Stop blaming teachers for your child’s behaviour

[Woolfatthedoor]

I’m so fed up of my partner return home from school exhausted and mentally drained due to the appalling behaviour of some of their year six pupils.
Heaven forbid they are reprimanded. Then a slurry of emails accusing the teacher of ‘shouting’ at their innocent kids.
My Partner and several colleagues are at the point ot resigning.
They are experienced teachers who love teaching yet these kids make teaching intolerable.
If feels like these kids are not set any boundaries at home therefore come to school with a degree of arrogance.
Parents don’t seem to take any accountability for their children’s behaviour siding with them against the teacher who just wants to teach the rest of the class.

Want some ketchup with all those chips you're carrying?

What is wrong with self made people? Some people have to make their own luck in life.

No but we do have a screen epidemic! People need to get off their phone and pay attention to what their kids are doing … too many kids left stuck on tablets and gaming!

I don’t know - IS PDA in the rise? Or are kids just not being parented well? I have my suspicions. Watching families out and about, I am deeply sceptical that they are just brought up to be little ignoramuses just like the parents.

As for the 'free breakfast scheme'. It's the parent's job to give their children breakfast, not the schools. We are taking yet another responsibility away from parents.
They are welcome to have free porridge oats/eggs/bread etc... but get up and make your child breakfast!
What's next?.... 'Do you have trouble putting your child to bed? Fear not... we'll send their class teacher round to sort it out for you!'
We need to stop expecting parents to do less and less parenting. They need to up their game and do more! This includes breakfast.

Problem is any child who is just given a screen to look at/interact with all day is going to have attention problems anyway.

Schools have to deal with badly parented kids, that's nothing new - phones and screens are relatively new at the rate they're used. Schools being kow-towed to by shit parents is self-inflicted bullshit though. A lack of discipline in a school is ultimately the fault of the head teacher (and upwards as fish rots from head down).

Well not sure about that. Many parents only have their kids in private in the first place because have a sen child in a rowdy classroom of 35 with no ability to tailor teaching, funnily enough, wasn’t having a great impact on the child. This is why VAT on independent schools is an odious move by the current Marxist government because it’s punishing very, very ordinary people who had no choice but to move their child to an independent school and pay for them.

You are very misinformed. Most parents are extensively out of pocket and receive nothing. You can't buy a diagnosis seriously. No reputable psychiatrist will risk their reputation for giving out a diagnosis just for the LOLs.

Many have to pay because they are refused an assessment on the NHS or have to wait years. Without the diagnosis it's difficult to access appropriate education support.or any alternative provision of you're lucky enough to have opportunity for that.

Most of us receive nothing. Rather, in my case for example, I'm down approximately £5000 in costs this last 2 years associated with appointments and assessments that the NHS would have one waiting 5 years for. I have probably underestimated those costs dramatically.

There's a huge population of SEN kids forced into mainstream by Government to save money. Schools seem less able to suspend or exclude and I believe a great deal of the reason is that alternative provision / specialised schools or PRU places are no longer there. So there's nowhere they could go. I wonder if there are targets on schools regards exclusions which also makes it difficult.

The Government has stripped all the funding for places these kids would other wise go ( SEN schools and specialist units for troubled kids who can't manage in school).

So teachers and pupils and parents suffer. And the Governments walk away laughing because we have so many less than bright members of the public saying ' it's the parents ' or ' anyone can buy a diagnosis' or ' SEN diagnosis means benefits '.

Terrible really. No chance of change at this rate.

Yes but I guess the school is trying to stop kids being hungry, how do you enforce parents to feed kids breakfast when they moan that the kids either won’t eat it or they can’t afford it due to cost of living … while they have their nails done, make up on and sky TV?!?!

100%. and Bridget Philipson actually thinks this is an amazing move. You can see her awful face light up with glee. So the crap parents are incentivised to be negligent and the hard working ones are punished.

Sorry that's bullshit it was going downhill way before COVID!

Just to add I saw an article today where teachers had gone on strike due to children's behaviour bloody good on them I say!

God - gaslighting. Sooo sick of the misuse of this term.

So parents are not only dictating how the school can police the bad behaviour of their child that isn't being parented properly, but are also expected to feed the child for them as well?

It's a little wonder the education system is viewed as such a joke when absolutely useless parents like this are running rings around them.

Well that’s the million dollar question isn’t it?

I’m not even exaggerating when I say every other poster on here has a child with ASD, ADHD or both. I’m honestly surprised to go on a thread (even if it’s about shoes, or the weather, or TV) and not see a response from somebody about how they/their children have ASD and ADHD. DD is in a class of 25, 5 have diagnoses and another 2 are pending assessment, and these are the ones I know about. My close friend whose son is 7 (and seems perfectly typical and fine to me) has just told me she’s having him assessed for autism. And don’t get me started on our local mums FB page - by far the posts that attract the most responses are the ones asking where they can get their child a private assessment or what school is best for SEN, they usually got 50+ responses where other topics get 4 or 5 at most. Virtually all the families have at least 1 child with ASD/ADHD, and it’s becoming increasingly common for families with 3/4/5 children to all have a diagnosis.

I wonder how far this will go before we admit it isn’t just ‘more awareness’

Eh no that is incorrect. I personally know people who receive DLA for their 2, 3 and 4 children who are autistic and they pull in quite a bit every month. I don’t think you’d look at these children and think they were anything other than typical kids - they’re certainly not in special schools. I have personal and professional experience of this

My sympathy to your partner. Retraining?

I was shocked when my 8yo came home to say one of the children in her class had told their teacher to fuck off and hadn’t noticed any consequences for that. I’m not naive, I expect at secondary school there to be a bit of swearing but I wasn’t expecting it in primary.

What do you actually do as a teacher if you’ve got children telling you to fuck off and have no levers to stop them? I can’t see it’s going to be any better as they get older and bigger. You’re either going to get more and more schools becoming totally draconian and authoritarian to manage behaviour or total bloody chaos where no-one learns anything.

Well I can agree with that being a problem in society . It isn't the cause of the school nightmare. My posts explain.

There's alot more to it which I haven't alluded to. In my day for example there was a culture of just having to deal with it and parents really didn't care too much if you complained about teachers. There are pros and cons to this. The pros are that we can at least now listen and respond to kids who are abused by adults ( and by god there are plenty of abusive adults). The downside is that teachers are more accountable but that is going beyond what they even should be accountable for. Teachers cannot deal with all these additional issues, so many of which are SEN kids, ridiculous expectations, targets, no appropriate tools to manage problematic behaviour where suspension and exclusion is not an option.

You can have ADHD and be a pain in the absolute arse, a little shite even. The 2 can go hand in hand. I hear that. If they could be properly diagnosed, access medication and get into more appropriate settings, it would be better for all.

As long as people are so blind as to blame feckless parents you'll be forever walking like a zombie whilst our Government continues to shaft everyone as always. And it's important for everyone because all the NT kids, well they're suffering too.

Agree with this

In many primaries it isnt unknown to have teeth brushing at school too

Yes, this is my experience too. Quite a few families round here claim DLA for 3+ children all with ASD/ADHD - lots of talk of payment dates, back payment, will it all be paid on the same day etc those type of queries

I haven't seen the thread you mentioned, but I don't blame the teacher for not wanting to break up a fight between two students. She could get badly hurt and she's not paid enough to risk that. More needs to be done about students bullying others though.

I have a lot of personal experience with autism and neurodivergence and my view is that people are making this into a thing that it’s not. I’m all for inclusive approaches to education but people have taken this waaaaaaaaaayyy too far. These kids are going to have no future prospects because they’ve been mollycoddled their entire lives. They won’t be able to have a job because they’ll be unemployable - not because they’re neurodivergent but because of the way they’ve been brought up. They need to just get on with it. I 100% disagree with this bandwagon that we’re on and the only good thing about Labour (clutching at straws here) is that they are finally looking to tackle the extremity of it all. It’s out of control

I didn’t ask for any lockdowns. The government ordered them. The only thing damaging some children is the attitudes of parents who think lockdowns made their children behave badly. Tell it to the judge when your child is in court. See how far that gets you.

Maybe it’s meant to be? Birth rate falling half the population unable to work through prevalence of these mysterious conditions so AI takes over the jobs…

I see posts from certain ND and SEN influencers posting videos every day about how to game the system. Read the comments and everyone’s asking for advice on how to submit claims that will be accepted and how to get their child a diagnosis. How to say the right things, how to gather evidence, who to use for diagnoses (as in which clinicians are reliable in making diagnoses). It’s a racket now. I’m pleased that it’s quite rightly on Keir Starmer’s agenda to tackle it