To thing school need to radically rethink their offer

[BlooDeBloop]

In lockdown everyone understood that schooling was optional. Everyone understood that missing a day or week didn't matter in the grand scheme of things

During lockdown students learned that rules could be arbitrary and not make sense

Lockdown taught parents that school was critical as childcare to enable them to work

Since then, kids are back in school. They are challenging the rules on an unprecedented scale. Parents are laughing at the SLT. Kids are cheering when they clowns are removed from class. The kids know there is no real punishment, no real consequence for deliberately, chronically disruptive behaviour.

Teachers are breaking down and leaving in droves, more than ever before. Leaving young, inexperienced colleagues in the trenches.

After having to educate their own children parents understand that Shakespeare, French, geography and more have no modern relevance in the UK. The curricula are unimaginative and disconnected from the future world of work. There is no longer home support for the suck it up attitude with which kids were once sent to school.

Once upon a time there was an understanding that the kids would go to school, get an education, leave to pursue training or higher education. Today, that understanding has broken down. Under the scrutiny and transparency that SM provides, we collectively understand this is not true. Schools are failing, not through lack of care or competency but a lack of relevance. Further, the social mores that governed acceptable behaviour have softened to such a degree a good 10% of every state secondary class will seek to destroy the locus of power in the room (teacher, SLT, whoever). To compound the issue, students are all seeing for themselves on SM how to disrupt and then go about emulating their heros.

This is a cluster fuck of gigantic proportions.

AIBU in thinking that there needs to be a big scale conversation (revolution!) around what schools offer in this new world? For starters, moving with the times to offer skills that are actually needed and valued in the workforce and in further ed (e.g. IT at all levels, from typing to programming, and not shoved into one hour a week). Real alternative curricula for non academic kids (let's not pretend these kids need Chaucer in their lives).

And when students are persistently disruptive over a long period of time, borderline encouraged by their parents, they should be sent home. Permanently. To be educated (or not) by their parents. That would sort out 90% of poor behaviour overnight.

Ahhhh. That feels better 😁. Thank you for reading if you got this far.

OP was one of the disruptive kids who ruined everyone's experience of learning.

OP is now the parent of a disruptive kid/s ruining the learning of a new generation.

Cheers!

@cansu absolutely bang on. Especially on the SEND front.

We need education to stop being the political hot potato. We need someone in charge of education who has worked in schools.

There are so many children in our schools who are inappropriately placed in mainstream because it is the cheaper and easy option for the LA. There needs to be frank and honest professional debate on inclusion and what inclusion actually is and should look like in best practice. This inclusion lite with children with EHCPs sharing adults, minimum possible support we can get away with giving, gaslighting parents, refusing to fund provision until the parent takes the LA to court is not it. Don't even get me started on the new delivering better value in SEND bullshittery.

We need to look at schools and realise that one size fits all doesn't work. We need more SEN schools which cater for all varieties of SEN (high achieving ASD is massively unrepresented). It is not good enough that high achieving ASD pupils are shoved into massive mainstream secondaries with a unit and pretty much told get on with it, you have a unit to go to. We need schools with specialities, why can't we have smaller secondaries which have staff who can provide mental health support/ access to councillors/ speech and language department ect.

A lot of behaviour in school is unmet need. IMO there are aspects of the 2016 curriculum that are too hard/ too fast for quite a sizeable chunk of the class (my experience is lower primary). This leads to disruption as if 1/3 of the class are struggling they will just mess about. I have friends in secondary who say that the lower sets have terrible behaviour and a terrible grasp of the basics. In some cases they are so far behind (yr 2 level reading and reading comprehension in yr 9) that catching them up is a major operation.

I feel embarrassed for you OP

Don't recognise that at all.

The only shift i've seen is parents more up for taking dc out for a holiday a few days early etc.

Exactly. Shakespeare, geography, French could not be more relevant!

Shakespeare - timeless psychological understanding of human weakness, failing and desire
Geography - ecological crisis, remember?
French - any foreign language helps insular little Brits broaden understanding of other cultures.

@Notlaughingalot absolutely more options for non academic kids. Not just aimlessly ploughing through every GCSE.

Geography has no modern relevance in the UK.

Apart from understanding politics
Apart from understanding trade deals
Apart from understanding history
Apart from understanding demographics
Apart from understanding climate change
Apart from understanding natural disasters
Apart from understanding where to go on bloody holiday

Yeah apart from all those things.

There has been a shift in attitudes post covid. There are issues with behaviour in school. I also think there is an issue with how do we give a meaningful education to the 50% not headed to university. And SEND is a total crisis.

I dont have an answer to it that isnt really expensive.

I can tell you're not a fan of the Arts... 😂

I wonder where you think the activities you might enjoy in your leisure time originate: film, music, fashion etc...?

Let's suck out everything that might possibly be enjoyable or character-forming from the syllabus, that'll do wonders for behaviour, I'm sure.

This ^

Are you seriously advocating that the UK should be turning out DC who are so ignorant and insular that they have no knowledge of language, history, their own country or the wider World? Think about the disciplines that are learnt in studying these topics and the transferable skills.

They’d be truly unemployable.

Exactly. Even computer science jobs don't require you to have done computer science at school. Basic IT literacy is useful but is not computer science. Everyone I know who did humanities at school and university has been able to transfer their skills to a wide range of, often well paid, jobs.

I think there are a complete of strands going on

• poor SEN support
• not valuing teaching as a profession
• taking education for granted. Similar to some trends in medicine, there seems to be a movement that doesn't rejects things that our grandparents or people in other parts of the world today would love to have access to (like we've forgotten what it was like not to have those things)
• recognising that "everyone should have the opportunity to go to university" is not the same as "everyone should go to university"

I think trying to be super relevant to 'right this minute' job skills is probably not a job for schools - it'll be outdated by the time they're on the job market.

I do think more vocational education would be great - rather than making it an option for 'less academic' kids, I'd suggest making some vocational lessons mandatory for all, so more kids could find what they're good at and people might develop more respect for those vocational skills if they see that they can't do them well but others can.

I’m delighted to report this is not our school and I’m baffled with the majority of content here!

I don’t recognise this from my dc secondary school.

After having to educate their own children parents understand that Shakespeare, French, geography and more have no modern relevance in the UK. The curricula are unimaginative and disconnected from the future world of work.

You realise not every child wants to be in I.T? Or an office slave.

Where will the musicians, artists, creators, sculptors, writers (and so many more) come from.
Where will these children live if they never learn another language. How will they get there if they dont know any geography.
I'm no lover of Shakespeare or chaucer, but you can learn a lot from both.

Your vision for new curricula is short sighted.

Must try harder.

Academic targets have narrowed, making schools the right fit for a small minority, so no wonder many are biting at the bit. The present system currently labels a large percentage of children as failures just because they have different interests, are practically minded or have additional learning needs. The present school system fails too many children who just need something else to reach their potential. It’s no surprise that thousands of parents withdraw their children from school and homeschool, accessing a multitude of alternative learning opportunities in much nicer more nurturing environments.

I'd love to hear the calls in once Year 5 bring home their artistic representations of the Miller's Tale or discuss why saying Cunt isn't being naughty, they're just using the words they learned when describing the Wife of Bath's genitalia and, in any case, it's spelled with an 'e' on the end.

The hyperbole at the beginning of the original post was unnecessary, but I completely agree that the education system is not fit for purpose. It’s a 19th century curriculum trying to address 21st century problems. The challenge is determining what is critical and what is optional. I’d argue that coding and finance (including personal finance) should take precedence over something like English literature. Certainly a GCSE in IT should be core and English lit an option, rather than the other way round as it is now.

I agree the world needs more musicians.

Music education at state school is a joke.

The music lead often has no prior experience in the subject.

The music curriculum is laughable.

It's very sad.

I agree with you insofar as I think we need to rethink the social contract between schools and parents. A lot of kids are not OK in schools atm and I think many, if not most, would benefit from schools taking a more therapeutic and less punitive approach. Of course, that would require funding, of which there is none.

Surely the point is that no curriculum can ever be totally relevant to the needs of students who are going to live in a changing world for the next sixty or seventy years. In my day we did writing practice with dip pens, because no one envisioned that actually it would have been more useful to teach us to touch type on plastic keyboards.

Education as such is rarely relevant if you think of it as a series of facts to be learned, but what is important is teaching persistence, research skills, the ability to analyse, to overcome predjudice, to recognise that other people and their cultures have values, expectations and ways of expressing themselves, to understand that the human condition doesn’t change much over centuries.

Do you understand education is not the same as training?

Nor mine, (and I am talking a public school with 12 classes per year, and entry over the full range of academic ability, including SEN!)

I would also say that getting rid of NC levels was a huge mistake.
I disagree @cansu. The huge mistake was introducing them in the first place.