Why do primary schools never recognise the well behaved average achievers?

[CathyBlowsBubbles]

Originally put this in AIBU because I was cross but I could actually do with answers from an educational perspective.
DD (10) is not as academic as either her older sister or her older brother (14&11). She’s a lovely child who isn’t struggling but is bang average. She’s never in trouble and tries her best.

All year, she’s been telling me how she was going to work really hard to get a HT’s award given every other month as she’s never got one. (Older sibs both got lots over the course of their primary school) She’s come home tonight in tears which is so rare for her. Naughty kid in her class got it for ‘making an improved effort to listen in class. Now I know that it’s about equity and that he should be rewarded for improving BUT, where’s her reward for calmly and quietly working her socks off all year? Why is that NEVER, EVER rewarded??? How come her older sibs were forever being rewarded for being super high achievers when it all came so easily to them yet she is never recognised.

She is in a class with a high proportion of kids with behavioural issues and right from Infants, any tiny weekly improvement has been seized on and rewarded. Doesn’t change anything. Behaviour is still poor. Kids are still hurting other kids and disrupting lessons. All TA attention and support is given to those kids too to enable the teacher to teach. How is that fair? How is it fair that the TA supports that group and the teacher ‘stretches’ the high achievers twice a week but the cohort in the middle (apart from one who’s disruptive) are just left to get on with it.

Why don’t they ever even say to us, ‘look, the class is too big, the teacher is frazzled, the TA is struggling too, your kid is no trouble so they just need to suck it up!’ They never say that. They never say, ‘we know this child has received rewards frequently over the part 6yrs without impact but we still need to try despite how demotivating it is to kids who try all year and get nothing in return.’ The system is completely broken when kids like my youngest child gets to the end of Y5 effectively unnoticed. My eldest was on their G&T register and somehow she didn’t go unnoticed! 🤨 I feel so angry on DD’s behalf. She’s never going to get the academic accolades that the older two get. why can’t she be recognised for just being a good kid?

@Legomania I didn’t want to teach my DDs to be doormats either! If unfairness is evident and clear to all, it should be challenged. DD1 is now a barrister and no one minds fairness at school and in life. Injustice? Totally different matter.

Is challenge it, op. Im a teacher. It is lazy. Im very much against rewarding poor behaviour. There are better ways.

Re the comment about the ta not supporting your child you will probably find that the ta is being funded through one or more of the children’s ehcps, not many classes now outside of reception have dedicated TA’s. My son had a 1-1 when he was in mainstream but on the correspondence that went out to all parents he was just down as a class ta. Some people used to moan that he spent too much time with my son or try and hijak him to talk about their child in morning or afternoon but ultimately when my son left that school and went to specialist so the mainstream lost his funding the class no longer had a ta at all

I think so many parents can relate to this. With increasingly bad behaviour in classrooms, I think it’s probably time for schools to accept this system doesn’t work.

All it does is reward, and I feel reinforce the naughty kid’s behaviour and punish the well behaved hard working children who don’t get the recognition they deserve. Some children have definitely have cottoned on to that they get more treats the naughtier they are!

It’s absolutely awful. But unless you can afford a private school with very high behaviour expectations or home educate, there’s no way to avoid it really. Unfortunately.

@Morph22010 I don’t know a single school that doesn’t pay for a ta. When I was a governor no dc had 1:1 ta time. The vast majority of ta time was paid for by the school. The last school where I was a governor had TAs paid for from the school budget and it was a junior school.

Two reasons...

1 - Schools are measured on their input, i.e. how much have they have improved a group of children's academic standards rather than how well children perform.

2 - The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

@HollyGolightly4 thank you for engaging with your students like this! My DD is in Y9 and I'm sure she doesn't much care which teachers give her lots of house points, but she comes home talking about a conversation with a teacher about the book she's currently reading, and the teacher that asked her what she thought of the play she'd been to watch etc. So important for developing confidence and self-worth.

I think it takes a while before they reach this stage though - perhaps Y5-6 typically? In KS1, the 'star of the week' did matter to DD, so I sympathise with all the 'forgotten' children in lower primary.

I can assure you my sons old mainstream had one ta in his class and he had 1-1 support detailed in his ehcp who was that ta but there wasn’t another one. It’s very common where I live to not have a class at once you get above year one or two unless they are funded through the ehcp of a child in that class. We are one of the lowest funded LA’s in the country though so it may be better elsewhere

the way Sen funding works the school have to fund the first £6k of a child’s ehcp out of general funding but it still means the rest of the funding is coming from the child’s ehcp and when they go the ta goes