Zero tolerance schools and slant techniques for send - good, okay or terrible

[Zerotolerancetofun]

Dd is starting secondary next year. The school has a zero tolerance behaviour policy so very strict about everything (uniform, homework, behaviour etc). They are also bringing in this new teaching technique called slant that the kids are meant to follow - about how they sit/pay attention/look at the teachers - it sounds very Draconian.

Dd has ASD and significant levels of anxiety and I am concerned how this environment will work for her. I think she will be terrified of making a mistake and getting detention for minor mistakes, but of course if this approach stops bullying etc then that is a good thing for her.

I'd love to know how other people's DC have got on with this type of school. Particularly if they have ASD, but also NT children too.

CryHavok
The problem with your approach for you is that your daughter probably learns in a noisy classroom where the teacher spends more time on behaviour than teaching her. This means she does not get the best education. If parents supported teachers then everyone's child would have a better experience and standards would be higher. If the class can work independently on a task then the teacher can give kids who need extra help what they need. If the kids misbehave then they can't.

There needs to be order in a classroom to allow learning. The debate here seems to revolve around the extent and severity of rules. I think it all depends on what is viewed as acceptable and everyone will have different views.
ie - is it acceptable to answer without putting hands up
is it acceptable to balance a chair on two legs
is it acceptable to talk when engaged in a task (talk about task)
etc etc

My DD (ADHD, and v likelyb ASD) started this academic year about a year behind. We worked really hard with the school and they put in a few adjustments. Their ethos is, we dont care how she learns, as long as she learns.
She has a busy table, with fidget toys and kinetic sand. She does not have to sit. She is excused from group exercises, as she cannot handle them. The staff scribe for her much of the time because shw struggles with writing.
She is now working at expected levels across the board, with stretch targets in some areas.
A slant school would be a disaster for her, but I can see how it could be really effective for others. Having a choice will be key!

My son has inattentive ADHD and a host of other issues. He has thrived in the work environment , he has a fabulous work ethic, always on time , keen to help his peers. His employers were happy when he first started to allow him to wear his ear buds when needed to help with extraneous distractions but after a few months he felt confident enough to never use them. That’s what tolerance and support does.

Like a lot of ND people he often thinks laterally and ‘outside the box’ because he is not hide bound by the obvious and his employers have valued this and encouraged him, he has been promoted and supported. He has held down a very stressful job throughout the pandemic and it has given him the confidence to move on to a much more people facing role than I ever thought he would cope with.

We abandoned the state sector after we were laughed at for wanting him to do GCSEs and told it was because of our ‘middle class expectations’ and told no allowances would be made for his sensory issues. He got 7 GCSEs In his independent specialist school where he was understood and cared for and where no one cared that he wore cotton not polyester shirts or doodles to help himself concentrate. Adaptations were made but he was also encouraged to understand that the world wouldn’t always change for him and helped and supported to discover his own strategies that worked for him. Doodling happens to be one, also using a large page a day diary to log his day, using his earphones , sometimes taking a break, being honest about whatever issue he is having, using a lumber support cushion.

These seem small things but ‘zero tolerance’ doesn’t allow even small adjustments. It also doesn’t allow young people to take responsibility for their own neurodiversity and learn to accept and live with it and crucially to be proud of who they are. Nothing about being neurodiverse is wrong it’s just different from the way the majority think and process information, these zero tolerance rules just want everyone to the same and not think for themselves .

As an employer I want people who don’t keep asking me what the rule is and who are prepared to take risks and make mistakes and learn from them. Frankly people who have learned that normal human traits are punishable are not brilliant employees.

Absolutely! Unless your child has a career in the army planned, this sort of school is not preparation for the workplace. Thankfully most workplaces bear little resemblance. In my workplace people are kind, help one another if they make a mistake, teach people things more than once when they’ve forgotten, lend people things etc.

Lots 9f jobs are like this! I obviously wouldn't he day dreaming of someone might be killed but I also don't think anyone is going to get killed if a child daydreams for a few seconds at school.

How old are your children?

I'm guessing none of them have additional needs?

Nope. Why would I support the teacher or school if I think they are wrong?

Most workplaces are nothing like that. In some workplaces daydreaming when you're supposed to be working causes accidents and gets people hurt or killed.

Firstly these jobs are the minority and secondly I doubt a person with concentration challenges would choose them. Either way no amount of making people track the teacher or sit a certain way will ‘cure the ADHD’ just like making people look at distances without glasses will not cure short sight or making deaf people listen harder will not make them less deaf . Allowancing people to make adaptations to enable them to mitigate the effects on them of their difficulties will however mean that they are best able to contribute fully to society and make the best if their lives.

The school doesn’t have the legal power to prevent my kid from leaving the site at the end of the school day. Academies have to follow the same rules as everyone else, the heads just pretend they don’t. I would engage the services of a solicitor to tie them up in red tape and make life as difficult as possible.

As for how you cope in work - I’m autistic, went to school when they very much tried still to punish the “odd” out of you (I had a table shoved behind a filling cabinet for an entire year one) - left school pretty traumatised with no self esteem and I now work in a team where a few of us doodle (or ridiculously over note take in meetings) and if I’m on a Teams call where my brain will go into a “am I doing eye contact or looking stalkery and I must sit still but not too still or they’ll think I’ve frozen” worry loop - I pop camera on for hellos and interactive parts and then turn it off for parts where it’s just listening and taking in information. It works - but it works because I have enough confidence to request that kind of low key adjustments.

I used to support school blindly, but the impact this period of SLANT-esque rules had on DD2 mean I no longer do so. If you can’t justify a rule beyond “everyone HAS to be like this just because” then it’s a shit rule

CryHavok. You clearly would not and do not. I guess you can't see the link between lack of parental support and poor behaviour. How many schools have you worked in? What experience do you have of managing a class?

I would. People always bleat about parents “supporting the school” but it needs to go both ways. But it doesn’t. If you thought your child’s school was in the wrong would you still back them up? Yes or no?

If you want me to answer your questions, maybe you should answer mine.

I would not assume that I knew more than the person who had witnessed the incident or the behaviour. I don't set myself up in opposition or in the role of deciding whether the school is right or wrong. If my kid is rude then that is up to the staff to decide on the consequence. If staff tell me that my child has been rude then yes I believe them.

I am not sure also what you mean by 'Nope'. Nope to what? Your answer doesn't seem to address anything I said in my post.

You dont understand the situation at all

No one is going to physically restrain your child, but the detention stands, and if you and your child do not comply, your child will quite quickly be expelled.

lawyer up all you like - some people do, and they lose.

They won’t be. There’s a high bar for permanent exclusion. A child not doing a detention doesn’t meet it. As I suspect you well know. Are you on the board of a MAT lol?

Yes unfortunately the bar is set too high and far too many degenerates are allowed to remain in school, often with violent behaviour.

I feel sorry for your children then. It mustn’t be nice having parents that aren’t in your corner.

In answer to your questions, no I’ve never worked as a teacher. But, much like it’s not up to anyone else to make my job easier, I’m not going to throw my kid under the bus for the convenience of their class teacher or school management.

A child not doing a detention once, no.

A child not doing the follow up, rearranged detention will get an exclusion

A child continuing along these lines will be expelled in a couple of month

THis happens regularly - you have a very wrong and very outdated idea of how much a non-compliance an academy will tolerate, and how easy it is to expel a child. It is very easy

however, in the scenario you outline, with a parent ringing the school and saying they are refusing to allow their child to do the detention 😂( sorry, it does at least give the receptionist a giggle when that happened)

the most likly and most common outcome is that the child, when spoken to, most likely knowing other children who have been expelled, and with a better understanding than the parent, will ask to do the detention, and will do it

and the parent might or might not get banned from the premises, depending on the level of aggression in the phone call

You’re talking out of your hoop and you know it. Head’s with that attitude get their arses handed to them in non mumsnet using areas.

@CryHavok

It isn’t about not being in their corner is it? Do you never think your kids can do anything wrong? What happens when they get into the workplace, they’re pulled up by their boss and they can’t ring mummy?

Work places don’t have the ridiculous rules that schools do. For example, if I’m in the office and don’t have a pen I simply get one from the stationary cupboard my boss won’t try and keep me back an hour unpaid. Neither am I forced to wear a polyester blazer when it’s boiling out.

No but if you have a job where bringing a piece of equipment is necessary to do your job, and you continually forget to bring it to work, you'll get sacked before long. Teaching kids to remember to bring their pen to school drills this into them as a life lesson so when they're older they're in the habit of turning up to work fully equipped.

Oh I see we're only allowed opinions if we teach - not if our kids are being subjected to discriminatory abusive treatment by schools. Nearly 15 years in the classroom, in some of the most deprived areas of the nearby cities - SLANT shite is STILL abusive as fuck power-mad Heads and Teachers not giving a stuff about the kids, wanting the inconvenient SEN kids managed out and an easy life for themselves.

I'd rather have to deal with Johnny staring out of the window but actually taking the lesson content in because eye contact is fucking uncomfortable and distressing for him to maintain, Jamie who is wriggling and has changed position in his seat five times and has his foot up under him to give him a kind of impromptu wobble cushion, and Jack who is colouring in all the A and O letters on his worksheet while listening to the teacher any day of the week... rather than a silent room of kids who go home and collapse into floods of tears from stress, begin to school refuse or, like my daughter did when a teacher decided to tell her she wasn't allowed to use a very very silent and selected for minimum potential to irritate and distract in the classroom, fiddle toy - rip holes out of the skin on her face as a substitute while being left sitting in her own shit as she took "stay in your seat" rule to the absolute letter.

Thankfully, while these hideous Crunchem Hall schools are spreading like the Clap, one of our local schools has changed to a policy of teaching as if all students are neurodivergent. They're rising fast in terms of parental preference around here (and results)

@CryHavok

Actually I think plenty of workplaces have quite ridiculous rules, regulations, ridiculous policies, red tape and plenty of other annoying and pointless shite depending on the sector. The helicopter parents are flying high on this thread I see. ❄️