To think disruptive behaviour in schools is out of hand?

[Absentosaur]

‘Children at state schools are almost three times more likely to have their lessons disrupted by poor behaviour than their privately educated peers, a widespread survey of parents has found.’

https://archive.md/HMGtJ accessible link to article .

18% 16-18yr olds go to private school, probably for this reason a lot of the time.

Do we expect the government to do something about it, particularly given they have closed the private school doors to many? What could they be doing to improve the worst state schools??

So what’s the solution? Bringing back asylums, euthanasia, send them up chimneys?

The LA is responsible for all children’s education as a matter of law. There are plenty of things that I would like to see cut back before we start eroding disabled children’s right to be educated. If people want calm and productive state education - and it’s entirely reasonable that they do - they also need to make provision for the children unsuited to mainstream elsewhere (which costs money). It’s not possible to have it both ways. 🤷‍♀️

Nail on the head. In no other setting would that kind of thing be remotely acceptable yet school kids, trying their best in comps, for some reason have to put up and shut up!

We could go back to having genuinely different types of schools - one type mainly for the more academic kids and another type for the mainly practical kids. It wouldn't solve all the problems, but the non academic kids wouldn't be quite so bored and disengaged if they were doing mostly practical/active things.

But there's a big difference between having a narrow set of choices in your curriculum (which a lot of Michaelaesque schools call 'knowledge rich' or some such) and having a genuine specialism (e.g. 'this is a school for kids who are really passionate about art'). What was absurd about the previous 'specialisms' was that the government asked schools to pick two 'specialisms', i.e. say which two random subjects they'd like a bit more money for.

And yes, Michaeala is a free school.

Some of it is a failure of communication - different abilities or different preferences/strengths?

and how many ordinary people have by this point saved for private treatment - quite a lot looking at the stats.

i agree, this Labour govt is not Blairite - there’s no listening to what works it very much is the old 70s debate.

Free schools don't have to follow the National Curriculum apart from providing core subjects (English, Maths, Science and some kind of religious education). I suppose Michaela's spread of subjects must be the absolute bare minimum to provide a 'broad and balanced education' which free schools are also meant to do. I personally don't think it sounds either broad or balanced!

Not new, decades ago I went to a 2000 pupil comprehensive 8 form entry mixed ability school.
It was truly awful yet it was commended in the press and visited from people overseas as demonstrating an innovative approach.
Bullying and bad behaviour was the norm , zero discipline . Constant disruption , so really hard to do any work.

And Children left still unable to read and write properly whilst a very few tried for university.
my DC went private.

I honestly believe that there are hundreds of thousands of pupils for whom education post 14+ is a waste of everyone's time and energy. And keeping them in school post 14+ just turns into a frustrating crowd control exercise for everyone involved.

The kids do not want to be there. They have reached their capacity for learning. They're bored and resentful and no one in their families or social circle place any value on school or education. You might as well try and teach a fish to ride a bicycle.

Well as an ex-grammar school girl, I agree entirely! I think AI will have a huge impact on professional/office roles, and those on a more practical path should be supported and encouraged from a young age.

I may have a skewed view as a SEN parent, but there would still be increasing numbers of children who would not thrive in either environment. There has been an explosion in ND diagnoses, the reasons for which are not entirely clear. A proportion of those ND children would still need a specialist setting with small classes and high staff numbers to access learning. My son is now 1:1 with a trusted staff member, but has been 2:1 in the recent past. It is these needs (and the associated costs), rather than practical vs. academic children, “feral” vs. well-behaved children, that seems to be causing much of the conflict in the state school learning environment.

As a parent, I always found it interesting at school events or open days to meet the parents of the kids I've heard about for months and their disruptive behaviour. So often it is like 'yep, that figures'. Some have good reasons, sure. But for many it seems like the behaviour is acceptable to them, so they have no motivation to correct it.

Also get fed up with school's approach is too often 'boys will be boys'....yeah, if you let them behave like that. I wish teachers came down harder on boys' behaviour as by secondary it does seem to go mad and in mixed schools girls have to put up with far too much shitty, noisy behaviour

I also think that the modern curriculum is too focused on academia, schools are driven by exam performance and government targets and children are forced into pigeon holes they neither fit in, nor want to fit into. People say "ND was never a thing back in the day" whilst querying the explosion of ND in modern day classrooms. Well, maybe the old curriculum offered children different routes into employment and didn't assume they all needed to be highly qualified academics. As a result, ND didn't appear to be so pronounced because children didn't have the same pressure to fit in and to achieve. Don't get me wrong, a lot was wrong with schooling in my parent's day - they wrote off clever working class pupils too easily at too young an age, and I don't agree with corporal punishment. But performance, exams, targets etc are just relentless these days - and it shows in both the mental health of teachers, and of pupils.

As humans, our skills and interests are so varied that it seems perverse to insist on pressurising children into heavily theoretical subjects when they may actually want to do and be good at skilled manual work. There's a lot of snobbery in education.

The idea with the zero tolerance school is that if kids know that there's detention for the wrong colour socks they won't be tempted to even try throwing a chair. Everything is so strictly regimented that the opportunity to misbehave doesn't arise.

Private schools don't HAVE to be super strict about that kind of stuff because the kids aren't going to push boundaries that far. You can give an inch and they won't take a mile- and they also know that if they do really push it, the school can get rid of them in an instant.

Badly behaved children at state school know that there's nothing that the school can really do. They can't make them attend and they can't permanently exclude them either without reams of paperwork and a very long-winded process.

Yes I totally agree. We need to stop pretending that all children are equally academic and invested in cerebral learning.

I was bookish and academic at school, DH even more so. We'd have both been so miserable and bored having to learn practical skills, trade skills etc. And obviously that works in reverse too. There's zero point dragging 'Tom' through algebra and French verbs when all he really wants to do is work with his hands.

@atamlin dd3 has adhd and is probably autistic as well and goes to a private school. She can be quite disruptive as she often goes off on a tangent or starts messing with the furniture. Obviously the classes are not as large as at a state school - she is now in year 13 and probably her biggest class is 10 - but she seems to be allowed small periods of disruption in exchange for longer periods of attention. She is very bright- all 9s at gcse. Ds is autistic and his private boys school were very good at giving him quiet time. He was the opposite of disruptive.

@Vinvertebrate

The LA is responsible for all children’s education as a matter of law. There are plenty of things that I would like to see cut back before we start eroding disabled children’s right to be educated. If people want calm and productive state education - and it’s entirely reasonable that they do - they also need to make provision for the children unsuited to mainstream elsewhere (which costs money).

Agree but I don’t think anyone is proposing removing their right to be educated. There are several parents on here of children with neurodiversities who are clearly begging for their children to be educated but outside of a mainstream setting.

Its time to face the fact that including these children in mainstream is damaging everyone in the ecosystem including the children it is most supposed to support along with most of the mainstream children. It is working for no one.

Obviously money is a huge factor and the funding isnt there in the state sector but there seems also to be a lack of political will to engage with the challenge. There must be alternative ways to fund this (philanthropy springs to mind) but this won’t get off the ground until we admit the degree to which the system is failing.

Get yourself on TikTok and see lots of parents criticising schools, teachers, school rules etc. No support for schools at all, only for their little darlings. It’s depressing. This is where the disruptive behaviour starts.

@CrispieCake dd3's private school states pupils should wear black socks - throughout her 6 years there she has consistently worn any colour but black. She has never had a detention or warning about them. She is not the best for making sure she has everything with her (adhd) but thankfully her school has never made an issue about it and just ask her to remember next time.

Its time we got back to good old fashioned parenting with children being taught that they have responsibilities as well as "rights". Time to talk about rights when children are old enough to get ajob and contribute to the community. All this so called gentle parenting has much to answer for. Kids need strict boundaries where they are taught to respect adults. Otherwise they will grow up into feral little shits. Todays schools are just holding pens for tomorrows hoodlums and gangsters.

Schools were always a one size fits all institution.. I remember when mine were going through the system, 45 years ago, I told the school head that they obviously thought teaching was a great job if it weren’t for the students. They wanted rows of little robots, all learning the same things at the same rate and no room for individuals

Also attendance is a relatively new focus in schools term. A lot of behavioral students as only as far back at 2010s would truant/bunk lessons as could walk off site. Teachers and students were relieve led at this and the student would just have a cig, chat etc or go to the shop - but not be in lesson disturbing learning. Now they are all forced into all lessons at all times disrupting the learning of others consistently - when until very recently many of the disruptive students wouldn’t be there. Safeguarding and attendance are huge now and you cannot just walk off site - everything is logged, chased and recorded. Ironically, I genuinely think everyone was happier and more learning took place when said kids were allowed to just sneak off for the subjects they didn’t like/want to do.

Think of how quick you could whizz through the content in lockdown, because there were no interruptions. It’s mad. Lessons have to be an hour long to cope with 15-20 mins of disruption.
Im not sure if this has gotten worse in recent years though, there were certain days I used to be deliberately rude/obnoxious at the start of the school day in yr 10/11 to get myself put in inclusion. A nice quiet room where I could work from a book and just get on with everything myself especially when I had coursework due.
Comprehensive schools do not work for anyone IMO, those that are academic don’t get the right environment to reach their full potential & those that aren’t are forced through GCSEs when clearly they aren’t going to succeed in that area. My town has 3 comps, I’ve no idea why 1 can’t be a grammar, 1 some kind of polytechnic/vocational type situation & another a comprehensive for those that do want that option. 1 size certainly does not fit all.

They are also skills that are in short supply (probably linked to the government stopping it in schools!)

It’s great that your child was included due to the inclusion policy. My child was excluded due to the inclusion policy. They couldn’t cope with the lack of adherence to basic behaviour law expectations, got too stressed by the constantly tense atmosphere and started self harming until we moved them. But hey it’s great that your one child got what you wanted, and lots of other children didn’t.

I don’t see it as a sin bin, I see it as an educational environment where therapists and teachers work together to get through their issues, while being educated on the side. What wrong with that? Better than these kids being in mainstream, traumatising other kids at the same time as ruining their educational chances.

@Thepeopleversuswork I agree with everything you say. I was responding to a PP who claimed that LA’s can’t afford SEN provision. There is no sensible alternative, morally or legally, if you want a decent mainstream learning environment. The current debacle - where we are told inclusion is great, but in reality, it’s just cheap and fails everyone - is used to justify mendacious delaying tactics in getting SEN children (including my DS) much-needed specialist support.