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
blackbird77

Parents are 100% behind schools and teachers dealing with behaviour right up until it’s their child. When it’s their child it’s either “they only did it because they are being bullied” or they suddenly develop up a SEND need and it’s the school’s fault for not meeting need or the teachers fault for not intervening correctly for their specific ‘sensory’ need which means it’s the teachers fault for having the shit kicked out of them or the other child. It’s NEVER EVER their child’s fault. And body cams and cctv would help but as I said in my original post, parents still find an excuse.

None of that would matter if schools weren't under farcical obligations to avoid excluding children, and those polices aren't coming from parents. They appear to be coming from Ofsted and/or the government, with zero opposition from teacher's unions. If that policy were changed then, as happened years ago, the parents could say what they liked but the child would be out and that would be the end of it. In an ideal world of course they could then go to some kind of special school that is capable of educating them, or at least containing them, without risk to any other children or normal teachers.

We can. We do. Doesn't stop them doing it - whatever it is - again.

If schools are as violent as people are claiming, why aren't there thousands of arrests every day?

But that doesn't stop them from being violent, that just shuffles the problem along.

Because schools don't like to report to the police, the police don't like arresting school children as they see it as the schools problem.
And teachers that go to the police often get no support from the school, end up teaching the pupils that have assaulted them and are forced either out of the profession or at very least out of the school.

To add to this often there are other parents that will back up the pupils parent as they have something against the education system as well.

A friend of mine will tell you how badly bullied he was at school by the teachers, they do this all the time until I remind them of what an absolute horror they were at school.

We apparently have different goals. My goal is that children and teachers should be safe in school. It's not to prevent violence in society. If you shuffle the problem out of schools then there is no more problem for children in schools, which is all I care about. I'm not trying to solve some kind of broader social problem of violence and antisocial behaviour. In a sane society everyone would agree that that's not the role of the education system.

Have you ever tried getting the police involved in a school incident?

My nephew had a knife pulled on him at the school gate and nothing was done until his Mum got a local journalist involved. The police were adamant it was a school issue. School said outside the gates isn’t their problem.

The police will do anything generally to avoid getting involved when under 18's commit crime. Any excuse. I'm sure they feel it's a pointless waste of time unless it's a really serious crime, because it is.

@FrippEnos

The police will readily arrest children when a crime has been committed.

This seems like a cultural issue within schools. The only way to change culture is to take a stand. Teachers cannot teach children whom have bail conditions to stay away from them.

Again, I highly doubt secondary schools on the whole are as bad as are claimed here, given I worked in one in one of the most deprived areas in the country. And this was... 2019 (agency on top of my 30h a week prison contract before anyone questions it!) So very much sounds like folk devil and moral panic. Yes there are fights, but teachers being mass assaulted on a daily basis? Absolutely not.

Why would your individual personal experience cause you to doubt what I've seen probably dozens of teachers on here say? And, by the way, absolutely no one claimed teachers were 'being mass assaulted on a daily basis'. As of course you're well aware.

Sorry I missed that they get shuffled to other mainstream schools and become their problem.

I have seen teachers being forced to teach the child that have assaulted them the day before and seen teachers forced out because they went to the police.

Teachers cannot teach children whom have bail conditions to stay away from them.
As I haven't seen this I don't know if it would be possible to enforce. but it is different from a pupil being arrested and charged to getting bail.

No one has said that teachers are being assaulted on a daily basis, just that sweet FA is being done about it.

And I have had HTs saying that pupil X shouldn't be left allow with female members of staff because they are known to sexually assault them in their previous school and similar to the whole staff as the pupil is know to be generally violent towards staff members. ,

@Pollyputhekettleon

Someone claimed earlier that all key stage 2 children are spitting on staff and calling them paedos and slags earlier 😂 are you telling me you believe that?

If it's not alleged that teachers are not being attacked en mass, then why are so many crying for BWC after reading the thread?

I worked in a school on an estate that had council cctv and the buses had been rerouted due to the danger. There were not daily attacks on staff.

CCTV has its merits. I used to work in a school with one of the highest numbers of CCTV cameras around many years ago. It helped us find thieves, prove who damaged equipment, find evidence of assaults and I witnessed 2 people's careers being saved by them, because CCTV proved that they had been falsely accused of inappropriate behaviour towards a child.

But times have changed a lot since then. Body cameras would only work in exposing the daily disrespect and indeed violence on a larger scale to an audience, much like it very briefly did for the journalist who'd gone undercover as a supply teacher many years back. The problem is, no one cared for long enough.

Do the parents of the young man who threatened me today to get the fuck out of his way or else care? They didn't the many times he jumped the school fence, used a chair to try and smash in a window or any one of the many detentions he got for other types of antisocial behaviour.

I am broken today by the behaviour I have had to endure over this week. Body cams, however, won't help. Smaller classes, more SLT presence, more money for alternative provision, more mental health support, more in-class support and more actual exclusions allowed would help. We don't need more evidence - we have plenty of that. We need more actual help.

I work in an alternative education setting with very high risk young people. We don't have cctv and I'd never wear a body cam. I have been threatened with a knife on one occasion so I know what it feels like to deal with weapons in our setting.

Ultimately schools need better resourcing. Teachers need better training and more support in and outside of the classroom and schools need more resources for pupils with educational needs, sen and otherwise.

The vast majority of young people I work with have been put out of schools for asb due to significant trauma. The vast majority don't have any incidents of aggressive behaviour in our setting because our approach is very different, the setting itself is very different and groups are never more than 18 in a class. In fact I can only think of 2 incidents in the last 8 years.

Being completely honest, I think a lot of times it's easy to blame the pupil but oftentimes, the other adults in the room could have deescalated quicker/ more appropriately/ recognised behaviours faster etc. But without appropriate training they won't know that at the time. Teachers are often so overworked etc that they don't have the time nor the threshold to provide that support so more children are now falling out of mainstream education and more teachers are choosing to leave. I have a lot of support for myself in my job, that helps me sustain high threshold working.

It's not good enough and at the crux of it there are children who deserve an education who are being failed by the education system. Cctv won't fix a thing, it'll just make it easier to blame the pupil and have them expelled/ suspended which doesn't help identify the root of the behaviour. The majority of pupils lashing out in this way are to an extent vulnerable. The only thing that will help is better targeted support in schools. I also offer this to mainstream education and it always amazes me how few schools actually take us up on it considering it's a free service. In fact I've been really disgusted at the attitudes I get from teachers when I've done training with them around dv and other important topics.

Absolutely nobody claimed 'that all key stage 2 children are spitting on staff and calling them paedos and slags'. I don't even need to to find me the quote to know that's, to put it politely, false. Why are you persistently saying things that you know are not true?

Also, again, why do you keep talking about your personal experience as if it's evidence that everyone else is lying?

@ThrallsWife

Exposing the violence to the public consistently would work. It's something you'd expect a union to do, but they're not doing it. And apparently no one in teaching is standing up to whoever it is that's enforcing the nicey nice discipline policies.

As a teacher I would love this. You don’t believe little Johnny is a knob head, watch and see.

@Lavender14

The goal of the general public, if anyone bothered to educate them about this, would not be to 'identify the root of the behaviour'. It would be to prioritize the safety of the other children and teachers, by exclusion wherever needed.

I totally understand the root of Bob's behaviour. However, it doesn't mean it is acceptable for him to assault a peer, or to call a member of staff who tries to intervene a "fucking pedo cunt"

So it's everyone else's fault and they're just misunderstood?

@Pollyputhekettleon and @MyGooseisTotallyLoose why shouldn't those children also be safeguarded though? When 1/4 homes in the UK have domestic violence for example, you think all those kids are going into school and behaving just as the other 3/4 are? With better resourcing it's possible to do both. Just because children are "difficult" or "challenging" doesn't make them any less entitled to support, safeguarding and an education. In fact id argue they're the ones who actually need it the most. There should be an period of trying to work through challenges and understand behaviours. For a lot of children school is the only place problems at home are picked up so I'd say it's an essential part of being a teacher. And if it's not realistic for the teacher to do it, then my question is why the schools are blocking free services like ours who can go in and do that to take the load off the teachers? I find the young people I work with are generally pretty logical (even if the logic is flawed), understand why they're acting a certain way and you can usually intercept it and the behaviour isn't needed any more, behaviour is a reaction. For me it's too easy for schools to just wash their hands off those kids and no I don't think it's good enough. I'm not saying it's a teacher specific problem, it's a problem with the education system overall. Although honestly the attitude I get from teachers I train is really disheartening. Obviously some are there because they genuinely want to support their pupils and care but a lot are so openly unbothered it's just rude and i can't think of any other profession where you could bring that attitude to training and have people think it's acceptable. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I'd say they're probably burnt out and feel under resourced and under supported in the current system, but if the attitude and opinions they bring to my training is what they bring to their classroom then I'm not surprised some children are maybe lashing out at them because it's like a red flag to a bull. Accountability works both ways.

@Pollyputhekettleon I think you'll find it was here at around 07:00 this morning