All these issues with schools!

[Capercaille]

I feel so sorry for schools and teachers these days. All I see on here is contant moaning and whining!

Has it always been like this?!

I doubt it. When I was at school, we had teachers teaching. Everything else was handled at home. Nowadays schools seem to combine childcare, hospital, police and social services. It's quite a lot of demand to place on schools and I am not sure how they can possibly cope with the expectations to fulfil all these roles.

I'm torn here. I had a conversation with a friend just this week about issues we're having. Trying to understand the causes and what's going on. I have ideas about this but may be wrong.

-People listen to children now so rotten teachers can't get away with as much abuse
-Schools seem to have significantly more demands with massive influx of SEN pupils and no resources or understanding how best to deal with their needs
-It feels like expulsion isn't an option like years before - because there are no facilities left for kids with extra issues or SEN kids

• Social media hell infiltrates classrooms and behaviour and probably now takes up time to deal with
• Bullying carried over onto SMedia

Are there just more useless parents expecting school to do more? I'm not sure.

Having my own SEN child. My feeling is alot of issues are here. No resources and teachers with no understanding or support ( and sometimes no care) dealing with situations they just can't.

My bestie is a teacher and has said it has gotten significantly worse recently especially since covid. She said both childrens and parents behaviour has deteriorated and verbal and physical abuse isn’t uncommon.

She says parents often back their child no matter what (even if there is cctv evidence for example) and come into the school all guns blazing while fing and blinding because they don’t think their darling child has done anything wrong. You often see posts on here about parents who feel their kid is “special” and the rules shouldn’t apply to them or don’t feel they should follow them because they don’t agree with them.

I seriously worry about what will happen to these children when they grow up and realise the world doesn’t revolve around them or struggle with real anxiety issues for example because they have no resilience and aren’t used to being told no or failure. If something goes wrong the parent swoops in and contacts the school instead of trying to support their child to work it out for themselves and develop coping strategies.

Be cause of this “entitlement” and reduction for some kids in social skills (potentially due to covid) children act out, behave badly and make it very hard to teach.

I know a head of school who spends most of his time dealing with the police, social services, mental health and parents. And by parents I mean fing and blinding, physical assault, threats to ofsted, threats to police and aggressive behaviour - this in a nice town and area.

I can only imagine what it would be like to get 30 emails from parents every day because of this and have to deal with these issues. Not to mention the increase in mental health issues and the lack of support for kids.

Overall I see a lack of taking a step back and considering impact on others and the teacher/school.

But hey that’s just how I feel…

Do you have children at school?

Helicopter parenting. Half the time it's the parents who have the issues, not the kids, but they make out it's the kids being upset.

No, but that's irrelevant.

I've been a nanny for 26 years for school aged kids. I've been very involved with schools.

Plus, this question is insulting.

It also has nothing to do with the question the OP asked.

25% of children at my child’s school have SEN.

I think this is incredibly accurate. In some ways it's a good thing. In many ways it's a negative.

Fir example, in my day we had to sort things out ourselves. There are positives to that. But people also came out of this significantly impacted by abuse from teachers and /or pupils that a more involved parent should have helped with.

SEN kids are having a nightmare in school. But I think their teachers are too. I try not blame the schools or the teachers in it. The system is rotten. The Government/s are responsible for this.

If this is true then we need more resources to deal with this.

Those resources obviously have to come from somewhere so it might mean reducing resources in other areas.

I'm not sure how you deal with this fairly as clearly different children's needs will conflict, but we need a system that can deal with the demographic going to school. It sounds like there is not enough provision for SEN.

Heads have had their responsibility taken from them.

When I started teaching if a child threatened a teacher or assaulted a teacher it was instant suspension then, usually, expulsion.

Poor behaviour led to exclusion, forcing parents to take some responsibility for their feral kids.

Plenty of schools for children with special needs where they could be met by low staff ratios and plenty of support.

This is in my view a huge part of the problem. My child is ND. He can see it in others. When he tells me about kids throwing tables etc it's apparent it's those needing support most the time.

I feel for these kids immensely. I feel for the teachers dumped with kids they are not adequately equipped or supported to teach. This problem is immense and people don't realise how awful it is out there. SEN parents are on their knees.

The kids that throw tables etc are not necessarily bad from bad homes. They often can't cope with what mainstream expects. There is no support there. These kids are often forced to confirm in ways that are incredibly difficult. Parent's are fobbed off then they get angry with the teachers who are themselves overwhelmed.

Significant SEN support/resources would in my view make quite a difference.
Actually banning phones. They lock them away but in my son's school they over ride the locks. Pointless. But you'll get a detention for socks of the wrong colour.

I think that the problem is that parents are too involved in their children's lives. How often do we see threads here about children's friendships or adult children and their lives. Kids are not allowed to be independent or grow resilience so are unable to deal with anything negative in their lives.

For example, there is a thread now about a child's locker being changed. I wouldn't have even told my parents about something like that, even if it did annoy me. The child in question "doesn't cope with change" well good luck in the modern workplace then.

SEN is also an issue, why are so many kids classed as being in need of help. I went to pretty poor performing primary and secondary schools, but there were only 3 kids in my class of 32 in primary who would fall into that category. In secondary there was only one out of 30

Completely accurate. My friend is a TA from a school in the next town and tells me her school has a much higher ratio.

I wouldn’t say there s no support. There is support but much of the need is complex.

People don't start threads saying:

I'm happy with my child's school, their teacher is nice/competent, they have good friends in the class, are learning lots of new things. Nothing to report.

Do they?

It's pretty much always been like this on Mumsnet, but I think the moaning and complaining has got worse of late.

And that's from both parents and teachers posting on here.

I’ve had to this week de register my dd as the school would not authorise absences for illness unless we took her there for them to assess. This was despite dd consultant writing to them . The thought they were better placed to assess her health . They threatened fines so we had no choice

When I was a child we had several sen schools if you had "behaviour issues" you were sent there sometimes just for support one child went there because his parents were getting a divorce and he was coping poorly so he spent about 18 months in a supportive environment then was put back in mainstream speech and language? Put there and then back in mainstream if you needed to be kept there you were but some just went for the extra help they closed the school with no further provision in the area and suddenly parents are complaining about the "increase" in sen students the lack of school support the "over diagnosis" of children there arnt suddenly more sen kids you CLOSED THEIR FUCKING SCHOOLS

The recruitment figures speak for themselves. I’ve definitely witnessed a decrease in resilience amongst students due to this attitude of ‘my mum says I don’t have to do the detention’ etc. For some, it’s a case of if they perform well, it’s in spite of you and if they do badly, it’s because of you. There are lots of lovely students but unfortunately the noisy minority and their parents get all the attention. I seriously think a decline in literacy standards is to blame for lots of behaviour issues too and the fact that teens aren’t reading as much plus social media means they struggle to concentrate and play up.

@Absolutefrustration I would have seen them in court for the non-payment of those fines - if indeed they were ever brave enough to bill them! If you'd got medical evidence then surely they'd have been laughed out of court.

@Theunamedcat spot on.

And to add to this, the focus is now heavily upon attendance ( smoke and mirrors in other words). We will now punish you for your child being unable to cope and not come into school that they can't cope with.

Of course parents will be up in arms. But I understand the teachers themselves are in a very difficult position with all this.

I think its because parents are less inclined to tolerate bs from schools than they were in my time. We had some absolutely awful teachers but most parents didn't want to create a fuss so said nothing. Thankfully I believe that day is gone and parents will speak up for their children

I don't think it's reasonable to expect parents never to complain about anything as long as it's done in a respectful way.

I think I had undiagnosed sen in primary school and was treated terribly by my teachers in the 90's. My child is very much like me and on a pathway to diagnosis, and I've had to raise one or two things with school over the years to advocate for him. Usually these things happen within the first half term of a new school year, which shows that the teacher just needs time to understand him in my opinion.

Children had sen years ago, they were just screamed at for not paying attention (me) and things have definitely progressed for the better.