To think change is desperately needed in schools?

[GibberingPeck]

I work with young children. Today I was hit twice and scratched on the face so hard it drew blood. This has not happened to me before and I’ve worked in schools for many years. I was trying to stop a child hurting another child. The school’s stance seems to be that I shouldn’t have intervened or somehow dealt with the situation badly. I think they saw I was bleeding, but ignored it as they have so much to deal with. This year, I think I’ve seen more violent and aggressive behaviour from children than I’ve ever seen. And no way of dealing with it - it seems to have become acceptable or ‘the norm’.

@Notlikeamother
Omg no words to that ridiculous reply!

No it doesn’t. It sends a message that it was an unusual emergency where we all had to be flexible for a while. If kids managed to wrap their heads around this during WW2, why can’t they now? It’s a lame excuse IMO

Schools were not closed in WW2

Children went to school in ww2- in fact extra children were sent to boarding schools.

I do agree that young people having young children nowadays just don't know how to discipline their kids or can be bothered to do so.

Disciplining a child is hard work. Very hard work. Once upon a time, fear was the basis of discipline because it was easier and quicker. It worked but left kids damaged and confused.

Nowadays, parents use the excuse of gentle parenting for what ultimately is lack of parenting. It's easier to...in the short term...but much harder in the longer term. When the lack of teaching children boundaries, respect for others, consistent and predictable schedules, that life is indeed a matter of doing a lot of things that are not pleasant, and the value of delayed gratification lead to uncontrollable behaviour, parents then look for blame outside of the family expect others to deal with it. Education or Camhs and then get cross when it's not available to them. The problem is that a lot of poorly behaviour or anxiety and stress is just due to the poor parenting, not mental issues.

What is sad is that those children start their life already behind those whose parents are more understanding and prepared to put all the hard work in disciplining their kids. The divide gets bigger each year until adulthood when it becomes so much more difficult for them to adapt. They go on to have children themselves and no good role models...and the vicious circle continues.

Lots of schools were closed in WW2, and there was a lot of disruption-meaning children had to be flexible, just like the pp said.

I love that you have posted information saying school attendance dropped when schooling was disrupted in order to support the argument that closing schools shouldn’t have led to a drop in attendance…

Can you highlight the bit where you think it says schools (as opposed to school buildings) closed - other than for the duration of an air raid warning?

The bright kids did okay. The middle of the road kids struggled. The poor kids , we failed them. It was ableist and wrong.

Yes, but children could go out to work in a chimney. How many of those children do you think had their exams affected?

I’m a child of the 60s, my own are products of the 80s. I can’t remember being scared of my teachers or parents; my children say the same as do my grandchildren. The thing we all have in common is we had respect for both our parents and teachers; the disappointment really awful behaviour would have brought to our homes generally stopped it happening. I don’t think I’ve ever treated a parent like shit, some parents seem to have a chip on their shoulders about schools.

Forgive me - my memory of that time is a bit blurred. If masks didn't help - indeed, possibly contributed to cross contamination - then why was I forced by law to wear one to my husband's funeral?

When I was still a PTC, they weren't even removing children who weren't being fed.

I had an instance of a child wreaking mayhem one Monday morning: started to pick up books, anything to hand, and threw them across the room. There was no apparent reason.

Called for a Duty Manager and the HT came to take her away. He saw me later in the day: "She's not had anything to eat since her school dinner on Friday. I gave her some fruit out of the bowl on my desk and then got the dinner ladies to make her a breakfast."

The parent was very well fed and had a beer belly. Social Work would not remove the child.

Some time later, the child lost her National Entitlement Card. At that time, the council was charging £5 for a replacement. (Totally wrong, in my view, when the card has a child's free dinner encoded in it.)

The parent refused to pay. I gave the office the money. (I was later reimbursed - I suspect by my HT.)

Because it wasn’t about taking measures that would work. It was about building a narrative and making sure it followed ‚common knowledge‘ as people frankly behaved like herd animals and were pushing for implementation of what they thought should work.

Telling the people they are wrong is actually hard work. Going along with incorrect ideas and playing on fear is easy.

But schools didn't close wholesale in WW2. Evacuees went with their whole school, along with their teachers. Where schools were damaged or requisitioned they doubled up on other sites, classes got bigger due to teacher shortages. The effort was to keep them open as much as possible - Covid was the opposite approach. Women being needed for the war effort was a big part of this but there were other systems that swung in too- community canteens where you could get a free meal, community nurseries. They are not comparable situations.

Incidentally in 1944 there was a huge reform of the education system; the government at the time recognising that the war had changed things so fundamentally the education needed reform to meet changed need.

Many schools closed during the 1918 Flu pandemic.

'Spanish flu' school closures were patchy (in London they only closed if there were staff shortages) and were pretty short-lived, only for a couple of months which included Christmas.

That flu epidemic was also unusual in that unlike other flus it hit children particularly badly with rocketing mortality rates, so schools were closed for the protection of the children and not the protection of the general population. The opposite of covid.

Compulsory education only went up to 12 (I think) at the time as well.

I don't believe schools should have closed to be honest. I just wanted the government to recognise that school's weren't the safe haven they were suggesting.

At the beginning they intimated that children couldn't even spread Covid. They eventually admitted that closing schools was to slow the spread of Covid and protect the NHS rather than protect one group of the population.

Yes, but children could go out to work in a chimney

That stopped ages ago. Honestly. Look it up if you don't believe me, @IWasAimingForTheSky

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/12/sturgeon-masks-schools-political-scotland-vallance-covid/#:~:text=Sturgeon%20making%20children%20wear%20masks,Vallance%20wrote%20in%20Covid%20diary&text=Nicola%20Sturgeon's%20decision%20to%20force,wrote%20in%20his%20Covid%20diary.

There was scientific evidence that at the start of covid children, and those who worked or lived closely with them, had some protection from covid. This was because of their exposure to other corona (cold) viruses. Lockdown would have reduced that.

I taught an infant class that had three boys in it that should never have been allowed to be in mainstream education, let alone without anyone there for support. It was insane the things that used to go on. I had a fire escape in my class, which sounded an alarm if opened. They would be out the fire door multiple times per hour. If I tried to stand in their way to stop this whole escapade they would boot me in the shins. They threw chairs at children (aged 5). They threw toys, boxes and even pins one day. I was never off the phone to the office asking for management/help. They spent most of their day just running away, either outside or around the school. Then returning to briefly terrorise kids again.

I held it together, despite seeing the most lovely little kids who had had a nice upbringing (and had probably never heard a swear word before), have everything possible shouted across the room. The worst words imaginable, they knew them all at age 5! It wasn’t until I went to a family wedding and my dad (who is an employer) commented on the state of my shins with bruises. I was telling him that it was from school and he already knew most of the story. He said as an employer he wouldn’t be able to have an employee going home harmed every single day without doing anything to stop it.

I eventually crumbled and burst into tears. I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to leave for the sake of the poor souls in the class who wanted to learn and as management were just throwing children back in the door and allowing it to continue, it was never going to improve for them. I left and on the same week all three were removed from the class and placed in a behaviour unit. The girl who replaced me had contacted HR to be moved elsewhere before my 2 weeks notice was even up!

I moved to another school thinking that would solve the problem and it did start off a bit better but very quickly went down the same slippery slope. Have seen children smash windows/doors out of anger, multiple colleagues have had to go to hospital, one pregnant colleague has been punched in the stomach, another colleague walked about with a black eye from getting punched. These are very young children and it’s coming up the way. I would say the worst of it is around the middle of primary school now almost. So I cannot imagine the world in 10 years time if these people are adults out of the street with knives and no idea of actual consequences. Not to mention the fact a chunk of them wont want to work and will make no effort to, since they have never followed rules or stuck to any sort of boundaries in or out of school.

Can you tell I’m finally about to quit for good?! 😅

Also, to add.. in both the class where I had the violent boys who would often escape and in my friend’s class with similar children.. both different schools and different head teachers but both of us were told to barricade the door with a table and teach from there to not let them get past you.

Can you IMAGINE when you were at primary school if someone in the class behaved so awfully, the teacher was regularly assaulted and was now having to barricade the door with actual pieces of furniture?! But you’ve to sit there and do your maths like everything is fine. They bang on about trauma informed everything. The classroom is the main source of trauma for 90% of the kids in the class!

I agree with every word you've written. Good luck for the future.

@Sherrystrull thank you.. you too 😊