to be shocked about the amount of suppo rt a teacher gets when they nearly kill a pupil

[2shoes]

now I know it sounds like the boy was not a good kid, but he was 14, the teacher nearly killed him, yet on here and in the media the teacher has been getting so much support.
yet a boy was nearly killed...........
(prepares to be flamed)

mint that's very powerful and bloody terrifying

Minthumbug, so depressing.

So what MH is saying is news to you? Unfortunately it's true and widespread.

I've read up on this and slept on it and now I'm truly horrified by the ruling.

There is a moral line which was crossed by attacking the child that cannot be excused by bullying, lack of support, or depression. If the teacher couldn't take it, he could have walked out. But instead he chose to beat the child to near death.

The message? It's okay to kill a child if you are provoked. That's like saying we should absolve the murderer of a baby boy because, poor man, he had a headache and the boy was crying. Does anyone want to argue that the baby boy innocent and the student not?

It's NEVER okay to hit a child. It's NEVER okay to try to murder someone. We are not animals, and the above posts of the little shit will have learned his lesson variety hearken back to a barbaric past, and I'm amazed enough of our young survive to adulthood to continue the race.

I am in despair over the future of our society.

Well done to the teaching unions who backed him.....Thank god we still have a few strong unions left in this country.

I have sympathy for the teacher but don't feel it's unreasonable to suggest that a 14 year old boy should not receive head injuries from an adult charged with his care.

Teachers have been goaded for a long time. There was certainly a lot of it in my school. The filming is new, yes, but weak and/or ineffective teachers were relentlessly mocked in the 80's and 90's too. I recall working as a substitute teacher in a primary school in 2000 and listening to 9 year olds making very disturbing sexual comments about me and also having to pull them off one another as they, quite literally, wanted to murder eachother. When I got to know them and they warmed to me, they would tell me stories of their home life in circle time that would chill the majority: finding their mums passed out from drugs/alcohol etc. I had to report at social services case conferences for 8 out of 12 kids (it was a special unit, like a PRU) in a one month period.

I still work with teens and 14 year olds are kids, definitely. They're just kids who are testing boundaries and if they've learned no boundaries at home and/or have only seen how to test boundaries using violence, aggression and degradation, they will repeat this at school. Doesn't mean that they deserve to be brain-injured when the person dealing with them can't cope with that level of challenge (extreme as it is). This is 'broken Britain', all right and if you work with that demographic, you need to be up to the job or walk away from it.

The real villains of this piece are those who knew how weak and vulnerable this teacher was and yet sent him back to the same working conditions. It's a sorry tale for all involved.

I think this poor man needs all the support he can get.

But zazizoma, it shouldn't be OK to hound a man til he breaks, should it?
I don't think anyone has said that he did the right thing, but surely this should act as a wake up call that things need to change?

"bad eggs?"

Minthumbug, do you really think this about some of the children you teach? (I am assuming you're a teacher?)

This kind of behaviour is not a recent phenomenon. What is a relatively recent development is inclusion.

Children have displayed this kind of behaviour for years- before inclusion, they were all shipped off to special schools, approved schools or other 'establishments'.

I don't see why this has to be an either or situation- you can feel for the teachers and feel for the boy. This teacher categorically should not have been back at work.

"It's NEVER okay to hit a child. It's NEVER okay to try to murder someone."

Could not have put it better myself.

Great post, mrsbean

"This kind of behaviour is not a recent phenomenon. What is a relatively recent development is inclusion."

So how long have four year olds been telling teachers to fuck off?

Is this like the old lie statement "there's isn't more autism, just more diagnosis"?

The bus driver this morning was talking on his phone about this whilst waiting to pull away from the station -

"Is it any different to a ruddy chimpanzee beating the shit out of another one for no reason..."

Mind you in the next sentence he said -

"Cor I was havin' a shit this morning and Christ I thought it was comin? out sideways, sweet corn an' all."

agreew with pov tethersend , mrs bean and mint humbug.

" bad eggs" perhaps not very pc and not suggesting that child was one but some people/ some posters seem to give the impression earlierin the thread that they absolutely refute that a very very very small minority of students are mad bad and dangerous to know because they are children. The student in this case wasn't necessarily one of these. Straw - camels back etc

But it is true because of inclusion badly behaved students drag a lot of kids and schools down with them.

mmrsceptic, four year olds have been telling teachers to fuck off for generations.

They just didn't remain in mainstream education- quite often, they were not there in the first place.

Has nothing to do with autism. Bad analogy.

It has nothng to do with SEN.

But yes I am surprised about the fuck off in reception.

Nobody would argue that many 4 yr olds tell or have told teachers to fuck off- but a few do, and a few have done for many years.

I went to a rough as arseholes school, and it was weird in the fact that the class could 'sense' a weak teacher, and it was almost an unsaid plan to try and crack the teacher up. There would be a couple of kids who would kick off, and the rest would go along with them in almost passive agreement to try and wind up the teacher.

The same kids in the same class would behave themselves well in a different class, as we could sense the teachers with 'authority', for want of a better word.

Have seen several teachers either walk out of the classroom at the end of their tether, and on one occasion a teacher burst into tears and ran off.

It was a kind of Lord of the Flies mentality, and makes me very uncomfortable to remember it.

I worked at that same school as an adult, the difference was that the disruptive children were removed to an inclusion unit (headed by very skilled staff) and there were TAs in most of the classes. There were still badly behaved kids (like I said, it was a rough area) however they were dealt with, and classes did not descend to the same level of anarchy as I experienced when I was a pupil there (early 90s).

I feel very ambivalent about this case, clearly the teacher was at the end of his tether, however if someone with post traumatic stress and depression had a set to with a kid in the street, and battered the kid around the head with a dumb-bell saying 'die die', he would (I believe) have been convicted. As it was, he was in a school so I think he has got away with it as the jury blamed the feral teenager. Wrong in my view.

He obviously was not fit to teach. He should have recognised that.

"But it is true because of inclusion badly behaved students drag a lot of kids and schools down with them."
inclusion?? what do you mean by that isoldeone

Really tethersend? What evidence do you have for this, given that many teachers, headteachers, unions, commentators, and so on, seem convinced behaviour has worsened?

"...he got away with it"... Aren't some posters missing the fact that this teacher hasn't got off scot free? He's admitted to GBH and has already spent 8 months in custody.

how can you begin to address a problem when you can't admit it?

My evidence is only anecdotal, mmrsceptic- I know quite a few people who worked with children with behavioural difficulties since the 1960s; to say it didn't used to happen is innacurate. There were whole institutions set up for children with these behaviours.

Behaviour in mainstream education could certainly be said to have 'worsened'; the policy of inclusion has affected this.

We are be missing the point. The man was on trial for attempted murder of a child. He should have been found guilty for attempted murder of a child because he attempted to murder a child. Rather, he was acquitted. I don't see how you get around that.

The schooling system was not on trial. Perhaps it should have been, but that was not the question put to the jury.

Intent. Psychotic episode. He was out of his mind.