Would you withdraw your child?

[whizzyrocket]

We have recently moved and my older boy, Theo, has spent a month in a year four class at the local school. There are 35 children in his class and a very bad atmosphere. He comes home with stories of who has “kicked off” today. A couple of the children hurt the others. They have taught my son bad language but he doesn’t seem to be learning otherwise as it is pitched low. The teachers regularly use iPads for long periods of time without setting targeted work on them- just general educational apps.

My son isn’t happy. The boy that was supposed to be his settling in “buddy” has told him to f off. Something he wouldn’t have understood six weeks ago. He has been in floods of tears to me several times and yesterday at school broke down in front of the other kids.

The teacher doesn’t come out when the children do at the end of the day. I am going to have to ask for a meeting with her.

I am tempted to withdraw Theo completely and teach him at home. He worked well during lockdown although he missed his friends. But he misses his friends already here and the children he is mixing with at school are hard work to be around.

We don’t plan on staying here and are working towards buying a house in the village we came from, so homeschooling him would be temporary.

So what do you think? Would you homeschool him if you were me?

I would ask for an immediate meeting with the school and ask how they plan to manage the situation (which sounds completely unacceptable. I wouldn’t give them eons of time to sort it whilst your child is so obviously distressed, but I would want to give it a month and revisit before jumping to home education. But only you know the extent to which this is distressing your son, and what sort of time frame you would be looking at in terms of how ‘temporary’ the home schooling would be before moving back to your original village (and I presume original school?)

I've got a kid in year 4 and if I believed what she came home and told me they'd got up to in school I'd think she was going into a Mad Max film each morning... but I know the kids involved and they're gobby and don't think before opening their gob and a bit daft - but not malicious and DD loves regaling me with tales of woe about them (think she still hopes that they'll get into trouble with me or something).

And I think they all kind of develop an awareness of swear words around that age (whether they let you know about it at home or not) - although they're still not quite sure what is a "proper" swear word or which are the "swear fingers"... that's kind of normal. You just have the "no it's not a very nice word, it's not appropriate to use and I don't want to hear it coming out of your mouth" conversation with them.

It’s not so much the knowledge of bad language as the nastiness behind it. I know that innocence/ignorance has a time limit and we have had conversations about how people perceive those who swear. I do think that being sworn at is a bit much though.

My lad isn’t one to come up with tall tales. He didn’t say anything like this at the last school because it didn’t happen. He had a lovely class of friends- nice supportive kids, not ones that make teaching impossible because they are shouting and throwing chairs. Or hurting other children.

We have talked to the bank and know we can make an offer for the house at the village we came from when we are ready. This lockdown is slowing us up though as we can’t physically go to see the place.

So you wouldn’t homeschool him temporarily until we can move him back to his old school?

If it was an option and my child was distressed, then yes I probably would. 35 kids isn’t a great learning environment anyway and with Oak Academy it would be fairly straightforward to follow their curriculum for a while and keep up.

Obviously socialisation at school would normally be important but it doesn’t sound like he’s making friends and it’s only a temporary situation.

Get him out before he's dragged down.

If you feel able to homeschool (both in terms of skills and your own sanity 😁) then yes I would do it. But make sure you're looking after yourself too, don't feel you have to do it, especially for what is currently an undefined time period.

Yes I would definitely do it if I felt it was the best option for my child (even if just best in terms of their mental health rather than academically) but I would want to give the school a final chance first. But that is based on my own less than successful experience of home schooling during lockdown!