To think teachers should wear body cams

[Ffs555]

Rail staff are wearing them, Wetherspoons staff had them on when I went in, it's becoming more common luckily.
I know it isn't a foolproof solution but I think it would stop so many behavioural incidents.
There are signs up in many public facing workplaces saying abuse won't be tolerated, yet it seems teachers/support staff are expected to put up with it 'because they're just kids'.
I used to be a teacher, was threatened by a pupil, he got half a day in internal exclusion and that was it. I had a year 11 pupil make death threats about another teacher in front of me.
I've had another year 11 male pupil walk up to me and grab the mouse out of my hand when I was on the pc.
However have got off lightly compared to many teachers. Still, we're sworn at constantly and verbally abused.
I have left teaching unfortunately due to the behaviour, my new role is much less stressful.
You practically have to bring a weapon into a school to get permanently excluded, schools don't like to permanently exclude due to costs and reputation.
We used to have a very difficult pupil who brought in a fake weapon one day. The headteacher himself said unfortunately it wasn't a real one, otherwise we could have excluded him permanently.
Anyway, I don't know what the solution is, all this restorative conversation stuff doesn't work. Kids don't care about a detention or even a day's exclusion in a lot of cases.

Why are teachers tolerating this? Why are so many head teachers such absolute pushovers?

In my (primary) school, many of the boys have learnt their behaviour from their dads or their dad's have actively 'trained' them to behave that way because they're 'men' and they are trying to counter the impact of them being 'feminised' by having mostly female teachers.

So it's not (always) absent fathers who are the problem.

Parents don’t care. Thee us culture of entitlement and the kids only have to say ‘I feel unsafe’ (Reminding them to tuck in their shirt or asking where the homework is)
school leadership is rubbish /just promoted teachers who couldn’t teach/ and do thr kids rule the roost and they know their power and flaunt it.

I agree. And with some of the threads on here lately it's easy to see that there's a feeling of being against teachers from the outset.

I'm amused by the othering on here as well. This isn't 'just' children where the parents are as described here (absent, criminal, misogynistic). I can list on one hand the children in year 5 that haven't engaged in attacking others, staff teaching and particularly non teaching, they are the exception. The chances are if your child is in primary school and in KS2 they are regularly calling staff bitches/ whores/ pedo/ freaks. Teaching staff not so much, definitely cleaners, lunch staff, caretakers etc. We don't even bother reporting because there's no consequences.

That absolutely is not the case in all schools. But ironically the ideology behind 'othering' is ultimately the reason why they are no consequences.

Normal in the outstanding school I work in, but of course. I'm sure the children in your terribly nice area are entirely different.

There have been several threads on here just over the last few weeks on the same topic. Many teachers have described their experiences in different schools. Many worked in schools like where you are, then moved to other schools - usually private and with strict entry requirements and discipline - and they found the problems were either non-existent or minor there. Obviously that's just common sense. Are you calling them all liars?

I work in a lovely school where violent behaviour is not an issue, so I would refuse to wear a body cam. Early in my almost 30 year career, I worked in a school in a deprived part of a large city. There were fights there (kid on kid), and occasional outbursts from problematic kids, but for the majority, school was their safe space. This was along before mobile phones etc. The top insult of the day was: "your mum shops at Netto". We didn't need them then either.

Some kids were permanently excluded from there, almost always to do with drugs and once because a boy was found hiding in the girls' toilets. However, the SLT of the school was strong, and whilst I did not always agree with them, or indeed like many of them, they physically protected the majority of the kids and the staff but the Head and one Deputy were bloody pyschos.

In my current school, I respect and like our Head. He gets the balance about right in most things and he is approachable. However, one Deputy has never worked elsewhere. Whilst I know her to be an excellent classroom practitioner, she has no insight from other settings to share and her "advice" is limited/useless. The other Deputy has had a similar career path to me, and is far better on discipline and classroom management because he has a much wider experience to draw on.

I have worked in 8 or 9 different schools. The way that behaviour is dealt with by the SLT is key to me. Weak/crap SLT leads to poor behaviour. Heads/deputies who hide away in their offices dispensing policies are a total waste of money. Body cams might work in some settings, but if school management is crap, you might as well not bother, because nothing more will be done.

Last week, two boys from a different school snuck into the high school where I work. When a female member of staff tried to get rid of them, they assaulted her.
She was in work the following day.
The bar is set so low for us. They say you stand more chance of being hurt working in a school these days, than you would the Army.

But many of the parents don't care.

Is she suing the school? Are any of the other teachers going to do anything about it?

In the future everyone will wear body cams and for some, they will be accessible by forms of authority to 'see' what's going on via your body cam. This will be used for workplace and performance monitoring, surveillance, and security / safety.

It's happening whether we like it or not.

I live in an estate where there's been violence inside the building, meaning I don't feel safe to go from my front door to the exits. I turn my phone on video record every single time I go in and out, in case something happens then I can report it (otherwise the police and housing say 'no evidence' and the ASB tenants involved lie). It would be far easier to wear a body cam and I suppose I shall get one too.

While I don't want teachers to have to wear them.
I feel that some behaviour in schools has got to the point they are needed.
When even the lollipop ladies are wearing them something has gone majorly wrong with society

@Pollyputhekettleon

No, she's not suing the school!
And it's just business as usual really.

Umm it's not always ladies my 3 local schools have men!

It's clearly not outstanding if they haven't got control of the children's behaviour is it? Just shows that ofsted ratings mean sweet FA.

That's the answer I get over and over from teachers on these threads. A male-dominated profession would not be rolling over like this. I think what's happening is that teachers themselves are largely highly agreeable people who care about children to start with. At university they're taught the same environmentalist dogma about the causes of bad behaviour and the responsibility of the state which also produces the softly-softly discipline policies. This combination makes teachers as a group incredibly easy to emotionally manipulate into tolerating abuse in silence. They also appear to have zero solidarity whatsoever with each other.

Until that changes no amount of bodycams or CCTV is going to solve the problem. It will continue to get worse.

@Pollyputhekettleon

I think there's a huge amount of shaming going on as well. The message being that you've failed as a teacher for not controlling behaviour, your lessons should be more engaging...
Also, you haven't managed individual needs well enough or followed procedures to stop children being aggressive.
Staff in school want to do the best for all of the children and we're set up to fail every day and vilified by parents and the government for not achieving perfection for every child while juggling tiny funding, large class sizes and ridiculous work loads.

Do you think SLT/pastoral care don’t have anything better to do with their time?

@Noname99 - thanks for responding.

Culturally something needs to change. School is clearly regarded as a holding pen by some parents and that's about it.

I would probably revise OFSTED as they seem to be the problem. SEN and traumatized children should be managed separately away from other children who aren't so disregulated. If a parent claims an unmet need, then that should mean being moved to a different place or schooling at home with support. I am sure right now there is little funding to meet any of this but I hope a new government will look at it.

Other children and staff have a right to be educated and work in a safe environment.

Schools already have CCTV, and have done for many years.

Yes I've heard so much of that too. This bizarre notion that teaching should involve preventing violence and that the next clever progressive teaching method will definitely work, any day now, if only those silly teachers implemented it right. Again, a male-dominated profession would not be self-flaggelating like this in response to emotional manipulation. Teachers desperately need to channel just a fraction of the selfishness and, let's call it assertiveness, of their shittiest students and their parents. No one else is going to rescue you as a profession from this.

It does sound like teaching unions have lost their ability to deal with this. I don't expect to be assaulted or abused at work. But if I was, it would be going to the police. Any child over 10 can be considered criminally responsible in law.

If a 15 year old boy pushed me over then it's a criminal assault. I don't care if he's troubled or not.

I've asked teachers many times why the unions have apparently no interest in this but have never had a real answer. I suspect the answer is that unions are predominantly run by very left wing people. And of course it's their ideology which drives the push to treat perpetrators as victims and prioritize their rights over victims, to blame their environment/the state/patriarchy/Tories/inequality etc for their behaviour, to pretend that progressive teaching methods can work on them, to pretend that the state could protect them from the risks they face if only if had enough money. So they have no motive to acknowledge the harm their policies are causing.