URGENT - Calling Primary School Teachers need some advice please on disruptive pupil in class

[mullercorner]

In a nutshell my son will be starting school in Sept and starting visits after Easter. (He is 4)

There is another boy who will do the same, we are friends with but his behaviour is somewhat should I say verging on "out of control". Thus always ends in disruptiveness and violence, and several of the children including my own copy - which I know is normal but totally unaceptable.

Recently his behaviour has become quite aggressive and violent...he punches and I mean throws right hooks, hits, pushes and pokes eyes. I am sooo sooo worried that my child is going to get "Tarred with the same brush"...all kids copy I know but when he is not around all the kids are great. His home life is rather wild - no set routine, bedtime cir. 11pm, junk food etc... His parents are lovely but let him rule the roost, they seem to think he is just "a boy being a boy" when the father "plays" with him they punch and kick and wrestle its all very aggressive.

Pre-school are aware of this but will not talk about another child to me, but say my son is an angel when he is on his own the days the other boy isnt there. I have spoke to the head mistress of the new school who says although they cant keep them apart when they start school, they will try as much as possible.

Im thinking of putting my son elsewhere.

Question to primary teachers - how do you handle this type of behaviour? Surely you would allow this type of behaviour to continue and disrupt the other childre - would you speak to the parents? Please, Please put my midn at rest, Im having sleepless nights over this

I'm a 1-to-1 but I also help out with the rest of the class. It's fine for them to leave their charges from time to time you know, it's even good for them as it encourages independance.

The schools are given funding to employ TAs, so if there is a lack of TAs then I suggest the school need to review how they spend that funding, or look into getting grants.

I'm afraid that moving your child to another school will not automatically solve the problem. There are naughty children in every school. Fair enough, you could choose a school like my dd's old one, just one child with sn and one TA. The children there were stuck up and vicious. So although there wasn't the same level of physical violence, there was plenty of racism and emotional bullying (yes, it was a primary).

I think the one thing one can do in a disruptive situation as described above is to insist that the school deals with the situation. It is their job to ask for money, they can ask for a child to be statemented if the parents won't do it. Keep on at them, write to the governors, write to Ofsted.

But demonising individual children (or even parents) does little good.

Dd had a very disruptive boy in her class in junior's. I found out later what had happened to him and it was horrendous. I don't see how anyone who had seen what he had seen could ever grow up normal. But at the same time you can't put someone without special needs in a special school because something horrible has happened to them. His foster parents were doing all they could, his parents weren't there anymore

Of course the same thing was happening in schools 30 years ago, there were children then who had been through traumas. But a much higher level of fighting and bullying was considered normal, people didn't usually tell their parents or even the teacher. I was often hit and kicked in primary school; it would never have occurred to me to tell anyone, because that wasn't the social norm.

As the mother of a reformed deliquent I'm a bit saddend by some of the posts.

My child was having behaviour difficulties at school. Other parents complained about him
and I have had to develope a thick skin at pick-up time. It transpired in the end that my ds was being horrendously bullied by the children whos mothers had complained so much about him. The more the mothers complained the worse the bullying got as they felt justified in thier behaviour. It took a new teacher and 8 months to sort it out. The mother of my ds's former best friend still gives me the evils as she thinks my son led hers astray and made him into a bully .

Just be careful branding and labelling children as it might come back and bite you on the bum.

"The schools are given funding to employ TAs" - rubbish, Rhubarb. I am a teacher governor on the Finance Committee, and know exactly how much funding is allocated. Schools are given money according to FFT funding, and in a small one form entry primary school this can be a few thousand at best, not even enough for one full time TA.

Sorry, typo - FFI funding - FFT is something different!

Yes they are. If you have statemented children then you have to have a TA with them and you can apply for funding from the council.

There are also various grants you can apply for.

We have statemented children. Even the most severe aren't given full funding - we make up the rest from our budget. As an extremely popular one form entry school, with only 2 free pupil spaces and a good reputation for SEN, we still can't fund one full time TA per class.

Take it up with your LEA. The targets are set by the government and if they are not reaching those targets then something should be done.

Statemented children should have enough funding to provide a full time TA for that child.

Our Head is very good at getting the right funding and grants. Pity I can't get her to come onto this thread.

Sorry, Rhubarb, your views are naive in the extreme. Until you sit on a Finance committee of a one form entry school, and see exactly how much funding SEN children attract into the budget, you can't really comment.

If funding for SEN children is sufficient, why is there constant lobbying for adequate funding at every level? Take a look at the SEN board on TES, for example, or even the stories on Mumsnet. Inclusion, however valid, remains a major budgetary headache for most small schools.

Rhubs, in my county schools have to fund the first 15 hours of a statement from the main school budget. The LEA only provides additional funding for statements over 15 hours. You can imagine how hard it is to get a statement for over 15 hours!

Budget for TAs within schools is not ringfenced, and has to be allocated like every other part of the budget e.g. books, training, PE equipment etc.

Feenie, it differs from LEA to LEA.

Some LEAs allocate more funding for schools than others. So yes, I agree you need to lobby for more funding.

I can only speak from the experience I have within the county I'm in. But in my last school, in Cumbria, they had more TAs than they knew what to do with. And certainly in this school, the class I am in has 2 statemented children and 3 TAs.

The Head has a reputation for knowing how to get the most funding and which grants to apply for. So yes, I'm sure it's pretty damn hard, but worth it surely? TAs are a valuable resource in the classroom.

Celia - the boy I am with has been allocated full time 1:1, as have a few of the children in the school. I don't know how they managed it but I'm shocked by the postings on this thread. Perhaps I really should point the Head in this direction?

I'll try and find out for you.