To think droves of teachers will make the decision by husband made today- to leave

[Peakyshelby]

Well after 6 years of teaching my husband has broken down, gone to the doctors, been signed off and says he is done.

he has done 3 years in 2 schools and then done supply for 3 years. There is too much to list but the highlights have been

been told to go and fuck himself and other insults thrown at him by kids with hardly any consequences from parents and schools

having stuff chucked at him

having to appear as a witness in court when a parent beat up his own child at home time in the playground

having parents create a smear group on WhatsApp against him and 2 other newly qualified teachers because the parents said there little darlings behaviour must be down to inexperienced teachers not being able to handle them.

having parents laugh and him and tell him he is picking on their little darlings by trying to sanction them.

have children laughing at him and saying my mum and dad don’t care what I do

hardly any support from above.

There is too much more to write but today he had a 10 year old child walk up to him and pour a water bottle over his head.

he is done. He qualified with a group of 10 others and 8 of them have since quit. 2 did not get through there NQT year.

He says the system is broken

Sorry, if you write 'the sun shone bright' except in a poem, you have made a grammatical error. As long as you know it's an error that is fine - you will have had good reason for using 'bright' rather than 'brightly' (I think it sounds better, so I'd use it) but if you do it because you don't understand that it is grammatically wrong you are writing without clarity.

I glanced at Rosen's breakdown of the Sats test. He is snooty about the fact that 'artisans' (printers in this case - so literate men) invented punctuation, so not erudite, clever people. How snobbish can you get?

I have worked as management in a special school (amongst many other senior roles) where behaviour can be extreme in terms of staff assaults and attacks. Parents will fight you on everything and expect the school to be managed according to their own child. It is incredibly hard to sanction children, especially without parental support. Especially at secondary school age.

I don’t get why people can’t see that working together would be in the best interest of the child, and for our society in the future. Maybe it’s an ego thing, I don’t know…..my school really helped my daughter through a bad time, and I am so grateful to them.

I haven't rtft but my child's head of year has quit due to stress. I'm very sad about it. She's wonderful and a good person. My son's year group are horrendous. They've bullied my child since y7. I can't get a different school without ehcp. Can't get ehcp for at least two years.

Today a child of 13 called me a cunt when I challenged their behaviour bullying my child in front of me when I collected him. I'm really scared for our society. Wish I could leave the country frankly.

Do contact the school about that verbal assault. In fact, I would contact the police too.

The phonics check is an aberration. As a dyslexia specialist I use a phonics check to help me decide if a child is dyslexic. This useful tool has been taken away from me by making every child do it. Teachers teaching to the test as they always do has made standardised tests such as I use useless. If children can read real words they don’t need to practice nonsense words. And if they can’t read real words they need to be taught how to read them not how to read nonsense words.

I have emailed the school. I'm absolutely mortified.

I got a real sense of what my child puts up with. There were so many of them and they all talk at once, so mouthy and so incredibly rude. I lost all sense of exactly who said what. It was just awful.

They don't respect anyone. One child slapped another across the face while I was stood there too, screaming and swearing.

I told them that I was disgusted at how they speak and their behaviour was appalling. They don't care. I just despair. I feel like I've failed my child.

I should not have spoken to them. I've probably made it worse. But I am not someone who can ignore terrible behaviour. I've always stood up for what I think is right. It seems you can't do that now. I'm probably lucky I wasn't assaulted. I'm dreading my child going to school tomorrow.

I have emailed school twice in two days and once last week. No reply so far.

They don’t know how. There are people who lack basic communication skills, their modus operandi is usually to ‘kick off’. Anyone working in public facing roles will have met them. As rights have overtaken responsibilities that kind of behaviour has grown. Sadly.

I work in the NHS and the entitlement of some people and their utter disregard for the rights of others astounds me daily. I do think society has become very selfish and no one dares challenge terrible behaviour, adults and children’s, for fear of been complained about or being verbally or physically attacked. Unfortunately this has fed into how children are raised and how they subsequently behave in schools.

I grew up in the 80s and went to the nearest comprehensive school. I never really appreciated how much discipline and order there was in my old school until I started reading these threads. We stood up when an adult entered the classroom and didn’t sit down until the teacher said we could. If you misbehaved badly enough you were expelled and your parents were responsible for finding another school to take you. We had the very low staff turnover and always had specialist maths and physics teachers. Nowadays you would have to pay for that sort of education.

That sounds appalling. Have you checked the school's bullying policy on their website? Are they following it? Can you put in a formal complaint if they are not? It sounds an absolutely terrible environment for your child. Do you have other options? Sorry lots of questions!

No other options. I felt school were trying but it's gone quiet lately and I fear the head of year leaving.

All schools that are feasible and decent have huge waiting lists and we're not near enough. I've been told by their admissions to get an ehcp before even bothering to try and move.

No guarantee it doesn't happen elsewhere either. 80% of autistic kids are bullied. What an awful statistic.

I really regret my actions today. I've been in tears all evening worrying about it.

I should say they were trying but it's ineffective overall.

Whether or not the test was introduced for poor reasons, I see absolutely nothing wrong with that list of grammatical terms. They all refer to commonplace parts of speech etc. Knowing the proper names for things is good. Being able to analyse how sentences work can be helpful.

British adults largely seem rather scared of grammatical terminology. It sounds alien to them because most of them never learned in themselves. That doesn't mean they should assume their children can't cope with it. Children in other European countries seem to learn grammar properly. That's probably one of the reasons they tend to be better at learning foreign languages.

@Windywuss don't feel bad for challenging them. It is probably water off a duck's back. If the bullying is really bad and the school are ineffective, I'd be tempted to keep my child off school for a while. Can you homeschool for a period? Is private an option? I would be concerned about the toll this is taking on your child's mental health.

He's been coping ok lately but he is also good at masking so it can be hard to tell.

No can't home school. Single parent with almost full time job and not much help. I'm also disabled.

And no, can't possibly afford the cheapest private school..

All I can do is complain every couple of months. I feel as broken as the system today. I pray for better funding for schools but I also know this is a bigger societal issue. We've got lord of the flies on a grand scale now. No empathy. No respect for themselves or others. I can't bear it. My beautiful boy doesn't belong with those nasty kids. It's cruel.

Thank you for listening though. I feel the need to offload at least. I'm so stressed and upset this evening.

@Windywuss bless you! it is so hard and there are no easy solutions. All you can do is to keep on doing the best you can for your son. These issues are too big for us to solve on an individual level. If moving is an option, there are still good schools out there. Wishing you both well! x

What's wrong with it, based on my experience of being in the classroom with the children being taught this stuff, is that so many of them don't really understand it. They are being taught it at primary school when they aren't ready to learn it. Even the ones who do learn it at the time mostly forget it in secondary school. There are children who struggle to write a coherent sentence being taught complex grammar rules that they don't have a hope of understanding. All they learn from that is that they aren't clever enough to do school work so why should they bother? Disengaged children are more likely to become disruptive.

The grammar is great for the bright kids that lap it up. My own children are propper grammar nerds. It's too overwhelming for too many though. If they had more time to work on basic skills they may be better placed to understand and learn this stuff.

It's the same in maths. Children being taught how to divide a fraction by a fraction when they have no understanding of place value, struggle with number bonds to 20 and have no real understanding of what division is. Instead of taking the time to have strong foundations they are being rushed through a curriculum that is beyond their grasp.

Can you imagine what it feels like spending all day every day being taught stuff that you just don't understand? They switch off so much that they won't even try to do the things they actually are capable of. Everything seems to be aimed at children of average ability or above. The lower ones are supposed to have "scaffolding" so they can understand but there's only so much scaffolding you can do. Especially when there isn't a TA in every class but there are multiple SEN children in every class.

@Windywuss I'm so sorry 😞 your poor ds.

Please don't be afraid of getting a bit angry with the school. Not abusive at all obviously, but it is OK for them to know you are very upset and you need to know what they are going to do to keep your son safe.

Have you kept a record of incidents? If not,, then I would start right now. Any conversation you have with someone at school, send an email to confirm what was said so that you have a traceable record.

The school should have policies on their website. Check the bullying policy, are they following it? Also look at the complaints policy. Who do you complain to in what order and start working your way through the proper complaint procedure and keep escalating it.

Chase the EHCP, it's criminal how long that takes.

Be the squeaky wheel.

It's no wonder some children refuse to go to school.

@Windywuss this is one area where I do blame some parents. My son is also autistic. He's been at a good primary school and they've been pretty good. I find so much is to do with parents.

So the little turd calling you a c bomb is likely to have parents who won't give a shit or do anything about it. I've come across a parent recently who behaved so horribly that it explained exactly why his awful child was behaving so appallingly and bullying him. Luckily where we are, most parents won't tolerate it and gang up on the feral ones via the school complaints system.

Hope you get somewhere soon with it all. 🙏

@Garibaldhead yes, excellently explained. You have articulated what I could see myself as a parent trying to teach various things during lockdown and supporting SATS revision. Absolute mountain of complex learning that goes beyond focusing on a basic foundation. You make complete sense. Why on earth are kids being subjected to this. I don't understand why teachers aren't up in arms about what they have to teach. Out of principle, this element alone that you describe would make it impossible for me to buy into as a teacher. My son raises this all the time. He's bright but he sees through alot of the nonsense. I have to agree with his observations, apologise that it's the law and I can't do much about it and encourage him to just apply himself and get through it.

@Windywuss My son was bullied starting at Primary school. A very bright lad, 97th percentile in size, but wouldn't hit back. Due to his size he was seen as someone to bully to move up in the pecking order. His life was made a misery.

Many on here will find this abhorrent, but the only language these kids understand is when the person they are bullying hits back. Get the lad into martial arts class. it will be a good grounding for him. He only needs to catch one of the bully's arm once and give it a twist the "wrong" way for them to think twice. The bully's are like this because there is no come back and they know it.

I was in school until the mid-seventies. I could be lippy at times to the teachers. It only took 6 strokes of the cane once to cure me.

It is tough and getting tougher. Especially in Early years, we are expected to parent as well as teach. Potty training feeding etc. Its one of the reasons I quit after 17 years 😪

@ILoveEYFS Don't forget brushing teeth (was that ever actually introduced?)

No-one should not be taught to read nonsense words (and this is not a requirement of teaching SSP) but one of the ways to help dyslexics is to teach them phonics properly. I have been wary of dyslexia as a diagnosis since I was an ESL teacher and tried to show that one of my students was dyslexic. The answer was that they could not be dyslexic because their first language was not English. Dyslexia is disproportionatly found among English speakers, which suggests it is the complex phonic code that is causing the problem. Which means the code needs teaching properly.
I don't see how the phonic check impinges on tests for dyslexia - it contains words at the phonics level of year 1 plus nonsense words which are of the same phonics level and phonically legal (i.e. they are not letter combinations that do not appear in English).
I don't know what you mean by 'read real words'. Any word not in a child's vocabulary is 'not real' to them until they read it and discover its meaning. And there are also words which we read which have no meaning e.g. ENSA, NAAFI, which are acronyms. Also, what are you doing with these? Stromkarl, hobbit, dwarves, borogroves etc? They are not real, they are made up (and all phonically regular), having no existence until the writer thought them.