Sick and tired of this... [sad]

[DemiLee33]

Hello everyone and thanks for listening.

I am at breaking point with my son's secondary school teachers/policies.

For I.E for ridiculous, unwarranted punishments.
Detentions for not having a pen or a shirt untucked.
Most good students in secondary schools are in I.e at least once within their first 2 years of starting. Most students have had at least 10 detentions by the time they have completed year 8.

Once again I have been in meetings, lodged complaints, cried on the phone to them. My son has cried and is so low in mood now because he feels beaten down by them. I have had 2 teachers admit to me that a lot of 'normal' 'good' kids are in i.e or on report.

Their policies are awful! Nationwide, secondary schools are so extreme with their punishments for such ridiculous, unwarranted reasons. Some schools have even started saturday morning detentions!!
I am so tired of not having my voice heard. Anyone else feeling like this? I have started up a fb group to vent about this and it may take off it may not. I have emailed relevant organisations and lodged complaints but these schools are a law unto themselves.

Sorry for moaning
xx

Right, because making a fashion-conscious crop-top-wearing-teen wear a frumpy outfit isn’t a punishment in the slightest 
FFS, most would prefer a detention.

Ah, yes, but the fashion-conscious crop top wearing teen will think twice next time.
Maybe it's not a bad idea. Instead of wasting time all day on trying to make sure everyone's wearing their uniform.
We didn't have this, though. If you did turn up in inappropriate clothing, you'd get a warning not to come like that tomorrow or to borrow a jumper off someone. If you did turn up again like that, you'd be sent home to return properly dressed. Full stop.

And you're going to tell me that a school can't afford some pencils? They can waste lots of time on other stuff, it seems from this thread

There’s a school funding crisis. Teachers have to buy their own pencils, haven’t you heard?
Teacher time on the other hand, to supervise detentions, is free to the school.

If you’ve never known anyone in your school to not have a pen (the usual argument is ‘of course people sometimes will forget a pen’, so people always having a pen is a new one) then the school doesn’t need to come up with a sanction for no pen, does it?

In my school, where kids routinely rock up with no equipment, perhaps it would be useful if we did sanction it. Because despite what you think, furnishing a bunch of kids at the start of every lesson with writing implements is actually a pain in the arse.

If you did turn up again like that, you'd be sent home to return properly dressed. Full stop.

You’ve not seen the swathes of Daily Mail sad face stories about schools that do this? Outrageous to send a kid home and miss out on learning time for the wrong clothes etc etc.

Isitmybathtimeyet

Sounds like you've met some naff Sencos. They do have a difficult job (usually with a near full teaching timetable) and are prone to forgetting things. I'm not trying to defend them but their role is somewhat broken as well. The extra time for mocks wouldn't even come via the senco, our exams officer deals with that.

As a staff member I sometimes forget student specific interventions. For example I have students who require yellow paper for worksheets. Sometimes I forget this. Not out of malice, or because I don't care. But simply because I'm a human. When planning lessons the colour of the sheet is such a tiny consideration that I overlook it. Then feel awful when I see said student. I encounter about 30 students with different needs every day. It's difficult to remember what works for every student every time. Also trying balance different and totally opposing needs in the same room can be interesting. A couple of years ago I had 2 students with EHCPS, student A 'benefits from a quiet/silent classroom', student B "needs background noise to help him function '. That was a fun year!

I don’t think there’s any malice there. Well, with the exception of one, because we complained about him as he was so shocking, and he hated us after that.

I think there are enormous pressures and demands, and I am sympathetic to those. And I will be more sympathetic still to the ones who are kind. But sadly I’ve met ones who aren’t. And in each of the schools we’ve attended it’s been the same chaos and lack of support. (And in this school the lack of extra time was due to the Senco failing to tell those who were administering the exams - she apologised.)

I’m sure you can imagine that while we don’t have to think about hundreds of kids, just our own, it becomes exhausting to be constantly fighting for them to have even cost neutral support and understanding in a busy, pressed system. I don’t think that’s news to many who work in education!

Oh gosh I really can't imagine the exhaustion from constantly fighting a broken system. I feel like I do it on a daily basis as a teacher, without trying to sort my own children's needs as well. Any parent who has got a diagnosis has worked bloody hard for it.

We have had experience of many caring and dedicated teachers. And amazing primary support in general. I do love teachers in general. Honest.

Isitmybathtimeyet

I completely get the refusal to diagnose so no diagnosis = no support.

It really just makes school so hard for children who are trying to navigate school life.

The only analogy for someone with an SEN like say dyslexia I can think of is it is like trying to navigate a new school and being punished for not abiding by the rules when all the signs are in Japanese and they change every so often without you knowing.

Ds couldn’t read properly. No point pointing to a sign saying Pupils Must Turn Off Mobile Phones Before Entering School Building if he can’t read a lot of the words and it wasn’t at a height he could get close up to it to study the words and try and work out what they did say.

Dds school (private) was not somewhere you would consider sending your child if you wanted academic excellence.

It still had 30 children to the class but was much more relaxed in its approach.

It wasn’t your typical private school full of MC parents. The children came from all walks of life. I think it was something like 52/60 who had some form of SEN like dyslexia dysgraphia, dyscalculia ADD etc
However at the end of year 11 nearly all walked out with 8 GCSEs.
Dd didn’t do as well as most but did surprise me in scraping a handful of GCSEs when my forecast was that she might pass one or two if she was lucky.

I think her achievements were down to the fact that as soon as she started they immediately tested her and put in place proper lessons in small classes 3 times per week for an hour each time to concentrate on their dyslexia and how to overcome issues that affected them.

They got better results overall from everyone not just those who were average to bright.

If secondaries would take away their thinking that all children are bad and are going to rebel and put in place help for those that do have an SEN and make school about all their futures and not just about crowd control and educating the average child we might see a better outlook.

I get the impression that a lot of teachers on here think that those with an SEN are in the minority.

I would say that whilst there might be less than in dds school there are more than you as teachers know about.

When Ds left schools I spoke to teachers who knew nothing about his suspected dyslexia etc.

You as teachers would only know about the ones who have a diagnosis not the ones who’s parents fight to get their children tested and lose the battle.

Mainstream schooling is designed only to educate quite a narrow 'type' of child/person in still quite a narrow range of subjects. it is not surprising that many kids 'fail' at school. The school system hasn't changed fundamentally since the industrial revolution. Which is immensely stupid, given that the jobs people are going into post education have changed

teacher maths your post about not having time to remember what every student needs for every lesson....then schools aren't fit for purpose. They ONLY cater for the narrow demographic of academically able NT children. Because, whilst it's a fun anecdote for you, to lament how busy your job is; those kids get over looked in that way, in all their lessons. They aren't receiving an education that they can access.

Because, whilst it's a fun anecdote for you, to lament how busy your job is;

It's not a fun anecdote. It's reality. I wish it wasn't, but it is.

Olivers the fact your ds's school was private explains a lot. There won't be the pressure on results like in state. That pressure comes from the government measures. Fall below "average" and you get all sorts of inspections etc.

If secondaries would take away their thinking that all children are bad and are going to rebel and put in place help for those that do have an SEN and make school about all their futures and not just about crowd control and educating the average child we might see a better outlook.

If parents would accept that in the main teachers and schools are doing their best to do a good job in incredibly restricted circumstances, financially, time-wise and resourcewise, that no one goes into teaching for crowd control and that actually we also care about the kids’ futures, then this antagonistic stand-off would improve and we might be able to work together more effectively.

It’s the assumption that schools and teachers do stuff (e.g. tuck shirts in) because they don’t know what they’re doing, that they’re power-crazed authoritarians with nothing better to do with their time and not because e.g. systems need to be in place to manage the behaviour of over a thousand kids at a time and not just yours, that is really, really tiring.

Teachermaths what I was trying to explain was that despite not being an academic school by any stretch of the imagination (lessons were for only half the week) and having predominantly SEN pupils that they managed to turn out the children into the world at least being able to read and write and with enough GCSEs to get themselves into fe or work.

The SEN classes were started immediately and every pupil was given a “cursory” test to see where their needs lay or if they were ok and didn’t need any SEN help.

These things could be part of any schools curriculum and would cut down on a lot of the issues surrounding SEN pupils who atm are turning up for a lessons not having a clue what is going on because they cannot read the book or the board or just find reading such an effort that they get turned off.

Ds said the teachers in his school would write a word on the board and he would spend a lot of the lesson trying to guess what it said from the subsequent discussion.

In state schools pursuit of over average results are because those with an SEN who without help would bring the scores down are actively encouraged to go elsewhere or if they stay they are left by the wayside and those without any issues have the effort and time put into them so they achieve results that bring the “average” results up.

Taken from readingagency.org.uk/about/impact/002-reading-facts-1/

research, conducted in 2015, found that similar percentages of 15-year-olds across the UK do not have a minimum level of literacy proficiency: 18% in England and Scotland, 15% in Northern Ireland and 21% in Wales

So nearly 1 in 5 are not accessing lessons fully still by the time they are taking their GCSEs.

I think if schools did rethink their policies, got rid of some of the stupider rules and made schools about helping every one not just the 4 in 5 behaviour and results would naturally go up and schools would be much easier places to teach.

Just because dds school was private wasnt anything to do with the outcome.

They didn’t have super academic children, in fact they probably had a worse NT to SEN pupil ratio than any average state secondary and they had only 1/2 week to teach it all in.

Yet their pass rate for 5 or more GCSEs including English and Maths was virtually 100% yet (looked up the percentages) the average in 2015 for every school was 53.8%

Something is going wrong somewhere.

Just because dds school was private wasnt anything to do with the outcome.

Of course it did. MONEY.

noblegiraffe I was using the term crowd control because I think it was mentioned upthread or definitely in another thread/forum.

But don’t state schools have money?

It is how that money is spent that could be questioned.

How many 1000s of man hours each year are being used to supervise detentions for untucked shirts/walking the wrong way gown a corridor etc.

Ds’s state school (all 3 secondary he went to) thought it was a better use of their money to employ someone who’s sole job was to sit and supervise detentions/isolations.

Add to the fact that they managed to teach predominantly SENs in half the week.

School was one of the cheapest private schools I could find and the uniform alone cost 1/3rd of Ds’s state school.

Looking up spending per child in the state system it is £6200 per year. It doesn’t actuslly say what that covers, Rates, Water Rates, Insurance, mortgage on the school, Heating, Lighting, building repairs etc. As well as teachers salaries and equipment.
Given dds private school was more but not hugely more I can see that if you took out things like the mortgage aspect it could be quite similar.

Looking up spending per child in the state system it is £6200 per year.

Er, where? More like £4500 on average. In South Glos which I think is the worst funded it’s just over £4K.

So your dd’s school was significantly better funded.

You presumably know that there’s a school funding crisis? Have heard the stories in the press about teaching assistants being laid off. Class sizes increasing? A severe lack of qualified teachers? Teachers on this thread have pointed out that schools can’t even afford to provide a pot of pencils.

Of course this affects their ability to provide a bespoke education service for each individual pupil like your DD enjoyed.

But don’t state schools have money?

Wow. Just wow. Read the papers. Watch the news. There is a funding crisis in education at the moment. Spending on SEN has been slashed over recent years. It’s horrendous.

As a teen, I used to be horrified that my mum spent so much of her own money on resources. Now she’s horrified that I spend so much on the basics. Like pens.

My DS has SEN, so I check his bag every morning to make sure he has what he needs. Not every part of his needs should be dealt with by school.

But money to provide a permanent member of staff to oversee detentions but no money for anything else?

This is where I got the £6200 per year

www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/comms/R150.pdf

Page 30

Dds school building was available to use 24 hours / day to raise funds.

Sections of it when not in use were hired out.

Something that other schools could do with sections of their school.
Car parking, sharing resources with other schools in the area are how a lot of private schools work. Yet ds’s schools were left empty during the evening or lay there doing nothing during holidays.

One was near to a major commuting station into London which had a tiny station car park. The schools car park was huge and empty with a guy who patrolled it (another permanent member of staff) to tell people that you couldn’t park in the car park if not on school business.

The money they could have made would have been huge if the guy had been selling parking spaces at even just £5 per day.
Would have paid for his yearly wage and a bit more.

Instead they preferred to bitch about how underfunded they were.

I think the general attitude was, we get given money. It was unseemly or too right wing to run the school as a business.

Things do need to change but the way things are going it is not in the right direction.

But money to provide a permanent member of staff to oversee detentions

There’s that assumption that schools are shit and don’t know what they are doing at work again.

That permanent member of staff will be working their arse off supporting disaffected kids with their behaviour. It’s a pastoral role, not simply someone with their feet up reading a newspaper. FFS.

And stop with the ‘oh if only schools did x they’d be rolling in money’ shit.

Once it used to be common for schools to be used for adult classes in the evenings and weekends. I don't know if that generated more money for the schools. It certainly made it easier to find evening classes close to you. Of course, there is very little funding for evening classes now, so children that miss out don't have that to help....

This is where I got the £6200 per year

Not all of that money goes to the school. Like I said, national average actually going to schools is more like £4500 per pupil.

Just because dds school was private wasnt anything to do with the outcome.

Of course it did, firstly parental attitude and secondly money.

We get £4.2k per pupil. We don't own the building, thanks PFI. We have to pay ridiculous amounts for any building maintenance and get nothing for hiring it out. We have to pay extra for school performances, Saturday schools and revision classes.

Isolation and behaviour rooms are staffed by our pastoral staff on a rota. Detentions after school are manned by SLT and teaching staff, again on a rota. 3 hours from our directed time budget are allocated to this per year.

*There’s that assumption that schools are shit and don’t know what they are doing at work again.

That permanent member of staff will be working their arse off supporting disaffected kids with their behaviour. It’s a pastoral role, not simply someone with their feet up reading a newspaper. FFS*

But that is exactly what the role involves. How could it be anything but.

Isolation is a quiet room so no talking. How
Would that member of staff be working to support these disaffected pupils with their behaviour if there is no talking.

By the power of mime?

And stop with the ‘oh if only schools did x they’d be rolling in money’ shit

There is that mantra that schools don’t have any money and that is not to be questioned.

I asked the question upthread

Don’t state schools have money and I got a combination of answers which inferred Yes they do have money but not as much as my report said and No they don’t. Haven’t I read the papers.

What I am saying is that the government do give some money but also schools should be proactive in cutting down on bills and also making what they have work for them.

Eg Friend was £140 per month short each month after her divorce before saving for any treats or buying clothes etc.

An hour on comparison sites reduced her car and house insurance by £50 per month and I signed her up to Parkopedia and she now gets another £50-75 per week in from her driveway.

Unfortunately schools do seem to have a woe is me attitude and would prefer just to cut rather than think of ways of generating income.

One thing I really don’t understand is the slashing of the SEN part of the school budget and the reluctance to test pupils when pupils with SEN attract a higher premium from the government.

Yes schools did used to be used in the evening.

My primary had a weekly yoga class, and children’s dance classes in the Hall.

I know a few schools (not in my area) who do rent their halls out for sports or dance and drama groups etc

Thinking about it they are the schools that are supposed to be the most sort after.

So it isn’t impossible to raise more money if others schools can do it.

So it isn’t impossible to raise more money if others schools can do it.

It is impossible. Read my post above. We are a deprived area. We can't ask parents for money they don't have. We can't hire out the building. We aren't allowed to profit from selling resources (rightly so).

We have to save money. The first part of the SEN budget comes from the schools normal budget, then any extra is added for specific needs/ECHPS.

I taught in schools 10 years ago that have the same budget then as they do now. Rising prices and inflation means everything is more expensive. So staff and resources get cut. In fact our predicted budget for 2019-20 is lower than last year.