To wish schools would scrap registration

[gettingevenhotter]

Seems to make more sense to me to register kids in lessons.

We could finish half an hour earlier if this was the case. Bliss.

Wouldn’t that depend on what you wanted to know?

I’m not being a dickhead, but if you had an issue with her maths set then you’d go through the maths teacher and so on.

Obviously. I am talking about pastoral / welfare issues. Do you never handle those?

No. Not being an arse, no. Any bullying would go straight to HOY.

In your scenario, who do I contact if:

• There is a potential bullying issue going on - please could it be investigated
• A relative is very ill
• A previously absent parent is causing problems
• My child has a condition which will affect their appearance for a significant period of time
• The family is moving house or has been made homeless
• My child is fasting for religious reasons, and this may affect their school work
• A younger sibling is in hospital, and this has affected the whole family
• My child is very anxious about something, and this may affect behaviour in school that day
• My family has been involved in a car crash / break in/ other crime and thuis my child may seem unusually distracted
• My child has been involved in regional or national competition, and has returned home very late, without doing homework and very tired (and has won, which the school might like to celebrate)

etc etc etc (just thinking of a few scenarios from recent experience)?

Ah, HOY doesn't really exist within the pastoral system at DC's school. The tutor / house system plays that role. I couldn't even tell you who the head of any year they have been in is, or even if they have them, but I can name their tutors, and their heads of house.

I can see that if you have no pastoral responsibility, and no good programme of work for tutor time, in your school it could indeed be dull, chaotic and pointless. That is, of course, just your school, and the way they organise it, not the system itself.

This does sound a bit like my school maybe it is where parents learn by osmosis it seems to sidestep/sideline tutors and go straight to HOY As exemplified in your post above). It's a bit annoying if you are HOY. But we still need form time. And if we removed tutors we'd be playing in the hands of the 'school is only for learning' brigade (of which you may well be a member) and , in my school, you would lose two free lessons per cycle! Not sure you'd like that. That's the irony : lots of teachers are given more free time because they do the role, but then use that time for marking etc.

Do you not have to do anything like check reports/ write tutor reports? Not that I am saying you would relish that task!

Just checked - school does not have heads of year until 6th form. Until then, pastoral system is tutors + house heads. I should imagine that anything 'minor' going to the house heads just gets bounced straight back down to tutors anyway.

As a Head of PSHE it REALLY boils my piss that I can spend a VERY long time producing useful sessions for tutor time that are then not used. This can be for various reasons e.g. time is limited and by the time things are under way there may only be 5 or 10 mins useful teachng,sometimes other pastoral things crop up, some tutors aren’t organised enough, some are lazy and don’t want to deliver anything etc.
It means coverage is patchy and this is unfair for pupils who often need the info and skills development provided.

PSHE is statutory in Wales but our school only timetables it for KS3 for a variety if reasons. Next year I have refused to put it into KS4 Reg for some of the reasons given above. I’m not wasting my time. SLT chose to take ot out of KS4 curriculum - they can make therefore put a better delivery model to me (not me to them!)

Gobbin

Just to say that, as a parent in a school that seems to use tutor / registration time well, I am always impressed by their PSHCE curriculum / knowledge, delivered through a combination of tutor time and off-timetable days. I'm really sorry that you're frustrated - where it is done well, we do appreciate it!

Year heads and house heads is a fairly interchangeable term to be fair.

The thing you list would go through HOY/HOH and probably emailed to,relevant staff. I’ve never had a phone call of that nature, which isn’t to say it wouldn’t be welcome.

What, all of that list? To a head of house with 1/4 of the school between 11 and 16 to worry about? How very, very inefficient, especially as the HOH would not know every child in detail, their SEN, their home circumstances, their latest grades, how they come into school each day, their cleanliness, their organisation, their emotional and health state...(as a class teacher in primary, all of the above would - and have - come to me as class teacher, sometimes via the head or SENCo, but much more usually straight to me)

Glad my DC have a tutor system, and a tutor time curriculum, which works efficiently and well. I am sorry that yours doesn't.

They are pretty important things

By house heads, I mean people with a pastoral responsibility (and overall responsibility in terms of monitoring attainment, attendance etc) for a 'vertical' quarter of the school.

Year heads, I presume, have the same responsibility but for a single age group, so 1/5th or 1/7th of the school?

I wouldn't regard the TERMS as interchangeable, but I can see that - depending on how the school organises its pastoral systems - they could have a similar range of responsibilities.

They are important, which is why the person in the school who knows the child in greatest detail should deal with them, surely?

You seem to have a view / be within a system whereby the role of the form tutor is bypassed - you don't have an appropriate curriculum to deliver, and your key pastoral role is bypassed by Heads of Year.

That is not remotely universally the case. In the schools i have best knowledge of, the curriculum delivered in tutor time is well-structured and important, and the role of the form tutor is absolutely pivotal to all pastoral care around every child.

I’ve worked in a number of schools and never been contacted with things of that nature.