Parents should be forced to stay at home when their children are suspended from school

[Caligula]

Blair's latest big idea

He he he. This made me laugh.

When they say "parents", do they mean "mothers"?

You can just imagine the scenario- "sorry, we've had to cancel your brain surgery because the surgeon is at home looking after his excluded kid"

i guess some parents have gone to school and done this by taking some holiday time? it pays off in the long run!

And what would happen in those families where the parents disagree with the exclusion in the first place?

We have just had a case where a boy assaulted a girl (totaly unprovoked) in the play ground. They were both 13, lots of witnesses. He was excluded for 2 weeks and his mother thought that the school was over reacting

no idea hmb. like i said, we are lucky that most parents are cooperative and the threat of having the parents come in is usually enough to chill them out. the way I think this works is because our pupils know that staff don't make idle threats.

what a complete w*nker tory blair does it again - tosspot. how about having an education system that works - instead of somewhere where teachers feel so dejected they don't give a shit. it truly is a vocation.

smaller class sizes with lessons that are actually interesting - there a novel idea - i think no one has ever thought of that before i will go away and fking copyright it. tosser

fancy even discussiing introducing a policy which could force families into even more financial dire straights, homelessness etc. can you imagine pulling yourself up from your boot straps to get a mediocre education to get a mediocre job - however trying, learning and maybe getting on your feet a bit, then little johnny suddenly finds his balls and wants to be cock of the school in more way than one.

i sh*t you not some kids can become different kids at school. my dd changed from being a studious loving caring little girl into mwa mwa miss airhead love you kiss kiss, laugh loudly and talk incessently through lessons.

fuck it bring back the strap

but alux- ds1's mainstream school wouldn't let me in - much better home-school communication now at special school- and I'm often in school- usually for a coffee but teachers/lsa's usually make a point of popping in to say hello.- but at mainstream I had to sort out home-school link books (essential for a non-verbal child) and I had to give them a behaviour rating scale to fill in daily (so that I knew if there were any incidents)- they were not keen to do that even though I designed to to take 5 seconds to fill in.

The bloody stupidity is that education policy is being written by people who have never been in the class as anything but a motivated child. They don't have the first fucking idea what it is like trying to deliver a 'one size fits all' education to disafected kids. Arse, the lot of it!

I empathise Jimjams. I am however talking about kids who have not a thing wrong with them with the exception of discovering their hormones.

here, here custardo. Last sentence about your dd is so true. I have seen nice girls turned into ugly little madams given the wrong environment. typically in a school where the child's assessment of the teacher's expertise is valued well above the teacher's professionalism.

and of course, pen pushers in the dept of education know how to improve schools much better than teachers do. because their assessment of the teacher's expertise is valued way above the teacher's professionalism.

why are we in this job? emotional sadism maybe?

hmb- looking forward to the holidays?

I posted something on education about EBD provision today- I was rather hoping you wpould agree with me....

Where did you post that JJ? I missed it

on the thread about is my scool particularly bad or something...

Agree that like specialist schools for SEN we need more EBD units. There are a section of children who cannot cope with inclusion and we are failing them with the current blinkered attitude to school.

The thinkg that I find hardest to deal with is that in the bottom sets you have such a disparate range of needs it is impossible to cope with them all and all of the children loose out. It sucks. So you end up with ASD children fliping out because EBD kids kick off etc .. Hopeless. and in the middle you are trying to r=teach them photosynthesis ffs!

You know me, I'm a real biologist, I love my subject, but this just isn't what these kids need.

I wonder what percentage of children who are excluded have parents who are at home anyway. Only children I know who have been excluded are my 3 stepkids and neither of their mothers work. But that doesn't mean that once the kids are excluded they are at home being "looked after" by their mothers. They are sent out to play to get out of their mothers' hair.
Blair hasn't got a clue.

No parents should be forced to stay at home when their children are suspended from school.

Schools should be held more responsible for allowing children to leave school premises when they shouldn't.

I believe that once a child is delievered to school the child should remain on the premises for the duration of the day UNLESS a signed letter has been received from the parents to allow the child for GP/Dentist visits etc.

Once on school premises that the school should be made responsible for the child and their behaviour.

Love
Dawn
x

sorry it should have said 'SHOULD NOT'.

So dawn, should we put 10 foot high perimeter fences around the schools and have dogs patrolling?

We have kids escaping and it is impossible to stop them. They go out the window, through gaps in fences and even sneak out the front gate. We immediately phone parents to tell them what has happened and we dont know where the kids are.

Dawn do you not think that parents have some sort of responsibilty in their child's behaviour. Schools are not magical places. We are constantly battling with crap parenting.

When a child is in school, the staff are effectively in loco parentis. However, this discussion was not about who is responsible for a child's behaviour when that child is in school, but who should supervise children who have been excluded from school because of unacceptable behaviour.

Clearly, it is pointless excluding children who are then just left to their own devises (and probably causing more problems). This is no punishment for them and appropriate lessons are not going to be learnt this way.

Presumably, by the time the school has got to the point of having to exclude the child, its parents have already been informed of its behaviour and their help sought in rectifying this. I'm not certain that parents who have been unable to effect a change in their child's behaviour up to this point are necessarily going to be any help in supervising them once excluded.

Of course parents have some responsibility for their child's behaviour. But Twinset's post rather startled me. Here is a child who is obviously being properly parented, and yet the school can't deal with him without his mother's intervention. So she has to come into school to sort him out - which she was able to do. But what if a properly parented child has a mother who has a full time job and then simply can't take the time off to help the school do its job? Should she really be blamed for the fact that the school seems unable to impose effective behaviour management on this child? Why is this? Is it because effective behaviour management techniques aren't available to the school? (Is it because effective sanctions aren't available?)

Or is it because, in each class, there are probably 30+ other children so that the teacher cannot give the unruly child the one-to-one attention that this mother could?

Perhaps that's the answer. Each school should have an employee who could act as "mother". When a child's behaviour gets beyond the teacher's ability to continue to impart the lesson to the rest of the class, "mother" would be called in to sit with said child. Very uncool and embarrassing.

Fabulous idea Freckle!

You could either have a Mrs Mop figure or a Twinset and Pearls type mother figure. (TSaP, I have a very definite mental image of you!)

But also, is it an argument for smaller classes?

Caligula I don't know whether he had been properly parented, he has been in trouble both in and out of school. Is it proper parenting if your child only behaves when you are present?

Sadly though children who are well behaved can enter a culture of a school lacking in discipline and end up the same way as after a while they just think what is the point of me being the only one working and behaving? this wasn't the case with the boy I mentioned but I have seen it happen with many others. Much of this behaviour was happening because insecure new young teachers, City schools are full of them and sadly lacking in experienced teachers who haven't lost their original enthusiasm, don't have the authority and experience necessary and often don't get the support. Often teachers hide their discipline problems for fear of being seen a failure and it all starts to go downhill. So you get schools with lots of unsuportive parents, inexperienced teachers, a management team running round like headless chickens achieving very little which produces kids going wild and learning little, this then makes parents even more unsuportive and it all becomes a cycle of failure.

My expereinces of secondary education in a city, and I was in a nicish suburb were my main reason for moving up to Lancashire and eventually hopeully emigrate abraod. This makes me very sad as I loved teaching.

It is an argument for paying teachers more so they stay in the profession, giving teachers more time to plan dynamic lessons, sorting out house prices in cities so teachers don't have to move when they want a family, teachers and parents getting tough with their children, society feeling more responsible. More examples of schools being part of a community, rather than some mystical place that looks ater your kid while you are at work (and the whole community - not just the mums on the PTA!)so the barriers between parent and teacher are broken down or minimised. If you see a child in town on a school day approach them, challenge them, I do it all the time. I have physically walked children back into school!

And smaller classes!