Do all primary schools have behaviour issues?

[Wildflowers99]

Looking for a new primary for (well behaved, fairly academic) DD and without exception every OFSTED mentions things like ‘a significant number of children who struggle with appropriate behaviour’, or similar phrases to this.

It’s really disheartening. DD’s current school has a lot of children who are behind or struggle with behaviour and I was hoping to move her to a classroom environment better suited to her. We live in a very average area, some more deprived areas, some very middle class, but this seems to be an issue wherever I look.

Do I just give up and accept basically all primaries are like this?

Kids today are a different entity to those from say 20 or 30 years ago. Various parenting philosophies, chaotic home lives, lack of boundaries, screen addiction, UPFs and poor food choices plus an archaic education system not adequately equipped to deal with this societal shift means behaviour is impossible to manage in many classrooms.

What is alarming is how poorly educated those capable well behaved students will be due to this decay in classroom standards. Education needs a radical overhaul but with funding only ever being cut and not increased that’s not happening any time soon.

No, what is appalling is that my lovely and well behaved DD has had a chair thrown at her.

We wouldn't accept this level of violence in the work place, so why is it allowed in schools.

My dc over the years have been in two primaries (we moved house to a new county, hence reason for the change) and it certainly hasn’t been my experience in either. I have no idea what the Ofsted reports say. Previous school was requiring improvement and the current one is rated good.

The one thing I would say is that both are small village schools (less than 100 students) with strong communities. The larger Ofsted outstanding school near our old village apparently had all sorts of behaviour issues. So I think size does matter as well as the sort of community (I don’t mean deprived or not, I mean cohesive vs fractured). Leadership is also important. Both of ours have had really lovely headteachers who cared a lot about the school.

My school got an ‘outstanding’ recent Ofsted report.

Behaviour is a HUGE issue but we have very experienced staff, so although it was acknowledged in the report that we had a lot of challenging behaviour issues, they also praised how well our management of it was.

All that this means is that yes, behaviour is a MASSIVE concern, but how it is dealt with either makes or breaks a school. Choose wisely!

As an aside…and on a personal level…it’s absolutely exhausting dealing with it daily. I’ve taught for 32 years and I’m broken.

Ive been teaching for 23 years. Behaviour issues didn't used to be a problem. There was always 1 or 2 but nothing huge and always easily squashed. Rarely was the issue constant. There were also a good number of classroom assistants and we were able support those struggling.
Year on year the levels of discipline has slipped. More and more pupils becoming increasingly disrespectful, entitled and violent. Towards other pupils and towards adults.
Well behaved kids eager to learn are becoming less and less. The majority are not badly behaved all the time but they see kids being violent and using terrible, abusive language. This stops being shocking and becomes normalised.
The kids who are well behaved often have to be left to just get on with things whilst I'm trying to stop kids physically fighting or being dangerous with equipment.
I worry what the long term effects on society will be with our children seeing so much violence and hearing so much disrespectful language from a young age.
I have 3 with ADHD (with medication) 6 others neurodivergent, 3 others traumatic backgrounds that spill into the classroom, 1 with a serious health condition that I need to keep her phone on me to listen for an alarm and 4 very entitled, disrespectful and
cheeky kids and 12 others mainly trying to do their best. I have no support except 3 20 minute slots a week. Huge variety in ability and some using tech to access the curriculum.
it is virtually impossible to juggle all those balls and keep them all in the air all the time. I try my best but it is hard. I've basically worked myself into the ground but at least I don't work one day a week and can catch up on my day off.

I moved my son schools 2 years ago and he now attends a small village school, best thing we did. He says some of the kids are naughty but in the sense of chatting when told not to rather than swearing, fighting etc. Like at his last school.

Schools with ‘well-behaved’ pupils do exist but sadly they’re mainly in the private sector where children with SEN are often weeded out. There may be some state schools that have a grip on discipline but chances are they’re in highly militarised style academies that may not suit your DC who just want want what we took for granted in our childhood: normal, decent state schools with some cheeky kids, one or two very high needs DC but a broad mix of abilities that could somehow be catered for.

If you can’t afford a selective private school, all you can try to engineer is to move to a school where they’re happy day to day and top up any missed learning (as teachers are too stretched to cater for the quiet ones) through tutoring or enrichment activities and quality time doing free and cheap things.

Special schools for children with severe behaviour disorder were closed. Now teachers have the unenviable task of trying to help these children in mainstream on very limited budgets. Help for these children is assessed and then not fully funded.

From talking to friends and relatives, it seems mostly, yes.

DC are in a traditional, strict, catholic independent school, lack of disruption and small, calm, quiet classes are the main reason for this. We are lucky to be able to afford for this to be an option.

That’s because it doesn’t in mainstream schooling. You might find private school better fits her needs. Less SEN. Less disruptive children.

The lack of SEN places pushes them in to mainstream schools who then don’t have the provisions to support. Which leads to their behaviour escalating. It’s not just SEN children. Some are just from neglectful parents. But certainly the lack of provision contributes

I think it can be luck of the draw for different year groups even within the same school. I’ve got two children in the same single form school. One child’s class is brilliant- some challenges but it’s managed well, kids keen to learn and the kids are well behaved and happy. Other child’s class is car crash. Behaviour is poor, kids are behind where they should be and the girls seem to all be suffering from a degree of anxiety due to aggressive behaviour of boys from some of the boys.

Schools are for all children, and it’s down to the school to manage needs / behaviour. Every child has a right to access education.

If parents can’t manage behaviour I don’t know how they expect the school to. Yes every child has the right to an education, but that doesn’t mean the right to disrupt the education of others in doing so.

Hang on....not all children who struggle with behaviour in school struggle at home or have issues at home!! That is highly unreasonable to suggest it is the parents fault.
You cant expect a parent to manage behaviour that they never see and in some cases the school never tell them about.

You also have absolutely no context of what the Ofsted reports mean by appropriate behaviour. Every single issue is logged at school in my experience .....my DS school put 5 kids in a consequence yesterday because they were 'play fighting' - they were basically bumping into each other and pretending to fall down (confirmed by at least 3 of those involved). Each got a mark for inappropriate behaviour on the report system. No child was hurt, no child made a complaint and of the 3 spoke to they didn't really understand why they had a consequence but understood not to do it again.

This sounds sensible on the surface, but how is knowing the behaviour policy helpful to a parent of a child presumably without behavioural issues?

What she wants to know is how successful the policy is at preventing children's difficult behaviour disrupting the learning of other children. Knowing what the policy is on its own won't tell you anything about how many children there might be or how they might respond or how much time the teacher is spending on dealing with those kids or what the teacher/SLT would do if the behaviour policy isn't working.

(I'm the mum of the kid with behavioural issues, to be upfront about any bias).

I don't think a child leaving followed by a 1:1 is a behaviour issue, and nor is just having SEN. I do think that what you've laid out here isn't really likely for you to find, no - in any classroom your daughter will be one of 30ish other children so expecting no one else to ever do anything she might find distracting isn't reasonable. Whether work is differentiated for students of different ability is a teaching issue.

All children should have access to suitable education; that doesn't mean that any children is going to get an environment that's their own personal ideal. That isn't achievable in a group setting.

I think you need to also educate yourself on what behaviour is in young children especially, it’s almost always their way of trying to communicate something they are finding difficult. You can hardly blame a child for behavioural issues in school when it’s about unmet needs at the end of the day. You can hardly blame a child who is coming from a chaotic or abusive home life and unloading that when in school, and by excluding them from education you are almost always doing more damage than good. That’s a child lost and education is there to be a safe space where they be able to be themselves and gain some support system. You just are just lucky really that you have a compliant child, yes some of that is down to parenting, but a lot of it will just be temperament. You just have seen a chance to moan because you’re not experiencing challenges with your child.

It’s many years since I started teaching, but there were always one or two, in every class, that had behaviour that was challenging. Some of them had some form of SEND and some didn’t.

Over time, the difference is that more conditions are widely recognised, more children are ND to a greater or lesser degree and changes in parenting style have been beneficial for some children, but certainly not for others. It applies to primary and secondary schools too.

The key point is how behaviour is managed in the school and how effective support is, both academic and pastoral.

@DeepOchreBear All this can be true, and also that the resulting disruptive environment negatively affects the learning of some other children, can also be true.

Everyone in the same environment doesn’t work, IMO. It ends up with no-ones needs being met.

I’ve been teaching for 23 years. Behaviour has taken a nose dive. It’s society and a broken system. Unfortunately, whether SEND is involved or not, other children do suffer due to the poor behaviour of others. It isn’t fair on anyone, not least the children with unmet needs who aren’t behaving in a way that allows others to learn.

I think culturally poor behaviour is far more accepted than it used to be. When I’m around other people’s children I’m always surpised that there’ll be a few parents who turn a blind eye to the sort of thing I would pick my kids up on. I think it’s very unfair to blame it all on SEN too. I have a SEN child who has never had any behavioural issues but have witnessed plenty of dreadful behaviour from their neurotypical classmates. More relevant is how the parents and school deal with it.

I think you're going to struggle, primaries seem to have got quite a bit worse in the last few years. I have 5 kids ranging from 18 to 4, my eldest three had a great experience and behaviour was a small issue but seemed to be managed well, my 9yo has had an awful time. In her class of 23 kids 4 have been permanently excluded since the start of this academic year so you can probably imagine how bad things have been for that class.

It does seem to be the norm now to have 3 or 4 very violent and disruptive kids in each class rather than maybe 3 or 4 in the whole school a few years ago.

Wanting the best for your own child and not putting other people’s children first isn’t selfish. You’re clearly putting your child first by expecting his/her classmates to tolerate their behaviour, so why can’t I do the same in wanting the best classroom environment for my DD? Other children aren’t my concern, my own child is.

I mean of course @Wildflowers99 in that ideal world we don’t live in children and parents would have more choice for what’s right for them but v few kids are getting a classroom environment that’s right for them.

My elder dd was like this and we could not find a suitable state environment. Good luck, nothing in labour’s education policy is improving school diversity.

You’ve hit the nail on the head. This isn’t about piling on SEN children, it’s about finding the right(ish) school for my child. The right thing for her is a school with a low SEN intake as she doesn’t have SEN and is quite academic and I don’t want her to be top of her class (I think a bit of competition and equally able classmates is healthier). The behaviour policy alone doesn’t tell you what the behaviour is like, it just tells you how it’s handled.