason that the ones doing the bullying aren't the ones with SN as they are unlikely to possess the cunning or the guile. Dd knew she didn't like it and told them so but she saw no malice behind it because she was being hugged and "hugging is a nice thing to do to somebody you like". Thankfully her school didn't see it the same way and they were "educated" that hugging somebody who doesn't want to be hugged is no different to hitting/kicking/punching them and if it didn't stop immediately the consequences would be the same.

1nsanityscratching, I agree about the cunning and it being more likely with kids without SN, that has been my experience. The nicest girl in my daughter's class had SN but she was lovely. My daughter is all grown up now and she says the one good thing about it was that it made her value friends, she never takes them for granted so maybe some good can come out of it.

Whatever it takes to keep it stable and happy as possible - lie on the sofa for an hour beven if the hoovering, etc needs doing.....hardly anyone pops in to visit now anyway do they?!

This, quite literally, had me roaring with laughter. It's so true!!!

to you Plan

Um they're being rewarded for good behaviour. It's called positive reinforcement. Hth.

OK, this is all very interesting, thank you for sharing your experiences. I'm reading with interest and I will reflect. I'm still not sure. Nobody talks about this stuff in real life so it's very difficult to understand it. I certainly wouldn't use such information in a negative way - for me, I'd have more understanding of challenging behaviour if I thought it was down to ND rather than using it as a weapon against them (so people really do that? God I am naive it seems) and I am disappointed to hear your experiences.

Yep, people really do that and worse, i've heard of parents starting up petitions to get kids removed from schools, I've heard of a parent who took their child to school at 9:30am and picked up at 2:45pm just to avoid playground abuse while the parents went through the legal process of getting the child into a specialist school, it's not just a case of seeing if another school has a space available and moving them, it took us 9months

What is it that you're still not sure about?

Last my ds was the subject of a petition to have him removed from school,he was five years old and developmentally about two and a half. He also had a parent try and get into school to "teach him a lesson" and school had to call the police as he was going to assault my child.We also had to have the police attend our house because when he was thwarted he threatened to firebomb our house and police believed it was a threat we should take seriously. The reason this thug did this was that his child who was on the at risk register had come home from school with a bruise and whilst the child didn't say ds had hurt him (he said he had banged his leg on the trikes) ds was known to have challenging behaviour. The thug in question later punched his child unconscious in the street and so the child was removed and we never saw the thug again.
Ds was very obviously disabled, it afforded him no understanding or empathy. He was my fourth child, my other three had never misbehaved (ds was frightened and overwhelmed rather than misbehaving anyway) I was still judged to be a poor parent even though I had ensured ds had 1 to1 support at all times from the minute he set foot in nursery and I could handle him better than the TA they employed.
Knowing ds's exact diagnosis would have changed nothing tbh. He's 22 now and still disabled and people still stare when he's hand wringing or pacing even though it's pretty obvious there are additional needs.

Electrawoman. You have asked the question of parents of children with no Sen etc (sorry I can't buy into the good/bad children quotes) ...Whether their children have ever been picked for the football team, got a leading part in the Nativity, ran a race on sports day etc....well my answer would be no. Most primaries are quite big with possibly 100 kids in each year group. Not every child gets to do these things, thats why it would be nice for them to get golden award of the week every so often, so as they know teachers think well of them too. That's why it can be frustrating when all these things go to children who are often naughty.

For me it's not about the children with Sen, it's those are genuinely naughty and then get rewards when good, when the children who are good all along get nothing. Please don't anyone say "but how do you know they don't have sen"?...Think we've already covered that on this thread. Also already covered the not all children who are naughty have sen angle and not all Sen are naughty either.

Amazed at those arguing that children with SN do not bully. There is bullying in some special schools.

Nobody has said that children with SN do not bully but rather that they are less likely to bully and also that they are more likely to be the victim of bullying.

Mumzy Once again, challenging behaviour but no identified SEND is an additional need and as such strategies and interventions will be implemented, positive reinforcement is one strategy/intervention.
And just because there is no identified SEND at that point it doesn't mean that there isn't any.

You'd probably consider my ds as naughty, he was recently diagnosed with asd but it's not obvious especially if you don't know him well. He has various interventions at school that could be seen as rewards, such as lego club, but this is an intervention to help work as a team. He also has a Friday afternoon 'reward' club which I think is basically chilling at the end of a week. I wish the only thing I had to worry about was my kid getting abit upset my not getting a reward. Ds is generally well behaved at school but really struggles at school for various reasons such as having sensory issues. Every day I drop him off and go to work then worry the whole day about what is happening, I would gladly swap places with you and have ds not have asd

Sorry should have said generally well behaved at home, he's certainly not generally well behaved at school!!!!

brasty I wasn't saying SN children can't bully but I hate the fact that in my experience that was always what teachers said, well not actually that they have SN but that you have to understand, she isn't a happy child, she isn't as lucky as you etc etc. So presented as not their fault when some kids are just horrible. My daughter was highly amused when she was home at Christmas and bumped into one of her chief torturers who tried to embrace her and said how lovely it was to see her. She just got a rigid body to hold and no response and went off quietly. Daughter couldn't get her head round what that person remembered about their school days and she is married with kids and living a very normal life now so how delusional is she? Maybe that is her SN, delusions.

1nsanity i have to admit that it was you and your ds that i was thinking about wrt the petition .
I'll never know if parents at my ds' then School tried to petition the HT to get my son out (there were rumours of it).

I will never forget the day that I got called into the school because ds "wouldn't do his literacy" it was about 11am and i was told by the member of staff (not a teacher or his TA) that DS had sat and done no work for more than an hour (he was in the quiet room), so out of idle curiosity I asked what he was supposed to be doing and was told that he had to write a story involving a particular place (which she named) doing a particular thing and himself as the main character, i was taken into the quiet room where DS was sat hunched over his book, the member of staff said to him "you know what you have to do now can you start writing" she stood right next to him, he didn't do anything so she repeated what she had said, then said " you understand what you have to do so start writing" still nothing he was motionless, he wouldn't look at me and he wouldn't speak to me, again she repeated herself, she carried on like that for some time, just repeating herself again and again until finally she said " if you don't start writing then you will have to go home, we are not here to babysit you" at that point i told him to get his lunch box and coat and i would take him home, when he eventually looked at me there were tears streaming down his face ( i could not see that before then because he was facing a wall hunched over with his head in his hands). DS has AS amongst other things, so had great difficulty with Social Communication, Social Interaction and Social Imagination as per the triad of Impairments, he could not write about a place that he didn't know nor could he write about something that he had never done, he simply didn't have the imagination skills to write a story like that. For a key member of staff she didn't have a clue what she was doing wrong.

That day i learned that the school really could not support children with ASD because they didn't have the knowledge or understanding to do so. Shortly after that the HT admitted that they didn't have enough training. They wouldn't allow him to use assistive technology "in case he broke it", even though it was in his statement, They wouldn't allow him to go on trips "because his 1-1 TA was being used to supervise a group of children so she couldn't be responsible for him"

When DS started school i really thought that things had changed for the better.

zzzz it was truly horrendous but we came through
Thought it could serve as an illustration as to what we and our children sometimes experience alongside the extra certificates and tea parties and how even obvious disabilities don't draw understanding or empathy when people have the mindset that it's a choice on the part of the child to behave differently and so shouldn't be afforded adjustments in case their child feels hard done by.
My older children have spent their whole lives playing second fiddle to ds3's needs in the main but also dd2's at times and yet they are the warmest and most compassionate people you could wish to meet. They didn't get the extras in school and they didn't get a great deal of time and attention at home too but they never ever complained because they saw the realities of ds's life and they felt fortunate that they didn't have the same challenges and they still feel fortunate as they move on into independent lives with careers and relationships that won't ever happen for ds.
Perhaps worth thinking about when you are begrudging a child an extra sticker or a certificate or some time out of the class don't you think?

enterthedragon - how awful

enter it is awful how we are supposed to entrust our children to people who seemingly don't have a clue about their needs or how to support them.
Had my own moment with dd and her TA who is usually pretty competent. She wrote that dd was snappy in period 1. Dd then reports that the TA ignored her for the rest of the lesson which infuriates me seeing as she is supposed to be providing 1 to 1 support. Ended up writing out step by step instructions on what the TA should have done and lightly crossing out rather than being petulant and ignoring dd Dd had had an awful registration, lessons had been changed with no notice so she was missing a book and had received a data sheet with a concern about attendance when in fact on ed psych's recommendation and written in her statement is the need for her not to attend a certain subject so hardly surprising that her anxiety was sky high and she snapped. It's like walking through treacle just to get through at times tbh.

1nsanity i totally understand about your DD, we occasionally have days like that, DS' current school are good but sometimes they spring surprises on the pupils and/or change lessons about, i can always tell if he's had a stressful day because when asked if he's ok he will say " leave me alone, i don't want to talk about it" then i have to investigate the cause. I'm just grateful that he's not in mainstream education anymore, it nearly destroyed our family.