Having a bad first teacher can harm children’s entire education

[mrz]

The importance of a good teacher in Early Years

How do you prove that being in the bottom 16% of progress in infants is entirely due to the teacher being bad?

Could it not equally be down to having parents that discourage you from learning?

Not saying teachers are not a factor, but I wonder if they are the only one.

Personally, I would suspect that the stronger the educational influence of the parents/family friends/extended family, the less important the input of any one teacher.

i have to say that my dd had a useless teacher in reception , i never complained because she was on the verge of a breakdown and didnt think it would help at all . However my dd is still struggling as a result in year 2 . I agree that there are other factors that can effect early years education ,but being repeatedly told you are not ready to learn yet ,is always going to put a child at a disadvantage !!

My personal opinion is that it's not all that important how much a child learns in his first year at school, what really matters is that a child develops a positive attitude to the idea of learning. That's unlikely to happen unless they have an enthusiastic teacher.

A lack of interest in learning is a huge disadvantage when the child gets to the stage where they have to study more independently and self-motivate.

My ds was 'bullied' yes bullied * by a teacher in year 3 (he was 7) and if im honest it has affected him all through school.

*this isnt a wild accusation it was proven she retired early and he was signed off school for 2 years with a tutor paid for by the LEA.

My ds was one of the youngest in p1. After much thought and assurance from the nursery that he was ready for primary 1, my husband and I decided to keep him in the correct year and not defer him for a year as is often done in Scotland. He was happy for the first few months and then started coming home from school saying that he was useless and that his memory was really bad,definitely not something that we had ever said to him and I did not think that it came from his new classmates either. His confidence went downhill and he ended up in the bottom group for reading and therefore maths.Family illness meant that I was away from home quite a lot and I did not realise how bad things were until I compared notes with other p1 parents.His class teacher seemed to take the top group in reading etc and when approached about how my ds was doing during a parents evening, said that she did not take him and therfore didn't know and that we should talk to the other teacher.
In my desperation to get my son to the level I thought he could attain, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I bought all the Biff and Chip books used by the school, up to stage 7 and proceeded to spend the whole of the holidays teaching my son to read. He progressed really quickly and had just about completed them all by the end of the holidays.
My ds was put into a p1/p2 composite class going into p2 which we were very unhappy about but fortunately he has now got an excellent teacher, has loads of confidence because he can read and has moved up quickly into the second to top reading group. He can't quite get into the top because they got so far ahead of him in p1.
Do I blame the p1 teacher? Absolutely!!! She was only interested in the children who were in her top group and payed no attention to the rest.Can the damage be undone? Maybe if you put in the work and it hasn't totally undermined the nature of the child. I will never sit back and let a disinterested teacher undermine my child's learning ability again!