If a child at school is always in detention or in trouble at school - disclaimer - I am hot, sun scorched and knackered

[redrubyshoes]

should they be kept back from field trips/sports days as well?

Just had a nightmare few days of dealing with same five kids who are always walking out of class, being rude/abusive/bullying to other students/staff and a whole host of other reasons...........but the head (who rarely attends these trips) lets them go.

They took up sooo much of our (staff) time while the other kids were having fun/learning/looking out for each other running/jumping/high jumping/long jumping etc etc etc. We were literally at the end of our tether with these five and they stopped us cheering on the pupils or just sharing our attention around the other 193 or so that were great/not so great/injured/hot/tearful (when they lost)/needed water/food/plasters or WAY TO GO MISS DIDJA SEE THAT!!!! moments.

Am I horrible or just knackered and hot and worn out after a long day?

Hit me with it.

We are also almost at that time of year where the kids that cause trouble know that there won't be any sanctions against them as the letters will take too long to get home.

Of course you are right, beatback, but how do you get the tax payers to pay for enough special schools for 5% out of every non-selective secondary?

Remembering that if you put all the most disruptive pupils together into one school you are going to need pretty high staffing levels and specially trained staff if you want to prevent riots.

Are the tax payers particularly willing to pay out more money for specialist teaching at the moment?

Seeing that specialist teaching and other support is being cut even for very severely disabled pupils, where is the money going to come from?

The current idea of including everybody in mainstream isn't because of beautiful fluffy ideas about everybody's right to be together; it's because it's cheap!

Meanwhile, many parents of children with SN (including disruptive ones) and severe behaviour issues are tearing their hair because mainstream leaves their children without a chance to access their education.

Cory

Nice sentiments - but these parents don't give a flying fuck. We have children on literally 'the last chance saloon' because nowhere else will take them. The parents kick off ONLY when they know that their chil is going to be kicked out and home tutoring is on the horizon. They will have their child around all day.

I said 'all day' with sarcasm as their is not a hope in hell that child will stay in and sit quietly for a home tutor.

This is going to sound very harsh but I have reached a point that I don't care where these kids go so long as it not within a mile of me. The days have long gone when I felt sorry for them and tried to help them and their feckless/stupid/lazy parents who bring up children in their image.

My sympathy has all gone. Come down hard and fast when they are in Year 1/2/3 etc. Do NOT offer choices to the child/parent and take a bloody hard line from the first day AND STICK WITH ANY THREATS. Platitudes do not work.

If their child misbehaves in year 1 and they miss out on that trip? Tough. Suck it up and please do not clutch pearls and wring your hands and say 'Oh the poor, poor child, it is not their fault'.

It just might spare teaching staff years and years of grief. Might not but..............worth a try?

Like I said upthread I am turning into Daily Mail type.

This is not a state / private issue, most state schools are not like this.

Most state schools do not allow badly behaved children on trips. In most state schools teachers are not sworn at because the child would be be immediately excluded.

In most schools when a child goes down a path like the OP has described they are on the oath out of that school and into a special school or for a fresh start elsewhere and if that doesn't work they will go to a special school.

Arisbottle. In previous posts you have stated you teach at a normal comprehensive school and teach all academic abillties so it suprises me that you would not have up to 5%, who are very difficult and prone to this type of behaviour. Have none of your colleagues experienced this kind of behaviour this year and if they have not, how have they stoped it from delveloping.

We do meet difficult behaviour but it is dealt with firmly and calmly. I have to deal with children talking when I am, children being moody, leaving their seat without permission and messing about , but it is just not allowed to go on for months on end.

We are a bog standard comprehensive.

Children behaving badly go onto report. Whilst on report if they behave baldy they are isolated away from the school community at lunch and detained after school. If this continues they are educated in isolation or in a very small group in our behaviour unit. If this does not work they go onto an extreme behaviour programme which involves being on report to a senior member of staff, no participation in trips, sporting events and extra curricular activities. This programme will have an end date, named in advance. If there has not been a sustained improvement in this time they are asked to leave the school.

I thought it was very difficult to permanently exclude a pupil especially if the pupil has no where to go, would the school not come under pressure from the L.E.A to retain the pupil. The kind of behaviour that you have stated although unexceptable is almost trivial when compared to the original posters witnessed behaviour. How would you deal with a pupil throwing a chair at another pupil or kicking a teacher. You could say the pupil would be excluded but in many circumstances after a short suspension the pupil/pupils are readmitted to the school, and within their group they are seen as a hero/hero"s. I hope for your colleagues and pupils that the worst behaviour your school experiences is pupils getting out of their seats or giving back chat to the teacher.

It isn't trivial to have your education disrupted daily by children choosing to misbehave. We are fair, we use a balance of carrots and sticks but we are strict because we would be failing our young people if we let them think they can behave as they wish and hold down a job or have successful relationships.

I cannot recall ever having dealt with a student throwing a chair at another pupil at this school but they would be excluded. We step up each exclusion so that if we get to a third or fourth and it is a long exclusion we can start a pupil on our extreme behaviour programme.

We are a good school and not an inner city school but we have challenges as we have a comprehensive/ secondary modern intake.

I am a senior member of staff in charge of behaviour, I suspect children are a little better behaved for me than other members of staff, however we have an open door policy and constant walk throughs so that no teacher feels alone with a difficult class.

Most teachers in most schools do not face chairs being thrown or being sworn at, most face the kinds of behaviour issues I have referred to.

Arisbottle. I can see that you teach at a good school and from other posts it is obvious that you are very caring teacher with abilty. The things the op state go on every day within inner city schools. In fact i had a friend who taught at a 6th form college in salford and i kid you not one of his students shot his girlfriend and them himself i met this kid and he seemed to be one of my friends better students This is extreme i know and a older age group, but in inner city schools/colleges the teacher/lecturer has to be prepaired for potential life threatening situations not a pupil who keeps moving out of his seat or keeps talking when the teacher is speaking.

I have worked in inner city schools, I was a teach first graduate and we have to commit to a stint in a challenging school. I am not saying that teachers in some schools do not have to deal with extreme behaviour - but I was objecting to the idea that this is a state / private issue. It is not, it is about a small number of inner city schools - and not every inner city school deals with this behaviour.

At my ds's school, trips are very much conditional on behaviour- the children it he Oap describes would certainly not have been allowed on the trip.

And no, this sort of behaviour is not everyday in most schools- whatever the media like to tell us.

I say to children and parents that if I cannot trust you to behave whilst on school premises under tight supervision, there is not hope once they are on a trip.

I think after months and months of bad behaviour these children should be excluded. NOTHING has changed and nothing we have tried has modified their behaviour.

We are up in arms against a HT who thinks they are all worth saving. At the detriment of hundreds of other kids who are on the whole well mannered and polite?

Get rid and get rid now. We are not equipped to deal with this level of violence/intimidation/threats etc AND deal with the other pupils who are diligent and hardworking and are disrupted hourly in their lessons.

I think every child is worth saving but am not naive or arrogant enough to think that I am the person to do it. Some children need more support than most comprehensives can provide and therefore not onky is their presence stopping others from learning but if they are left to continue misbehaving they will not be learning.

I would not use the phrase getting rid, it is not about getting rid but educating children in the environment that suits them.

redruby
your head is at fault if they cannot see that excluding the kids to a dedicated PRU for a tem would not make everybody's lives better

round here they merged all the little PRUs into one big one and it is making a huge difference.
the schools that exclude them have to pay for the PRU out of their budget share (academy or LEA) but that works out cheaper than dedicated in house staff and huge disruption

and some of the kids are able to return to the normal schools when the issues driving the problems have been addressed

any head who thinks they can do better than a PRU team is arrogant in the extreme

There should be an escalation of punishment, although tbh I don't think anything will keep some pupils from misbehaving, they seem so hell-bent on a path of self-destruction (and no matter what people think, the person worst affected by bad behaviour on this scale is the perpetrator of the behaviour). Some just seem hard-wired to kick against the fence. They just need to find the fence and they're away. But even for a little toerag, there should not be an unjust scale of punishment that is applied as a little power kick by those in charge- that just reinforces what they already believe about those in supposed control. Any punishment meted out should be fair and just. If a child however misbehaves on such a scale that their or the safety of others is not certain, they that would be a good reason for banning from school trips etc.

There should be an escalation of punishment
why?
If the child comes from a deeply disrupted home (drugs, violence, prison, abuse) punishing them will make no difference

yes, separate them for periods of time from the main stream kids and arrange support
but criminalising having a crap childhood is not the answer

and yes, these kid should be being picked up and sent to the PRU from year R onwards - as soon as the need is identified
and some will end up in separate schools, some even in secure boarding schools (yes, they exist, DH has worked at a couple)
but many, given support and coping strategies can break the cycle

before they break the teachers in the main school

I came from a highly disruptive background and my only sense of discipline came from school. I am grateful that my school did not tie itself in knots about. "Criminalising my background " and sometimes made my life unpleasant because I was acting like a selfish idiot.

That discipline carried me through my school life and beyond. Because I came from a background with no boundaries I needed my teachers to be firmer with me not softer .

There's a difference between firm boundaries and kneejerk punishments that take no account of people's backgrounds. Understanding people's backgrounds and giving them firm boundaries are not mutually exclusive - you're more likely to succeed in putting firm boundaries in place and ultimately getting a child to respect them if you can untangle the particular issues that are making them not do so at the moment.

I don't know why people always seem to assume that paying attention to the difficult backgrounds of other people rather than ignoring them always means being 'soft' on them? Surely what it actually means is being a bit intelligent about solving the problem and not just blindly kicking back in a way that might not solve it at all?

Unfortunately the worst affected by allowing that kind of behaviour to continue, are probably other kids from difficult backgrounds, and their chances of getting a decent education.

We simply do not have time to go over every child's biography with a fine tooth comb and say "Oh yes his Dad walked out/Granny died/has an eating disorder/self harming issues/flat feet/gender issues so therefore we modify the teaching of a whole class to fit in with that child's 'needs'.

We are a school not a psychiatric unit or hospital and we are not psychiatrists or doctors. It is NOT possible to accommodate the 'needs' of every single child. Christ on a bike we could not bother with a uniform and let them wear pink stilettoes and a monks cowl if it made them 'happy'.

School is school where you conform to a set of standards and are expected to conform. Not be allowed to demand what level of standards you are 'willing' to agree to after much negotiation and shouting.

Special needs/medical problems etc ARE treated very, very seriously and each child has a team to quite rightly support them and they do.

Agreed
that is why those kids should be sent to the PRU (Pupil Referral Unit : use it for what its called) for a day, a week, a month
so that the teachers can teach and those kids can get the support they need

Talkinpeace. So we are not a million miles apart then regarding moving these very bad kids away from mainstream schools and giving those pupils a chance to achieve. In the PRU you have obviously got teachers and staff who can deal with serious incidents such as chair throwing and biting. They have also had training in dealing with a kid who may have a weapon and know how to talk the child down. They most have special skills and not go in to breakdown themselves when dealing with a highly dangerous and stressful situation.

BUT
PRUs are NOT for ever.
Special schools are a different kettle of fish.
PRUs are to take excluded pupils and ready them for return to the school that is paying for them.
In some cases its a matter of days
in some weeks
but they will all go back
unless the LEA agreed the massive extra funding to move them to separate schools

the secure boarding school DH went to had a pupil to staff ratio of 1:1 .... not many schools can afford that