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.

OMG!
Why don't we send them straight out to apprenticeships at puberty. We could
put a notice round their necks saying " education is not for the likes of us".
Culture in all forms is something that all should have the opportunity to explore. This may be present within the home but, for many it is first taught in schools.
How absolutely bloody depressing your post is!

Why should it be the State's responsibility to educate all children? Because that's the LAW, try? Because it's also the State's responsibility to safeguard the welfare of all children, hence why social services and "looked after children" and "wards of court" exist. Because the UK has signed up to binding treaties like the Convention on the Rights of the Child and is OBLIGED under article 28 to provide education for all children. Because parents have no authority to sign away their child's right to education.

Because you can try to frame it as "returning the child to the parents" until you are blue in the face, but what you are advocating in reality is depriving a child of his/her RIGHTS because of SOMEONE ELSE'S actions.

Resign, now. You are not fit to teach if you do not understand these fundamental principles of justice, fairness, and the rights of children.

This is an excellent post and really hits the nail on the head.

Exactly!

For many children it goes beyond being bored. It’s a curriculum they can’t access. It’s like turning up to work for a job you aren’t skilled in and is delivered in a language you don’t understand, then getting endless performance management meetings.
No one can sit through that 5 days a week. We need a curriculum that isn’t just about level 5 GCSEs, but catered for all children- functional skills, work skills, alternative assessments etc.
Why even turn up if you know by year 9, you’ve been given predicted grades on paper, that you will leave with nothing useful

@00100001

And yes, shakespeare, get rid in one fell swoop.

I've always admired your posts

If you think that some teachers don't still abuse, then you aren't paying attention. If you find statements of fact about safeguarding and the attitudes of the proportion of those attracted to teaching for the wrong reasons offensive, then I suggest that you don't teach because you will be expected to operate in an environment where no one is deemed beyond suspicion.

My primary teacher was hitting the children into the early nineties, after it was criminalised. She took early retirement in a hurry after one of the kids became aware of the change in the law and told his mum. My parents were incandescent with rage when I told them that she had hit us because she had done so without parental knowledge or consent. So yes, I'll go with little Hitler to describe her and those like her.

Absolutely none of this bears any relevance to my DC’s school, during lockdown or since.

I hate the idea that traditional academics would disappear because some wont can’t sit down and learn/focus/work since lockdown. SEN aside, clearly.

It’s not a race to the bottom

I've asked myself often where the anger and disaffection parents have towards schools and teachers in particular. I think it's because they had poor experiences themselves of school. And now we live in a society where it's easier to express those thoughts.

I agree the teaching profession is on its knees. Yet this is not widely known or understood or spoken about on the news. I think we, society, are in for a shock when all the chickens come home to roost.

We could always send them up the chimneys, couldn't we?

Worked before... 🙄

OP is talking utter pish.

@FluffyCloudsofShit not quite an official stat more of an insight. A Facebook group was set up in 2020 to help teachers support each other in seeking careers outside of teaching. It now has over 31,000 members. In three years. I'm not saying they have all left but maybe an insight into the recruitment and retention crisis.

I guess I know a lot more about how teachers behave in schools than you do, for reasons I am not going to disclose on here.

However, I can tell you from a highly informed POV that, in the 21st century, abusive teachers are pretty much renegades. They are so tightly regulated that they daren't.

Why don't you join us? 20th century is long gone.

The right way to learn a Shakespeare play is by going and watching the play at the theatre and then trying to put on your own production, even if just splitting the class into groups and each group putting on one scene.

The play script is the dialogue and directions for a performance, not a work of literature to be read.

And the ones who will send a kid to exclusion for practical but "wrong" shoes? Looks a lot like wielding power for power's sake to me.

Not alone in that...

Most "wrong shoes" aren't practical either...

Looks like you have an axe to grind, to me.

I am amazed at all the people calling for distruptive kids just to be thrown out of school and left up to the parents.

Many people are convinced that the enormous increase in knife crime and county lines is directly linked to kids not being in school during the pandemic and therefore finding something else to do (or being found by those who want to find such kids).
The most logical consequence of more kids being turfed out onto the streets is more crime and more drugs - or maybe that is only according to the Geographers, whose discipline is, we discover, irrelevant.
We do need solutions to allow kids who want to learn in class to learn, but having those kids learn something in class only to be knifed or sucked into addiction out of it doesn't seem like a great solution to me.

I'm talking about the shoes that are actually black trainers. They are practical but often on the uniform naughty list. Ditto Dr Martins, Kickers...

To have an axe to grind, you must first have been given the axe.

The new, modern school you describe sounds like it would churn out droves of homogenised, robotic little minions to support the global capitalism that has caused a great deal of the problems you describe. We need the dreamers and thinkers to stop us all sliding into a dystopian nightmare. So English lit, art, music ,drama, history, geography and languages are the last islands of humanity in a world that’s losing its beauty to AI and automation. Bored, Ill -mannered children are the result of parents who can’t or won’t support them properly. Historically, it was good schools teaching interesting stuff that broke the cycle and now , more than ever those kids need to read the classics and study history because they need to try and navigate a way out of this shitshow and dystopian nightmare that we’re drifting into.
Make teaching what it was when the eccentric and obsessive teacher could hold the kids attention, when they were paid well and it was a respected profession. When they spent their working hours teaching engaging lessons and not box ticking. My university years were wonderful because of the old school professors with their terrible hair and threadbare blazers that were just this side of bonkers but so bloody passionate about what they taught and every lesson was gift of humour and wonder. So I suggest you’re right that reform is needed, but possibly the opposite of what you propose.

Every day I thank my lucky stars that my kids go to a grammar school where about 80% of the kids are of Asian descent. The Asian parents and kids strive for an excellent education.

I do partially agree with parts of this. I have a child in gcse years and english lit for example is a load of shit. There has to be more modern novels that are relevant and that sparks interest
over shakespeare and blooy love and relationships poetry. They are also forced in re and psre once each per week, theyve done re for three years and arent taking a gcse in it. Be taught to respect everyone and their beliefs but then drop it in gcse year and let them have another hour of science or maths for gods sake. They have zero interest in re and pay no attention

The most logical consequence of more kids being turfed out onto the streets is more crime and more drugs - or maybe that is only according to the Geographers, whose discipline is, we discover, irrelevant.

You win the thread.

And yes, that kind of population analysis is done in sociology, which is where human geography and psychology meet.

You do not need a GCSE in IT to develop the skills necessary for most workplaces.

IT wasn't a 'thing' when I was in school and I did O levels not GCSEs and I can manage technology perfectly well to do my job.

It's such a fluid skill anyway! I remember mainframes, Wang word processors and the first spreadsheets were Lotus 1-2-3 😂🙄

Trainers are so bad for young, growing feet!!! School uniform policies are actually doing these kids a favour, where their parents don't know anything about basic foot health!

As for your axe... not going there.