Was the school right to march the supply teacher out of the school premises

[oksodthebend]

A newly qualified supply teacher, who is just at the beginning of the career and finding teaching difficult, is asked to leave the school, which they was only covering for the day in a Y6 class midway through a lesson in the morning between break and lunch and not stay until the end of the school day because SLT did not feel that the children was not safe with the teacher as the classes behaviour was out of control. Is this common practice in teaching?

The teacher after letting 2 of the children go to the toilet at the same time, forgot that they had left the classroom and they found by SLT in an empty room on their phones, having been gone for around 30 minutes.

Where was the teaching assistant? Why did they not support your sister by going to find the children? Your sister could not have been expected to leave the classroom unattended to look for them.

I second that, @Soontobe60 . Some empathy required here. Did anybody actually suffer? NQT should not be allowed to do supply work: this is an agency issue. School management should have told supply teacher what procedure is for allowing children out of room (1 at a time? 2 at a time?). It's not black and white.

Are you the person who posted a few months back about your younger sister possibly failing her teaching placement for various reasons? Sounds familiar to me.
If you are, it's not really surprising your sister was removed because she didn't have the class under control and there were all kinds of issues during her teaching placement which led to her possibly failing. I don't remember the outcome of the thread, the OP didn't update it, but basically you were told then (if in fact you are the same person) that the university were right to fail/warn your sister that she was going to fail because she basically wasn't cut out for teaching.

If SLT think that a supply teacher is not keeping the children safe, then yes, they can be made to leave immediately. The priority is the children's safety.

ITT people who've never taught a day in their lives and need to spend a day in a school.

When you're multitasking 50 things at the same time every minute of the day and have never met the children before, in a busy or unruly school it's not inconceivable that they don't notice one or two missing. Some children can be in the toilet for 15 minutes if they're doing a number 2!

Within the space of one lesson you might have 10 different toilet requests and 5 children pulled out by TAs/speech therapists/SLT/music teachers. It's not as easy as you think to know exactly what minute each of those children leaves the room or comes back.

At our school children who go to the toilet put on a lanyard. So if someone else asks to go, you glance at the hook where the lanyard lives and if it's not there you know that the previous child has not returned yet (or they are in the room still wearing it having forgotten to take it off!) Same system is used from Reception to Y6. I'll admit when I'm busy I can't always remember who's gone to the toilet without looking round to see who's missing.

I'm wondering why the Y6s in this case had their phones on them. In our primary school children who bring in phones hand them in at start of day; the phones are then locked in a cupboard or put in a box on a high shelf to be returned at home time. Seems like those children took advantage of having a supply teacher to not hand in their phones.

Y6 can be pretty awful to supply teachers, particularly if they are a tricky class anyway. We've got a tricky Y6 class at the moment whose teacher has been off for a while. They had a succession of supplies for the first couple of weeks and the class behaviour really spiralled down. An experienced teacher from another year group has now been moved to take charge of them and they have really improved with this stability. With SATs on the horizon they couldn't be left to implode.

I really feel for your sister - I was a new teacher many years ago and it really does take several years of experience to become confident handling bad behaviour. Hopefully she can build up her confidence in a less challenging situation. But it does sound like she wasn't coping in this situation. We've all had failures in teaching on which we look back and cringe!

My 19 year old trainee teacher daughter has been left alone with an infamous y6 class in a very rough area where over half the ckass have special needs and virtually all on pupil premium and very poor social skills. No TA and the ckass teacher had buggered off home. She felt sick and shakey. Eventually as the days went by and she developed rapport things improved.
It is totally horrible the way SLT seem to give student and supply teachers no support.
It 100% was not jyour sisters fault. Their regular teacher should have them linked into much better shape.The culture of the school stinks

Excellent post @EnidSpyton

going against the grain I think this is a bit extra. Nobody was actually hurt and also supply teachers before Christmas were literally gold dust (I’m in secondary and a teacher, and had to cover so much in the last term!). There has to be another reason.

in my early career, I was a part time teacher and did a bit of supply to boost my earnings. One of these was in a primary school - they had me teach PE (dance) which was ridiculous considering I have never taught PE. I had to teach medieval dance. Literally not a clue how to even manage a class! If someone had gotten hurt I would have literally not known what to do. Typically in these circumstances they just do extra English or something written in secondary.

I also didn’t know (because I was childless and an idiot) that I had to see the children in year 4 off. They all just left at the end of the day. I didn’t know who picked them up, as I didn’t know the parents. They all seemed to know what they were doing and where they were going.

to be honest in this case she’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t. So many in my old school had time out cards and toilet cards. If you refused someone going to the toilet, but they were too shy to show their card or explain the reason, and you’d missed the email which said they had to go, you’d have parents on the phone complaining.

long story short, there would have been other issues if she was asked to leave before the end of the day. In all fairness though, possibly quite naive to send two at a time? I’d always only send one at a time to the toilet…

it’s an easy mistake the rectify and the beauty of supply is she can reinvent herself in every new school she goes to!

Missing the point but I thought NQT supply teachers didn't exist! I thought in order to pass your NQT year you had to have a certain number of hours (ie full time, not supply) but then things may have changed.

Your sister was completely unprofessional in not realising/reporting two students missing out of the classroom for half an hour. Useless in fact.

The school were right. It sounds like teaching isn’t the right career for your sister. I wouldn’t want her teaching my Dc to be honest.

Your sister forgot two children had left the classroom and those children were found by SLT in an empty classroom on their phones – absolutely they were right to ask her to leave there and then. That's a massive breach of safeguarding. Frankly, she should count herself lucky. What if those kids had just walked off the school grounds?

Fortunately for her, though, there's such a supply teacher shortage I doubt it will impact her chances of getting more work. But maybe she should look for a permanent position where she gets to be with the same class throughout the year. Kids often act up when there's a supply and if she hasn't got strong behaviour management skills she's always going to flounder.

Lord the parents who think the OPs sister should be sacked on the spot, are part of the reason why we don't have enough teachers, why noone wants to be a teacher, and why they're leaving in droves. Where does the responsibility that that school have to their students and staff come into this? The school put a trainee in an impossible position, leaving them on their own with a badly behaved class. Yet somehow it's all the teacher's fault, and they should be sacked, they're not good enough to be a teacher? Noone was actually harmed, and the ECT likely won't make the same mistake again. Do the school have no responsibility to provide appropriate support to trainee teachers? ECTs are still training, they will make mistakes, but the school have done nothing to reduce the likelihood they'll make a harmful mistake, except blame it all on the teacher. If this is the whole story (which it may well not be), the school have behaved really badly.

So the responsible adult lost track of two of their charges, for over 30 mins, in a primary school.

Yeah, that’s gross misconduct.

I don't think she should be sacked at all, but she did let two children disappear from the classroom for 30 mins because she forgot. That's nothing to do with her being put in an impossible situation by the SLT but her not staying on top of things. Not losing children from your class is a pretty basic requirement for a teacher.

Yes it's a serious mistake, and ideally one that would never happen. But why did the school leave an inexperienced ECT alone with a badly behaved class? They should not have done that, the responsibility for the outcome lies with them. If a train driver who hadn't completed training was left alone to drive a train, who would you blame, the driver, or the bosses who told them to get in the can on their own? As has been well explained already, an ECT supply teacher, left on their own with a badly behaved class, unfamiliar with the students and the school's policies, is a recipe for disaster. Yes ideally, the teacher wouldn't accept the position, but the school should have foreseen the potential for disaster, and with inexperience comes less than perfect decision making. Maybe the ECT wasn't aware behaviour would be so bad? It's on the school to assess the risk and make appropriate decisions, and to train their students to be better behaved.

What will happen is that the agency will put into their system not to place her in that one school or offer her to that primary again. They might have made a note re safeguarding and might ask her her side of things but in the current climate, it is far more likely they will brush it under the carpet and put her in a different school - possibly an "easier" one if they think she cannot cope or, cynical me, a school they think are so desperate for staff they'd shave a tramp (i.e. one already in special measures).
Baptism of fire sadly.
She is essentially being pimped out and most agencies only care about their % - supply is bloody difficult at the best of times but short term day-to-day can be horrendous and kids can be feral. Primary tends to be easier than secondary but even so, in recent times, I have encountered year 7 pupils, whose behaviour leaves a lot to be desired.
Your sister needs to evaluate herself what went well and what mistakes were made: letting out more than one child from class was a mistake and not having made a mental note. Tbh she might have been better claiming the head had said no one to go to toilet until said child(ren) were practically dancing in their seat otherwise you have a domino effect.
Before Xmas can be nightmarish if no proper planning left and kids are hyper. Your sister needed quick calming activities e.g. xmas wordsearches or book reviews, pre printed or an activity like a CHRISTMAS acrostic on blank paper that didn't need much input.
She also needed to namedrop staff names and threaten to keep miscreants at break, 3 warnings then send one to a colleague; but this can only happen with appropriate SLT support. You get parachuted in and expected to work miracles sometimes. Silent reading for ten minutes might have bought her some time.
I hope she is not put off by this. I'll come back to the thread with classroom management recommendations at a later point. Good luck.

A year 6 class, just before Christmas with an inexperienced supply teacher is a bit of a recipe for disaster. (I’m a yr6 teacher, so I’m speaking from experience here- some of my class were very challenging the week before Christmas!) SLT would know this and should have had some sort of support in place- but they won’t as there are rarely enough staff to do this. The fact that they paid out for a supply suggests there were no spare staff around.
I’m guessing she didn’t have a briefing on rules around phones, wouldn’t have had a system for check who is in the loo and had a pile of work to plough through. An ECT employed in the school would have been given help and guidance to have these things sorted before the children arrived.
I’d be interested to know what the consequences were for the children involved- who would have known that their behaviour was wrong.

It is reasonable. They stopped a nightmare. I remember the 5 mn rule. It's a lifeline. You have no idea what kind of trouble kids can find themselves in in 30 mn. She needs more guidance, and should not accept this type of position as of now. I hope she is not put off.

What the school should have done, if noone else was available (the Head maybe?) is move one of their experienced teachers to the Year 6 class for the day, and let the inexperienced supply teacher take an easier class. By not doing that, the school have seriously failed in their duty of care. Whatever happens as a result is on them.

Exactly right @Hayliebells .

There are many people on this thread who clearly have no clue what it's like to teach a class of children, nor the fact that the behaviour of a class is not just a reflection on the class teacher, but on the environment in which that class teacher teaches.

A school with clearly communicated values and expectations, supported by clearly communicated policies and procedures, that are implemented fairly by visible and supportive leaders, is a school where behaviour issues such as the ones experienced by the OP's sister simply do not arise. This is because pupils know the rules, respect the rules and understand that if they break them there will be a consequence - and what that consequence will be. All teachers also know the rules, are trained to teach according to the rules, and are supported visibly when pupils in their classroom break the rules.

In schools where behaviour is as described in this thread, this comes about due to the exact opposite of what I have described above. No values and expectations, poorly communicated policies and procedures, teachers left to make up their own rules and manage as best they can with little support, invisible leaders who hide away in offices, and pupils who have no boundaries and understand that they can rule the roost because they have no consequences for poor behaviour.

Even the best teachers will struggle in a school like the one the OP's teacher was teaching in. It would be miraculous for any supply teacher - let alone an NQT - to come in and teach in that environment WITHOUT something going wrong.

I say this as someone with many years' teaching and SLT experience. A school always reveals its true self in its pupils' behaviour. And the least experienced teachers will always be used as scapegoats for leadership's failures.

In my experience if the school aren’t happy with your work they will just walk you off site.

However I think there is an ongoing issue of supply not being checked up on. My experience is secondary and even with SLT wandering about it’s amazing how nobody goes to see them until there is an issue. The students also know this.

She needs a conversation with her agency but I’m sure they will just send her out again. We’ve had banned lists of supply and the agencies still try to send them in to us as they are short staffed.

I think your sister has had a lucky escape. Those children knew exactly what they were doing! They were on their phones! Who allowed them to have phones in schools!
mot sounds like a nightmare school.

Both the agency and the school failed your sister. I hope she's okay, and she really should be allowed some perspective: the 2 children were in no danger and were not 'lost'. They were in the school, messing around on phones they probably shouldn't have had, in a classroom. She did not leave children in harm's way.

So... have her get in touch with her tutor from the PGCE. To talk about classroom procedures for managing behaviour and keeping track of students. She needs some tips and to run through possible scenarios.

And she needs someone to tell her that she's going to be okay. She needs guidance and experience. Hey - that's one mistake she won't make again, right? She's already learned and grown, and she should just ask for help and guidance.

Was your sister given any kind of briefing or information pack at the beginning of the day? Did she know how to summon support if she needed it or the rules around toilet visits?