Work Experience disaster 14 yr old

[Sula1978]

I have a well behaved 14 year old son. Slightly shy, academic, sporty and keen to be a teacher. My son decided to apply for his work experience at the local primary. It's near our house and his sister goes there. He has just done three days there and has been crucified on the feedback.

We explained to him on the first day to politely introduce himself to the head, go to his mentor with any issues, be helpful and most importantly enjoy it. Got there day 1 and no introduction, no induction, no mentor and left in a cupboard on his own for lunch. The teacher clearly did not want him there. She gave him no chair and left him outside the class sticking worksheets in books for 3 days. He went back to his own school today to a letter from the Primary school saying he was caught playing rock, paper, scissors with the 6 year olds and was seen to pretend bowl a cricket ball along the corridor. He had a bad attitude and was a poor communicator. He's so upset as thought he had done well but was called out of class today to explain.

Should I speak to the Primary to ask why he was crucified or leave it?

I would talk to HIS school about what happened. A primary school that gives a student work experience, clearly doesn't help them to really experience the world of work, gives them very little guidance on what do do, slams them for behaviour that would only be borderline inappropriate if they were done by an actual TA or teacher, and then writes a damming report of them, isn't going to at give two hoots about the affect of that report on the student.

Also the letter bit sounds really odd. I've always had to fill in Y10 work experience journals as the class teacher, never the headteacher (literally below her paygrade). Unless the Y10 had told me to fuck off but had turned up every day and managed to interact with me and the class, I will always tick the good box for every comment. As mentioned in my previous post, only one year did the HT contact a secondary school about really inappropriate behaviour of some children, but not the Y10s themselves.

There’s obviously stuff missing whether it’s missing from what the son told his mum

I agree with this. The problem is the senior leadership in the primary school. Some just love to virtue signal by accepting placements like this. They then do not want to put in any of the work needed regarding the placement. I left a charity that I volunteered for after retiring from teaching for similar reasons. The head of the school was very enthusiastic about my volunteering given the amount of experience I could bring to the role.The class teacher I was put with was incredibly rude and standoffish. It was quite obvious she didn’t want me there. I was shoved in a freezing corridor to work with the children who needed extra support with reading (who were lovely by the way) despite the availability of an unused library space. The charity was useless and dictatorial.Your poor son @Sula1978 how utterly shit of the class teacher to treat him like that.

I agree

What probably caused this is that the teacher felt overburdened with teaching her own class, and didn't want the extra work of also supervising an older child's work experience. Understandable in a way, BUT in that case she should have just said no from the start, and not taken things out on your son, and certainly not sent an unfavourable report to his school. As pp have said, you should probably report to your son's school that this primary school isn't a good place for work experience.

The teacher at the primary school appears to have behaved very badly. For many years I placed 6th formers in local primary schools on Wednesday afternoon community work. The teachers were always helpful and welcoming and generally everyone got something out of the experience. I hope this bad experience doesn't put him off what he wants to do.

Will we ever find out?

That school is batshit as many schools in England are. Tell him to forget about the experience, grow up and do the degree

As a professional who works with children I can honestly say I play games with them as often as I possibly can.
He’s done absolutely nothing wrong playing rock, paper scissors… pretending to bowl… whatever.
The only concern I have is an adult who works with children who does not recognise that children learn and interact through play.
That would be my response to my child, to his school and to the work experience school.
Big up to your son, he sounds like exactly the type of teacher these kids need and he should continue with his career choices and hopefully one day as an equal he will be able to defend himself against an adult who does not understand children in the slightest.

The primary where my son did his WE allowed him to lunch with staff. He overheard some interesting conversations, nothing contentious but about the teachers' views on mobiles for example. All part of growing up.

Depends on where it is done. In the playground, fine. In the classroom, no. I expect it was the latter.

This is not acceptable at all. If he had such poor behaviour then the primary should have called secondary on first day and sent him home.

what I imagine happened is an overworked and stressed out teacher was dumped with a work experience kid and didn’t have time to set anything up.
but both schools have a duty of care to your son as he’s still a child.

as your daughter goes to the school then what is your impression of the teacher he was placed with? Surely they must have realised he had a sibling there.

I would 100% follow up as eventually his head of year will be writing references for further education and maybe part time jobs and you want the file to be accurate.

my kid did his work experience in a school and had a whale of time. He wasn’t allowed in staffroom or to be left alone with kids at anytime. He did know the staff quite well as I used to work at that school but had left.

I’ve had teenagers in class as work experience and some have been delightful and others have been stroppy teens who didn’t want to do anything.

To be honest, as a business owner who is constantly getting contacted by parents asking for work experience for their Y10 children, I think it's too young. They are not mature enough for any responsibility and they take up an awful lot of time. Plus a lot of them just don't have the social skills. I think it's daft that schools expect workplaces to accept them at this age.

This is how they get a chance of developing these skills. Man business have a social responsibility policies and would actively like to help others especially students with SEN. Regrettably insurance policies often are this impossible.

Got there day 1 and no introduction, no induction, no mentor and left in a cupboard on his own for lunch. The teacher clearly did not want him there. She gave him no chair and left him outside the class sticking worksheets in books for 3 days.

That's outrageous. Even if he's exaggerating a bit, that was a deeply unprofessional way to treat a 14-year-old on work experience. I've always tried to find interesting things for work-experience teens to do, as well as a bit of helping with the grunt work because that's part of workplace life.

Google suggested to me that 'Paper resembles the Nazi salute, Rock is used by populists, and scissors is a symbol for peace and Churchill' - which just feels a bit of a stretch to me.

Also: "Rock crushes scissors.” This rule is a clear violation of all rules of decent humanity. It encourages violence as a means of problem-solving. Again, seems a bit far fetched.

This was an interesting take on it: The game is a miniature model of non-transitive relationships where no one option is superior, teaching lessons about balance and adaptability.

All of that aside, it still doesn't tell us what the 'obvious' connotations are.

Everyone who's criticising the school and commenting on how generally bad it must be because of this seems to have missed that OP's younger DC attend.

If there were serious problems I think they would have been noticeable to parents before they happened let a teen with a bad attitude come in for a favour and dared to feed back to the secondary that he hadn't behaved as they'd expect.

He was on work experience, should have been in the staff room, thats part of the work experience.

The sibling doesnt matter

Agreed. I would hope the staff could manage to not say anything inappropriate for a 3 day period

@Sula1978 He went back to his own school today to a letter from the Primary school saying he was caught playing rock, paper, scissors with the 6 year olds and was seen to pretend bowl a cricket ball along the corridor.

If this is what schools are worried about, I think they have their priorities backwards.

I’ve known student teachers and NQTs who have been treated similarly by primary schools. Sad to see it happen to an actual child. Being male might not have helped him, 2 of my male student teachers friends were treated awfully during placements by female colleagues who seemed to resent their presence.

I’d let his school know how poor the placement was, and that he wasn’t given any constructive feedback nor a chance to work on the skills they thought him lacking.

horrendous behaviour by the school. I’d be removing my DD if that’s how they’re treating older kids to be honest. I’d have real concerns.

My daughter also had a horrible work experience many years ago, spent 3 days taking staples out of paper in the dingy basement, then sent on an errand to buy lots of heavy milk for the staff office to be told it was the wrong one and take it all back, this was before the days of mobiles so she got semi skimmed, quite a sensible choice I would have thought.

I hope they haven’t put him off the career this is such a shame! He sounds like he is good at building rapport with kids and would be a lovely teacher. Schools say they want more men in primary schools then treat a young man like this - awful.