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.

@Pollyputhekettleon - I am quite the lefty and indeed belong to a Union so do not believe such things are inevitable! The point is that dignity at work, which is one of the things unions bang on about ceaselessly is a matter that needs actual action.

Structurally it sounds to me that what happens is that most of the people who are in a position to affect positively teachers and other children are just not there and design systems which do not address these problems but instead softly softly is rewarded and indeed gets you promoted. It gets you good OFSTED points.

That's something that needs addressing from the top down as the wrong people are in charge. Yea some parents are piss takers. But they were not indulged as they are now.

I don't believe it's inevitable, no. Communist countries weren't exactly busy teaching children about 'soft hands' in school. It's inevitable right now in western countries given current left wing assumptions.

Do you not think there is an ideology behind the policy of rewarding softly softly 'discipline'? I mean, who's designing these systems and what's their motivation and belief system? Why don't the unions address it?

spare
Online schools record all lessons so it already happens.

@Pollyputhekettleon - I don't actually know that to be the case.

I do think you make a reasonable point about teaching being female dominated. I think it is relevant. I worked in criminal justice for a long time. There is a strong culture about rehabilitation there (rightly in many cases). But what I did notice was that was strong personal incentives to believe in it or even design systems that promoted ineffective interventions on the basis it could be applied and be successful to everyone. In truth it was actually the case that some of this made the offender worse or even more manipulative.

It would therefore not surprise me that softly softly in schools had become orthodoxy to the point of ignoring actual evidence. That is just ideology, which does not actually care about an outcome but the appearance of one.

Yes the same ideology has been applied to criminal law as well with the same results. As you belong to the union you could try raising this with them and seeing what happens?

@Pollyputhekettleon - I moved on. Criminal justice needs to focus on those people who are violent and sexually abusive. My own views on violence are that the UK is too tolerant of it as this thread demonstrates. Serious assaults require prison time. And perhaps there needs to be acceptance of something about teenage boys which is hard for mothers to hear.

That truth is that a teenage boy is probably more dangerous in terms of violent conduct or sexual assault at say 15 than he is 10 to 15 years later. My view is you need more intervention not less.

Of course we do ….but when survey after survey shows that despite what the daily mail would have you believe one of the main reason that teachers are leaving is not wages but behavior of students and the inability/unwillingness of parents to work schools to address it. It is a huge reason why staff dont want to take on SLT roles. It’s the reason why almost every HT I know is looking to get out. It’s the reason why after 25 years, I left the profession in April with no job to go to and my life is immeasurable better

bombastix

The ridiculous thing is that I don’t think that the solution would cost more particularly as we have overall a declining school age population. The bulge is in secondary but it will pass through. We could be reorganizing and restructuring our primaries with almost every mainstream primary have a specialist ‘unit’
attached utilizing what are soon to be empty classrooms and extensive training for specialist staff who want it. They could work in a cluster so that say 12 schools within a set number of miles have a unit with moderate learning, communication & interaction, specific learning difficulties and semh.

They could get rid of the utter poison that is ofsted and stop holding schools to a level that is unobtainable in any other section of society.

I could go on but I wont.

I have no idea what you do with the countless feckless parents who can’t or wont parent their children though. Sure start didn’t work … it improved health outcomes but that’s about it. I don’t know 🤷‍♀️ but having literally given my 3/4 of my working life and at one point my health to it, I’ve given up and left like thousands of others.

Why are the teacher's unions not campaigning about this?

Thanks for coming back Noname99

Your idea sounds good to me. OFSTED is likely full of people with no real skin in the game. They are being paid to oversee this mess and they can be told to readjust what is a priority. There will be a whole group of people who are being paid to effectively set standards that don't address the most basic issues. It is no good this coming from individual teachers.

It needs to be addressed via the Department of Education. It is not the Department of social containment.

Feckless parents can have their kids educated or contained separately. That was what happened twenty years ago. Inclusion does not mean ruining the education of other children and teachers being assaulted.

I have no idea ….. I left the union fairly early in my career. They are hopeless and unlike every other workers union they have managed to split their own profession. They always blame the SLT/head teacher because it’s much easier for them to do that than to actually stand up
to the govt and ofsted. Part of the reason for this I think is unlike the medical unions, there is no support from the general public for teachers so unions find it harder to get traction. All nurses are angels and all teachers are work shy and useless with too many holidays.
As got school leaders, see it on here all the time from teachers …..SLT are useless, unsupportive, don’t know what they are doing rtc because they don’t have a magic wand that makes children behave but they can’t exclude them either or magic up appropriate resource for them as they have no money and even if they did, no specialist teachers / provision rather than recognizing that they are just teachers who accepted a promotion working under impossible conditions and expectations blamed for everything by both ofsted, govt, parents and teachers. Then people wonder why even with salaries around 50-70k in primary and 80-100K in secondary there is a dire shortage of head teachers. But it’s far easier to blame them than the govt so that’s what unions (& other teachers) do. So they burn out and leave

I've been told before that some head teachers are silencing teachers and playing down the violence in order to protect the school's reputation. Does that not happen?

Also, how could the general public have sympathy for teachers dealing with appalling behaviour when they are generally unaware of it? They're certainly unaware of the scale of the problem, and of the discipline policies being enforced. Unions, as far as I know, have never even attempted to raise public awareness about that. I believe it's because union activists share the same progressive ideology as those pushing 'education as containment'.

I'm a science teacher. Yesterday my classroom was used by another teacher for her class as their normal classroom was unable to be used due to the ceiling in there starting to bow.

When I returned to my classroom, I was aghast at how the students had left it. Some of them had shoved sandwiches and bits of food in the gas taps. Instead of putting rubbish in the bin of which there are several in the room (they're not even supposed to eat in the classrooms), they had shoved empty crisp and chocolate packets, sticky drinks, mushed up cake into faucets or into drawers containing science equipment. They had smeared food over the tables and the floor was covered in sticky drink. The poor cover teacher probably didn't even notice as kids are so covert about littering and eating. It just disgusts me that they can't even use a bin or put the rubbish back into their bag - they have to be as revolting and lazy as possible. After every lesson I am always picking up disgusting things kids have simply thrown onto the floor instead of respectfully putting into the bin. I know farm animals that are cleaner. It's just so upsetting.

Behaviour is just shocking at the moment. I simply don't think parents realise the extent of it. Students don't even respond to you anymore. They will laugh in your face and walk off, refuse to give you their name, blank you completely when you're addressing them, or threaten you with "my dad will just email you to tell you what he thinks".

There is a serious cultural problem in this country. It used to be the bottom 5% that ruins it for everybody but now it's more like 20%. I have taught in some countries with the most abject poverty imaginable and the students were always so impeccably behaved and respectful. Don't think I ever had a student that didn't show up with a pen. They'd treasure their property and equipment (and the school property and equipment) as they valued education so much. We regularly have our school laptops smashed to bits for fun. The school the other side of town gave every student an iPad so they'd always have access to information/internet/homework/a learning tool and half have already been destroyed or neglected.

Shame, guilt, sheepishness, embarrassment are all normal, healthy self-correctors of human behaviour. It's how you end up being a good adjusted person. Reluctance of parents or the progressive educational policy-making intelligentsia to make students experience any negative emotion whatsoever or framing everything under the umbrella of "trauma" or "human rights", despite how much upset or disturbance or unpleasantness the child is causing to others, is creating a generation of some really horrible individuals.

@blackbird77 Yes the future is going to get uglier and uglier unless something changes soon. What do management in your school say about this? Has anyone ever asked the teacher's unions to address it?

Who are these 20 per cent? I don't believe they all have SEN.

@Pollyputhekettleon Management are deflated and overwhelmed. They can't enact any meaningful sanctions to improve the harmony of the school. They are either met with obstruction from Ofsted or a barrage of abuse from parents. I wish all headteachers in the country would push back on this nonsense together and put up a united front. You read in the papers about such things as pregnant teachers being kicked in the stomach and STILL no exclusions. I feel it's reached critical mass now.

It has always infuriated me why unions never focus on behaviour. Every teacher in my school is sick of it and we are a bog-standard leafy school with an average intake. I can only imagine what it is like for schools with more difficult intakes. Virtually no teacher I have spoken to wants to leave primarily because of pay or workload issues. Teachers don't mind working hard and long hours for children when they are receptive and cooperative and kind and respectful! Every one seems to want to leave because of behaviour. In all but my top-set lessons, I lose almost half of the class time to behaviour management. I feel so sorry for the lovely kids who want to work hard and learn and can't.

The thing is, the British public are overwhelmingly supportive of cracking down on bad behaviour in schools. It's probably the only thing they would back the unions up on strongly. It's historically always been one of the strongest polling policy issues along with crime and unites people of (almost) all classes, backgrounds and varied political persuasions. People want to feel safe and happy. I think the uptick in crime, especially teenage shoplifting is upstream of all this too. Just so much entitlement and disregard for anyone else from so many young people these days. Everyone is getting so sick of it. Soon enough it will become a single-policy voter issue for a lot of the population. There's too much erosion and social decline now for it not to.

@blackbird77

Yes I think if teachers and head teachers stood together they could stop this. Oftsed only have power because they're allowed to. I absolutely agree the majority of the public would be on the teacher's side if they were aware of what's been happening. They have no idea. The unions give the impression that it's all about pay and maybe working hours.

Hopefully you're right and that it will soon become an unavoidable issue for governments. But I do think that only action by teachers themselves can turn it around. Their unions are supposed to serve them, not their own ideological agenda.

I’m a Secondary School Teacher and have been moaning for a while now that we should all be equipped with a body cams and microphones.

We deal with such abuse every day, as do students. Peer on peer abuse would be easier to prove, and I’d feel safer knowing my body can would pick up any physical or verbal abuse, also idiotic behaviour which wastes far too much time day in and day out.

The microphones would certainly help us to take off less time, as it’d help us more with voice projection

I have no doubt a good amount of these parents know that their DC are a chip off the ol' block, but as long as they're bothering someone else and not them they're OK with it.

What I do wonder however is in years to come as the generations get worse and violence/vandalism is really the daily norm will these parents/DC look back and realise, to late, that they may have actually played a part in it being that way....
What a legacy.

Because it's only used AFTER the event anyway, it's not used as a preventative measure

And as far as my DGC school is concerned. I'd like the students to wear bodycams. Might give some of them some protection

Your questions are part of the problem.

Surely you should be asking were the boys arrested and are the police going to charge them with assault?

@Pollyputhekettleon

On a recent thread (two really) about toilets being locked in schools.
There were some hardcore posters that kept blaming the schools. At no point did they cover how to stop the pupils from destroying the toilets, it was the schools fault for not controlling the kids and the schools fault for punishing the rest.

This is exactly the same thing.
How do you stop those pupils from being violent?

Just a quick thought on this.

How long do posters think it would be before the usual suspects started to say 'you are filming me so I am going to film you' and acting upon it with the usual crowd on here saying that its only fair as their kids are being filmed?

That would be a strange thing to ask! From everything I've read schools pretty much never report such assaults to police. It would be futile anyway because the criminal justice system operates according to the same ideology as the education system.

You stop them from being violent in school by kicking them out of school of course. I'm pretty sure most posters on those threads could have answered that. Very simple and very effective. Punishing the non-violent students, even unintentionally, in order to allow the violent ones to remain in school, is wrong. Yes it's the school's fault, primarily for refusing to oppose what appears to be disciplinary policies being imposed by Ofsted or the government.