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??

From a teaching perspective, my experience is of a lot of kids who are disruptive having parents who give zero fucks about education.

Calling home is pointless because they just shrug it off. There is no support in the slightest.

In my experience it is rarely kids with additional needs who play up, with the odd exception of dyslexic kids sometimes acting out to cover the embarrassment of not being able to read well.

Parents of kids in private give a shit because they're paying for it. They hate the thought of the money being wasted an d have high expectations of both the school and kids.

Nothing wrong at all - indeed it is to be expected and I did it with my own children when they were little. On the post I was referring to, a vociferous minority of posters were saying that they could not see why a small child should sit on their laps on public transport when it was crowded so that an adult could have the seat. I am singing from the same hymn sheet as you - such behaviour is entitled and extremely selfish.

I think the key would be to not treat leaving at that age as the end.

It would be where many students went on to learn in a more vocational setting. Which might well mean learning more maths or other things, but the context and approach would be very differernt. They would come out with a real trade, be it welding or bookkeeping or hairdressing or something else.

The student wouldn't be missing anything any more than a student going on to more academic work would be missing other kinds of training.

No doubt some kids would retrain later, as adults, and that should be supported, but a lot wouldn't. In fact, right now I know plenty of university grads who retrained in trades or other occupations, so it's not like that doesn't happen already in both directions.

Some kids might go right into work, but that might allow them to gain some maturity if they wanted more education later. For some that makes all the differernce.

It seems to me there needs to be some thinking about what a right to education means and entails.

I don't think it should be one size fits all. And its not the same as child care. Some kids may have reached their academic potential before others. And not all learning needs to be school based either. it's important, I think, to consider what the goal is for the student.

But as far as disruptive kids go - yes, they have a right to access education, but like other kids also have a right to education.

Somehow the kids who aren't disruptive are treated as if they have don't have a right to education and they are the ones blocking the disruptive ones.

I think this thread is a nature v nurture debate.

Nature = the child is disruptive by nature and it’s their/the parents fault and they should be excluded for the sake of others

Nurture = with the right support, the child may be disruptive but we - as adults - can help them become less disruptive and access an education.

On Thurs I was in a very disruptive situation and me/staff agreed it was the worst we’d experienced.

On Fri, we met as a team and with excellent support from SLT we agreed strategies/rules (including a calming time area). Fri had the potential to be disruptive again and we were a member of staff down. We were all super alert and nipped any behaviour in the bud. It worked like a dream.

I’m fortunate enough to work in a school where they believe in valuing each child and that good behaviour is the responsibility of the school. It is private, and it is a school that wholeheartedly agrees with inclusion. They are also desperate to ‘keep’ their students due to the VAT hike.

I’m not experiencing the same in state. I think state schools used to be more nurturing. In my area, places are oversubscribed and a child with an EHCP - or deemed to be needing an EHCP -seems to be immediately stigmatised or rejected. Once a child is on a path where adults label a child as disruptive, unteachable - isn’t that just going to lead further drain on resources : crime, unable to get a job or contribute to the economy?
The ease with which my child was almost rejected (plus two other exclusions in my DC’s class before the age of 5) is shocking. The school has also stated that I should be grateful that they agreed to educate my child.

And I’m not sure finances are a huge problem as the LA gives the school £10000 pounds for my child (which isn’t spent on him) and have just upgraded a garage to rent out for Pilates etc costing £27000.

The drive to inclusion at all costs was started by David Blunkett who didn’t like the fact that being blind as a child meant he was separated off from all of the other local children to go to a blind school when he’d rather have remained with his friends. I agree that children with physical disabilities ought to be able to go to their local school if that school can provide them with a good education. But mainstream schools have a teacher and a class of say 30 kids. This works fine if all children can sit quietly and be quiet. It’s utterly useless if some children want to take up all of that teachers thinly-spread attention. The disruptors need to be educated elsewhere.

But where? Councils don’t have enough places and unwilling to build assets as they have no money. They can’t afford to provide the legally required services they’re required to and so are selling any buildings they can to get their hands on quick cash. The council could build and specialist schools, get disruptive children out of mainstream, allow other children to learn but there’s no incentive for them to do so when the policy of ‘inclusion’ is seen as a good thing.

We’re left in the situation where the council haemorrhages money on paying private equity run specialist schools £100k to educate each child, and taxi firms £000’s to drive that child miles to the nearest (miles away) school, and EHCP appeal costs, and the cost of training teachers that don’t stay, and the cost of treating children traumatised by being educated in a climate of fear and frustration, and ruining the education of our future workforce. What on earth do we think we’re doing?

I live in Scotland. The Scottish educational attainment is dropping off a cliff. The SNP government is wedded to inclusion as it sees it as ‘progressive’. They have banned permanent exclusion. It’s what they do. SNP ministers are simply too stupid to know how to run a country and it will be a cold day in hell before they’d admit they are doing anything wrong. Things aren’t going to change here. But I have hope for England. Hope. Just not with Bridget Phillipson in charge.

“It also highlighted the sheer number of teenagers who are allowed to drop out of school, and how they can often fall through the net of academies, social services, alternative learning provisions and youth services. The report looking into the three murders and another serious stabbing in the city centre that happened back in January and February 2024, and found that all ten of the children involved - both perpetrators and victims - had histories that involved not attending school.”

“I personally believe that school exclusion should be completely illegal, if possible,” she said. “I believe it's causing a lot of kids to be vulnerable because they're not going to schools. They've been excluded, they're going to alternative education schools.
"Some kids are getting moved out of areas that they're not familiar with, and then being located in schools with other children and being exposed to certain things that they may have not been exposed to prior", she added.”

“Everything is about relationship building and it's based on interaction of human beings. I do think that there's an element of the academisation and the education system that certainly in the last ten years sees education as a commodity as opposed to a human interactive service.
"We need to get back to that and recognise that children have emotions, they're just younger than you and they will respond in the way that human beings respond. Therefore how you interact with the children will set the tone for how and what comes back to yourself as the adult,” she added.

I don't think employers will be queuing up to employ fourteen-year-olds, even on a reduced national minimum wage.

I think a local schooling with vocational ethos, physical space and movement, an emphasis on not sitting at a desk, basic maths/english, life skills should be more of an unstigmatised option - as it is in Europe.

In rural areas this idea wouldn't work but actually you dont need to build new buildings. Its the same amount of children overall, they just need distributing differently.

In my particular area, which is a mix of urban and rural. 2 schools have closed down and the buildings are sat empty, yet there are children with no suitable education sat at home.

I think its the running costs of staffing these provisions will proper staff thats the issue.

If the 14 year is enthusiastic, wants to be there and gets on with the job then why shouldn't they be employed?

I think the law would need to change before 14 year olds could work.

There would be issues with dbs checks, safeguarding and insurance.

At the moment many companies will not employ anyone under 18.

The problem is what are they going to do at 14 with nothing to do everyday, 17 / 18 year olds are struggling to find work opportunities, society doesn't need streets full of 14 year olds getting up to no good.

There's a kid living behind me who sounds about 11 or 12 and when the family arguments spill i to the garden he screams and growls at his parents, he tells them he hates them, threatens to kill them, threatens to kill himself. They sit and mild mannerly try to reason with him but he doesn't care! What ever they tell him he can't do, he just tells them that he will be doing it, he has absolutely no fear of repercussions and I always think how the hell does his school cope with such extreme rages and refusal to conform!
And it does annoy me when I'm trying to enjoy the sun in my garden and they let him rage in the garden for extended periods!

The root cause of behaviour problems in schools is size.

No school should have more than 500 pupils.

No class should have more than 15 pupils.

More schools, with smaller cohorts and classes, and a considerably reduced ratio of children to the number of teachers, would result in an environment where each child was truly known and their individual needs could be provided for.

Most schools are so large that children become anonymous cogs in a huge machine where no teacher or leadership team member can have a hope in hell of knowing all the kids in their care and the children therefore have no sense of truly being cared for.

When you feel that no one cares, you don’t care, and you don’t want to be there.

In smaller schools with smaller class sizes you can do more hands on, interactive, project based learning, because you don’t have as many bodies in a room and you as the teacher can spend meaningful time with each child and group to support and guide them as they work more independently. You can easily take a whole year group out on trips when there’s only 50 kids in a year as opposed to 200, which means you get to take kids out more and engage them beyond the classroom. Smaller classes build stronger bonds and they feel more like a community. In that environment, bullying and disruptive behaviour is more rare, as the children respect and care for each other more than when half the people in their class are practically strangers to them.

Rather than throwing money at behaviour tsars and academy chains and online curriculums, the government needs to invest money in reducing school and class sizes. It will take time, but if that became the norm, teacher recruitment and retention would also improve, and we’d be in a much better position to educate all children in an environment that was nurturing and inspiring, and not some kind of quasi prison designed to control and subdue.

We also need to stop expecting all children to pass an arbitrary collection of exams at 16 and provide genuine alternatives for those who aren’t academic - scrapping GCSEs is long overdue and a wholesale rethink of how we assess students needs to happen urgently. Too many children have mental health issues related to high stakes exams and we need to move towards a better model involving continuous assessment and teacher evaluation. It’s 2025 and we’re still stuck in the factory style approach to education created in the nineteenth century. It’s so depressing.

And yet. Inclusion. He’ll go to school each morning (his parent’s breathe a sigh of relief), the poor teachers can’t do their job (as well as being treated aggressively without any repercussions), and the other children in his class can’t be taught anything because of that child (and others like him).

We need more special schools and staff prepared to work in them.

As adolescence highlighted, many schools are more like ‘holding pens’ now.

I think you are a good example of a struggling, but clearly very engaged parent who is doing everything possible to ensure your child is supported well enough not to disrupt others. I am sympathetic and also believe that many on this thread are blind to the issues good parents of SEN children have. They are also generalising and dumping all ND children in together, when in fact there are multiple 'versions' of both ND experiences and ND parents, just as there are NT.

First, there's children who are clearly ND. But their parents, for whatever reason (lack of knowledge, lack of time, lack of resources, lack of interest, or simply that they're so worn down by the behaviour that they've given up,.or whatever) just don't seek support or employ the recommended management strategies. Their children may or may not have been able to thrive in ms but we'll never know, because they're the 'naughty' kids. And because the parents either can't or won't engage, this becomes a huge problem for the teachers and for other children.

Then there's the children whose parents know full well they're ND. They've done all the research, they might still be waiting for diagnoses (or even already have it) and they're fighting for every bit of support possible, both at home and at school. They're experts in ND, perhaps more so than many professionals. They will know whether their child could thrive in ms with the right support, or needs a specialist setting. The LA doesn't listen to parents, though. For these kids, successful inclusion in ms might be the right thing, or it might not. But while the LA is dragging its heels, delaying issuing EHCPs and generally not dealing with the situation, the situation gets worse and worse - for the child, their parents, the teachers, other children.

Then there's the different types of ND. My 8yo dd is on the autism diagnosis pathway and currently thriving in an extremely supportive (not private) mainstream school. We fought for her EHCP because her difficulties were very hidden at school and resulted in EBSA. She's well behaved at school, wants to do well. She's bright, socially motivated. And this week she's been home in tears twice because she's sitting next to a ND boy who sings and hums (noise triggers for her), and repeatedly knocks her glue stick down on purpose (a personal space and control trigger for her). She knows enough about herself now to use her personal resources put in place for her. So she used her movement break card so that she could retreat to the book corner for the remainder of the lesson.

My point being that some SEN children - who may fall into one of the above categories - become disruptive to all children, including other ND children. But I'm not going to sit here and blame his parents, because I have an understanding that it's not his fault, nor necessarily his parents' fault. They're likely victims of the convoluted and opaque 'system' that currently exists.

I'm very much in favour of inclusion in ms schools for well supported ND children who are, or are capable of, thriving - both the currently 'disruptive' and undisruptive ones. But 'inclusion' at the moment isn't working for anyone.

A lot of companies won't even take on under 18s due to insurance. My 17 year old would have loved to work at my workplace during the summer, and could easily do the work, but they won't take on under 18s.

@Fearfulsaints we have a closed down school near us - it used to educate about 800 children. It is set in beautiful grounds. The secondary school near us is now building an extension for SEN children whilst the closed school, in the town centre, near the train station is going to be pulled down to build houses on the site!

I agree!

Most of the SEN kids could be helped with TAs in a lot of cases, the real issue is the badly behaved (non SEN kids), and they should be expelled / PRUs.

I remember having them in my class in the 90s, the boy who would try to undo the girls bra straps in class, the girl throwing balls of papers at the teacher when he was writing on the board, the ones smoking in the toilet or putting wet loo roll everywhere, etc etc These are the ones who should not be allowed to disrupt the education of others!

One of my GC has an autistic child and one with SEN in his class at state primary. The class normally has a teacher and a TA, and often an extra specialised TA too, which means that there is little disruption. The DM of the autistic child is not willing to leave mainstream school, though she has been offered a place and the parents of the other child cannot find a place as there is a shortage locally. Their funding pays for the extra staff.

Our school has a high proportion of children for whom English is a second language but again they get extra help and the parents of most of these children are very supportive of the school if behavioural problems arise. They understand how important education is, though some of the local English parents do not and would always support their children if they are being badly behaved.

Most problems in our school are due to NT children who are badly behaved, but the school deals with it well. Problems in secondary school are far more difficult to deal with IMO.

Yes I mentioned that upthread.
Even for Saturday/Weekend jobs it's currently ridiculously hard for under 18s to get jobs.

Same, and much worse. Some of us were helped when we were setted (not sure that’s the right word). If not for that I don’t know how it would’ve gone. But then that leaves well behaved kids but in lower sets left with the disruption.

I know.
It's ridiculous.
A while ago I went into a branch of Poundland on a Saturday. The average age of the staff looked to be 60 (and they looked tired and fed up).
I used to work retail and weekend staff was almost all 16-18 year olds (except supervisors/management).
Weekends and school holidays the staff was all enthusiastic 6th Form/College kids who wanted to be there and worked hard.

@Absentosaur

Bloody hell! So let’s cart an 11year old child off to some kind of educational borstal
and lump them with other children we’d rather reject from society so they can fester together - and then what? Let them out to commit crime? Or remove them from society completely - a jail? A camp? Cart them off to an island?
The problem is we are developing into a society that is so focussed on our own individualism and chance to prosper - that we are more than happy to dehumanise others, even children. Even 5 year olds.