To think something has gone wrong in schools? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz0m2x30p4eo

[RebelBabybel]

From the BBC : school exclusions have doubled in the last 10 years.

I’ve worked in schools for 30 years : KS1/Early Years.

When I first started I was expected to do : hand written, detailed plans. Assessments. Handwritten reports. I had no TA. I had a blackboard. Children had books. I had to be firm with behaviour, schools had very clear behaviour policies in place, and the head would have an overview, was visible, check classes, be the ‘go to’ person if anything was difficult to manage.

Over the years, particularly in the Early Years things have changed massively.
My latest role has involved a manager who is mostly on the computer and rarely interacts with the children. No planning, no assessment. Resources are put out, but there is an ethos that it’s ‘wrong’ to show the children how to use them. Therefore children don’t use jigsaws as puzzles, they take the pieces out and transport them round the classroom. A doctors role play is set up, but with no input as to what the resources are there are for or how to role play ‘being a doctor’.

There is an expectation, a ‘box’ of what constitutes ‘normal’ behaviour : even with very young children. Any child who is outside this box, is often labelled ‘I think they’ve got autism, I think they’ve got ADHD’ without a formal assessment. These children - rather than getting to know them, or putting clear strategies in place, are quickly labelled as difficult : and fall into a stereotype that causes a negative cycle. There seems to be little ‘fault’ addressed to the teaching style, and the ‘fault??’ is centred on the child, I’d also argue that it is NOT a fault. It’s called being a child.

Children seem to be very readily excluded from schools without the adults fully questioning their teaching style and whether that might be at fault.

To be completely honest, teaching was far easier 30 years ago. Children were better behaved, and there was far better, stronger support from senior management. It felt more like a team, rather than:

an SLT who are in meetings, on a computer, off to conferences, in the staff room, pushing ‘new’ initiatives and criticising their staff.

It's the opposite in secondary. Far more rigid and planned. Far higher expectations of lesson quality. I've been a teacher for 30 years too.

But where have all these children come from?

Did we heard them all away 30 years ago? I went to 4 different primary schools due to my dad’s job. I never came across anyone who needed extra support. Middle school was the same. Why are there far more children with additional needs than there were 30 years ago?

Definitely. That is a symptom of the crap state of education at the moment. So many good experienced teachers have left-either retired, early retired, quit or managed out because it was suddenly miraculously found that they needed a capability plan round about the time they got onto UPS. There’s not enough good people left to move into those senior posts, (even if they wanted them), so they are filled up with young people who were often not great in the classroom themselves.

It’s the same in primary, too.

Oh, except in the OP’s school though, seemingly.

I used to teach in a deprived area in England and I can never remember a single child being excluded - 1980s.

I've just retired after working in a nice little coastal school in Scotland. I've lost count of the amount of pupils who should have been excluded but our LA has a policy of non exclusion and will not be keen to support HTs who push for it.

Bollocks, I didn’t think of that!

<wonders if we are colleagues>

The curriculum is too rigid.

My DD has been told off for doing "too much" homework.

There as when I was her age if I did "too much" homework I was given more as the concept didn't exist.

Plenty of computer use in schools is good, but some is bad. Ridiculously long reports for primary school level written to a generic template with the bulk of it just a long list of what the child has learned that year. A parent can just have a read of the curriculum instead to get the same information. It doesn't give a true picture of their child's ability and is so SO impersonal. I don't think I ever re-read my own children's reports after the first read because they were meaningless really apart from a couple of personalised sentences which really WERE about my child. The worst thing is they take teachers a long time to produce. As a parent I'd much rather have a free style much shorter report. I want to know where they are in relation to their peers and expected standard, and how much effort they put in, something particular the teacher has been impressed with, and areas for improvement. I don't need the rest of it. Neither do the teachers.

The whole of primary education is like this. Absolutely pointless work the teachers need to do which benefits no-one.

No planning, no assessment. Resources are put out, but there is an ethos that it’s ‘wrong’ to show the children how to use them.

I'm horrified by this.

That's the thing, they pretend such policies mean a better experience for the child. Whereas we all know they're just putting a different spin on things and the real reason for not wanting to exclude is that, despite knowing full well that these kids SHOULD be excluded, they just do not have the funding to put them anywhere decent. So it falls back on schools to just deal with them. Everything falls back onto schools unfortunately, all of society's ills. Because the funding just isn't there and the easiest thing for LAs to do is bat it back to the school.

That's not a thing. In any of the schools I've worked at or had children at.

The only shift that comes to mind is not doing it FOR the children or doing it with your hand on top of theirs . Which is fair enough, and I doubt it was a widespread phenomenon.

What OP describes must be specific to her school/EYFS lead.

I still teach kids in y6 how to play board games.

@LizzieBowesLyon

That's not been my experience working in primary or secondary. The children I have seen permanently excluded are often those where SEN and poor parenting collide. The children have trashed classrooms, been violent towards other children and/or staff, refused to stay in a classroom or engage in any way with learning (usually despite the school bending over backwards to find ways to accommodate them), spend their days rampaging around the school hurling abuse and swearing at anyone who dare suggest they should either be in class or in another safe place. In secondary their preference is generally to be in the toilets with a vape.

This behaviour has to have been extreme and ongoing for a long time before it gets to the point of permanent exclusion. The schools I have worked in have tried very hard to keep those children in school. Permanent exclusion really is the last resort.

When I was in primary there were children who clearly had SEN but for various reasons they were not diagnosed. After they were excluded and sent to the PRU the diagnosis followed. I know of at least one who subsequently ended up in a special school and thrived. Mainstream was just the wrong environment.

I was at school in the 80s and 90s. I remember about half the children in my year 7 form couldn't read fluently. Maybe behaviour was better but I don't think the level of education was that great. Although actually there was plenty of bad behaviour too. There were quite a few problem children at my primary school, mostly they were adopted or came from difficult families. There was no one with downs syndrome or a mental disability though - I guess they wouldn't have been in mainstream at that time.

Thank you for raising this. Our experience in school has been awful and I'm now home schooling DS through GCSEs.

At the same time, getting health care for child or maternal health problems has been disasterously difficult.

The two things together has made things impossible for us.

We tried so hard and the system is treating us as disposable.

The type of report you want would take longer than any other without the computerised comment banks + a short free text paragraph.

For the banked comments reports, somebody sets up the comments and marksheet templates, then the teacher selects the number for each and clicks save.

The expected level is a reference aspect. The actual level is a number which takes a second to enter, to add in free text for something particularly impressive and something to improve upon for each subject would massively increase the length of time unless they were also reduced to comment banks.

Of course, you then have the simpler number reports in secondary of expected level/grade, actual level and effort/behaviour - some parents are enraged by it being numbers rather than writing or want it read out to them line by line along with the explanation of the columns that's already printed on the report. And staff aren't fans of those, either, even with 6-30 weeks' notice, everything set up for them, collated, checked, chased when the deadlines are missed and they're planned to spread out the workload over the term. We're not even going into why some parents then complain they have too many reports as well as not enough and no updates between reports and parents' evenings that they haven't attended.

Report production is a Kobayashi scenario. It always causes issues, no matter how many, how few, how they look, the information on them - just the fact of their existence means there will be complaints on both sides of the gates.

Hi there I don’t have a dog in the fight but I’m interested.

What is the ratio between the number of places required and the number of places provided? There may be more places in absolute terms but if supply exceeds demand then it would effectively be a cut in provision which I think is what posters are pointing out.

I think the OP has forgotten about the use of long stay hospitals for those with learning difficulties - from age 5. The last of which shut in 2008! My first teaching job was teaching those who were being released in an adult education college. Have a look on YouTube for the ITV documentary ‘The Silent Minority’.
One of my student’s clearly remembered being pulled out of primary school to be told by his HT he wasn’t allowed to come to school anymore (due to his learning difficulties).
Education has changed hugely and we are now dealing with the growing pains.

I went to school in the 90s in a nice rural area. Some very happy memories but some of the behaviour was shocking! Lots of children were either not supported or just written off.

We also learnt much less. I do think the curriculum is far too overpacked now but in general standards have risen. SEN children are now more effectively supported. I was an SEN kid in the 90s and often told off a lot for stuff I couldn't help (not bad behaviour but poor presentation etc.).

I don't think education is perfect by any means but I don't think it was a utopia 30 years ago. In the twelve years I've taught lots of things have improved. The thing that's really hammering us is budget cuts.

I've never heard of or seen children not being shown how to use resources in any early years setting

I agree something has gone wrong, but I don't think it's primarily with the schools. It starts in the home.

@Appuskidu
@BlueSilverCats

I agree with the SLT comment.

It feels like many schools have become very Animal Farm : with SLT on computers or in meetings, dictating how things should be done and critising teachers. I see many schools with quite a few SLT leaders who don’t actually teach.
And then I see the Boxers who are burnt out.

I think it worked better when the Heads were visible, in the classrooms, taking occasional lessons, getting to know the kids, supporting, bringing the school together and providing consistency.

And if SENCOs were brought in in the 90’s, surely this should have helped improve the situation for children with additional needs??
That hasn’t happened clearly.

And for the sniffy, sarky posters here @noblegiraffe - do you think you know it all? What’s the answer then - let’s hear it?

The biggest difference between my DD’s school experience and mine (apart from the weird & overly rigid Gove-ish curriculum) is the number of ESL speakers.

Only 43% of her school speak English as the main language at home and there are over 50
different home languages amongst the student population.
Obvs this is going to have a knock on effect in terms of how engaged the students will be with a curriculum that they may not completely understand, how much parents can help with homework and how well parents communicate with the school.

I LOVE my DD’s school, she has a diverse group of friends who are really supportive of each other and the school has very high expectations for behaviour (but is also very clear about what the rules are and the escalating consequences for breaking them which creates a sense of fairness). It’s quite relaxed on the uniform rules though and it’s all girls (something my DD was set on having spent all of primary being made to sit beside the most disruptive boys as a classroom behaviour management strategy).

My mind genuinely boggles at the thought of teaching children from over 40 different home languages but a quick google says that there are over 300 home languages amongst UK school children (!) and while I’m sure the amount of home language diversity in a single school will vary by region and urban/rural areas, in my time there were only two families with ESL in my whole secondary school.

Add in all the stuff re: housing instability, lack of appropriate SEN provision, difficulty in accessing EHCP funding from the LA, huge amounts of screen time, families with 2 working parents and social-media induced anxiety already discussed upthread, plus the loss of Sure Start and youth clubs, overstretched Social Services and not enough Foster provision (something unlikely to improve when the high cost of housing makes an additional bedroom unfeasible) and increased waiting times for all NHS services both physical and mental and it’s a wonder schools are managing as well as they are! Especially with cutbacks on the fun lessons that used to motivate kids into a) attending school and b) behaving in the loathed lessons (art, drama, music etc).

I’d call it a miracle that schools haven’t collapsed already but it’s not luck or magic it’s due to the hard work of teachers.

I’d say I’m surprised that permanent exclusions aren’t a lot higher but IME the bar for justifying a permanent exclusion is so high that many children are suffering unnecessarily, either due to sharing a classroom with a child whose behaviour threatens everyone’s safety or due to being a child with challenging behaviour as a symptom of something (trauma, unmet SEN
needs etc) who would actually benefit from being in a PRU or similar alternative educational provision.

And for the sniffy, sarky posters here - do you think you know it all? What’s the answer then - let’s hear it?

I certainly wouldn't claim to know it all, but I think your insistence that everyone was just fine and dandy and in school learning back in the day with a bit of firm discipline, hardly anyone had SEN and everyone was wonderfully included is bollocks. I also think that your assertion that kids today are being diagnosed with SEN merely for not 'fitting into a box' is rubbish. I think your claim that teachers aren't allowed to tell kids how to use a jigsaw is bullshit.

David Blunkett was the Ed Sec whose policy of inclusion in the late 90s saw the widespread closure of special schools. The idea was the all but the most seriously disabled children would be educated in mainstream. This was while you were teaching so you should have noticed the increasing number of children with SEN in your classes. That policy has been a failure, but those special schools are gone.

Since 2010 school funding has been subject to a policy of austerity. The first people to lose their jobs were teaching assistants and pastoral workers. A huge amount of support that could be allocated to pupils with difficulties disappeared.

Then in 2015 the funding system for special needs changed. School funds had shrunk, and now the only way to get additional funding for pupils with SEN is if they have an EHCP. Schools are desperate for extra money and the number of pupils with EHCPs has doubled since then. (This doesn't necessarily mean that schools are making up the needs, rather that pupils could get extra funding before the changes without an EHCP, and there was more money in schools generally so EHCPs weren't as urgently required). This has put pressure on councils who are now bankrupting themselves with the cost of SEN funding so they now routinely reject any application for an EHCP, including kids with extreme needs, so those kids go unsupported, end up more likely to be excluded as they can't cope with school and school can't cope with them. An exclusion is sometimes the only way to get them an appropriate placement.

There has been an increase in diagnoses of SEN, not sure if it is clear if it is better recognition, or environmental factors, or things like increasing premature births or whatever, but we've also had a pandemic and a definite increase in children with e.g. speech and language issues as a result. There's also a mental health crisis in both children and adults (which will affect children as well) and a huge increase in child poverty which will impact behaviour in school.

At the same time there has been a huge turnover in school staff. Teachers leaving and being replaced by a series of supply teachers. Lack of experienced staff. Kids form a relationship with a TA or pastoral leader only for them to leave. That also has an impact, particularly on kids who need stability and routine.

Solutions? Massive funding for SEN support, taking the responsibility away from councils so they can focus on potholes and bin collections. More special schools, properly staffed. More properly trained SEN staff in schools. Overhaul of the EHCP system. Fixing teacher workload so that schools can recruit and retain a stable workforce. Reducing the curriculum in primary and secondary and giving more time to creative and physical subjects. Stop forcing kids who can't reliably add up to sit GCSE Maths. Give everyone in schools a bit of room to breathe.

for a start.

Literally this. I don’t buy the ‘but they were always there’ arguement. think we need to look at technology and the impact of screens with young children, at diet and UPFs and at medicine and figure out what is contributing to all of this. Of course, autism etc exists but the explosion of it is really unfathomable

people Won’t want to admit it also but the increase in diagnosis and correlation with claiming of things such as DLA which can be a lot of money when combined with carers allowance, disabled payment on UC etc. benefits are now much better paying that most professional jobs when combined with all the ‘elements’ and of course you can’t blame people for doing what they think is right for their family
i feel sad so many children are getting written off and not supported.
every time I’m on a bus etc I look around and see parents ignoring their children just mindlessly scrolling their phones. TikTok blasting out over their child crying or wanting to chat. These children pick up on that and will think they need to exhibit extreme behaviour to get attention- it’s not rocket science.
It’s sad what we’ve done to our society. I wonder if it’s the same in other countries?

I think the main thing here is how remarkable (the large majority) of teachers really are. It’s so underpaid and undervalued and I take my hats off to you